Huynh Thi Anh and Dao Thanh Linh v. Edward Levi, Attorney General of the United States

MERRITT, Circuit Judge.

Several thousand children were evacuated from South Vietnam to the United States by “Operation Babylift,” an effort to airlift Vietnamese orphans out of South Vietnam just before the fall of the Saigon government in 1975. It turned out that 2700 of the children were not orphans. This case involves a dispute over the custody of four of those children. The dispute is between their grandmother and uncle on the one hand, and their American foster parents, who hope to adopt them, on the other. Treating plaintiffs’ claims questioning custody of the children solely as a habeas…