Just for a few smiles on a serious day.

When I first heard this story on KVI’s The Commentators this morning, I was somewhat bemused.  The situation is a very painful one.

Here is the summary from The WaPo:

Va. Parents Trying to Unadopt Troubled Boy

A talkative 9-year-old boy came to Helen Briggs on Valentine’s Day 2000. She was a foster mother with years of tough love and scores of troubled kids behind her. But she grew to love this boy. Within the year, she’d talked her husband into adopting him.

Now, six years later, Briggs and her husband, James, a maintenance worker for the city of Alexandria, are taking the highly unusual step of trying to unadopt him.

In 2003, when the boy was 12, he sexually molested a 6-year-old boy and a 2-year-old girl still in diapers. She said it was only then, as she waited outside the courtroom for his sexual battery hearing and caseworkers handed her his psychological profile, that she found out just how damaged the boy had been when he came into her life.

Briggs said she did not know he had lived in five foster homes since he was 16 months old. Nor that his alcohol- and drug-addicted biological parents had physically abused him, injuring his brain stem and impairing his ability to gauge the passage of time.

He’d been hospitalized seven times in psychiatric institutions and diagnosed as possibly psychotically bipolar. He’d thrown knives, kicked in walls, pulled out all his hair and threatened to kill himself. He’d heard voices telling him to do bad things. His confidential case file shows he most likely was sexually abused.

"I did not know any of that," Briggs said, though Virginia policy states that caseworkers should provide "full, factual information" about a child to adoptive parents. "They just told me he was hyperactive."

She said the state’s failure to fully disclose the boy’s background is tantamount to fraud. 

The state is definitely at fault for lack of disclosure.  And maybe, had she known, she would have taken him in anyway, and taken precautions.

I am not sure what to make of this.  It is not as simple as it first sounded.

Let’s explore, shall we?

Illegal Immigrants Sue Wendy’s

A group of illegal immigrants who worked for Wendy’s International Inc. is suing the restaurant chain because the company fired them after discovering it had missed a deadline for joining a federal program that would have helped them attain legal status.

I am not familiar with the program…

The lawsuit, filed Friday in state district court in Houston, is a companion to a similar class-action suit filed last month in Dallas against Dublin, Ohio-based Wendy’s, its subsidiary Cafe Express and the Houston-based business law firm Boyar & Miller.

The immigrants, who worked for Cafe Express, are seeking unspecified damages.

Between the two lawsuits, 40 illegal immigrants say they were fired after the company recently found that Boyar & Miller, the law firm Wendy’s had hired, never filed paperwork for a 2001 legalization program that allowed immigrants with employer sponsorship or an American spouse to apply for citizenship.

Wait, was this a sponsored amnesty program?  Or a sponsored citizenship program.  I mean an employer can help a sponsored emplyee attain citizenship, but I don’t know enough about the INS stuff to speak about a program to allow employees to obtain legal status from illegal status.

Worker visa programs, yes.  But that, no.

Once the discovery was made, Wendy’s was forced by law to fire the employees because of their illegal status. Immigrants in the program would have been insulated from being fired.

This bothers me.  They should never have been hired.  But let’s move on for a minute.

Suing Wendy’s because they obeyed the law seems pointless.

"I put all my hope and faith in this company," said Daniel Olivares, who worked for Cafe Express for nine years before being fired in September. "It was devastating news for me and my family."

So you were here 9 years illegally?