The Virginia Supreme Court ruled Thursday that U.S. Marine Joshua Mast and his wife Stephanie will keep an Afghan child they brought home years ago — reversing two lower courts that had declared the adoption void. The 4-3 decision ends, at least for now, one of the most unusual custody battles to emerge from America's twenty-year war in Afghanistan.

The majority found that a Virginia statute cementing adoption orders after six months barred the Afghan relatives from challenging the ruling. The child's adoption was finalized in December 2020. The Afghan couple didn't contest it within the statutory window — because they were 7,000 miles away, raising the girl in Afghanistan, and say they had no idea an American judge had given her to another family.

Three justices dissented. They did not mince words.

How a Marine brought home a child from a war zone

The story begins in September 2019, when U.S. soldiers raided a rural compound in Afghanistan. The child was injured. Her parents and siblings were killed. Soldiers brought her to a hospital on an American military base.

The Afghan government determined the child was Afghan and vetted a man who claimed to be her uncle. The U.S. government — during the first Trump administration — agreed with that determination and brought the child to the family. The uncle chose to give her to his son and his son's new wife. That couple raised her for 18 months in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, the Masts convinced courts in Fluvanna County, Virginia, to grant them custody and then a series of adoption orders. Judge Richard Moore finalized the adoption in December 2020 — while the child was still living with her Afghan relatives on the other side of the world.

Joshua Mast then contacted the Afghan family through intermediaries and tried to get them to send the girl to the U.S. for medical treatment. They refused to let her go alone. When the U.S. military withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021 and the Taliban took over, the Afghan family agreed to leave the country. Mast worked his military contacts to get them on an evacuation flight.

Once the family arrived in Virginia, Mast took the child from the Afghan couple at a refugee resettlement center. They haven't seen her since.

The court's reasoning — and its fracture

The majority opinion, signed by Justices Kelsey, McCullough, Chafin, and Russell, leaned heavily on Virginia's six-month statute of limitations for challenging adoption orders. The clock ran out around June 2021. The adoption stood, procedurally, regardless of the circumstances that produced it.

The majority also cited Judge Moore's finding that the Afghan couple had no parental standing:

"We find no legal merit" in the argument "that they were 'de facto' parents of the child and that no American court could constitutionally sever that relationship."

Moore himself, in a 38-page document produced after presiding over a dozen hearings, wrote that he trusted the Masts more than the Afghans, believed the Masts' motivations were noble, and concluded that the Afghan couple was misrepresenting their relationship to the child. He stated that the Afghan couple "are not and never were parents" of the child.

The dissent, written by Justice Thomas P. Mann and joined by Chief Justice Cleo E. Powell and Justice LeRoy F. Millette Jr., took a blowtorch to the entire proceeding:

"A dispassionate review of this case reveals a scenario suffused with arrogance and privilege. Worse, it appears to have worked."

Mann argued that the adoption process was fatally compromised from the start:

"We must recognize what an adoption really is: the severance and termination of the rights naturally flowing to an otherwise legitimate claimant to parental authority. Of course, the process must be impeccable. An evolved society could not sanction anything less than that. And here, it was less."

His assessment of how the Masts navigated the legal system was even more pointed:

"If this process was represented by a straight line, (the Masts) went above it, under it, around it, and then blasted right through it until there was no line at all — just fragments collapsing into a cavity."

The three dissenters called the lower court proceedings "wrong," "cancerous," and "like a house built on a rotten foundation."

The federal government's reversal

One of the more striking subplots involves the Justice Department. During the first Trump administration, the State Department insisted the U.S. was obligated under international law to work with the Afghan government and the International Committee of the Red Cross to reunite the child with her closest surviving relatives. The government submitted filings in court predicting dire outcomes — warning that allowing the child to remain with the Marine could be viewed as "endorsing an act of international child abduction," threaten international security pacts, and be used as propaganda by Islamic extremists, potentially endangering U.S. soldiers overseas.

That was then. Under the second Trump administration, the Justice Department had been granted permission to make arguments in the Virginia Supreme Court case, then abruptly withdrew its request on the morning of oral arguments. The department stated it "has now had an opportunity to reevaluate its position in this case."

No further explanation was given.

What this case really asks

This is not a simple story, and conservatives shouldn't pretend it is. The instinct to side with an American Marine who wanted to save a child from a war zone is understandable. The impulse is noble on its face. Joshua Mast saw a child orphaned by violence and decided to act. That impulse — to protect the vulnerable, to take responsibility where others won't — is deeply American.

But conservatism is also supposed to mean something when it comes to process, sovereignty, and the rule of law. The Afghan government identified the child as Afghan. It vetted the uncle. The U.S. government agreed. The child was placed with family — extended family, yes, but family nonetheless — and raised by them for a year and a half. Then, a Virginia county court granted an adoption order for a child who was not in the country, not in the court's physical custody, and whose existing caregivers apparently had no idea the proceeding was happening.

The six-month statute of limitations did its mechanical work. But the Afghan couple says they didn't know there was anything to challenge. They testified they had no idea a judge was giving the girl to another family. The statute of limitations is designed to provide finality — a principle conservatives rightly defend. Whether it should provide finality when the people most affected were never meaningfully notified is a harder question.

The dissent accused the Masts of "brazenly" misleading the courts. The majority didn't engage with that charge directly. It found procedural ground and stood on it.

Conservatives who champion national sovereignty should note the tension here: the Afghan government determined its own citizen, and a county court in Virginia overrode it. Conservatives who champion the integrity of legal process should note that two lower courts examined the adoption and found it void, and the Supreme Court reversed them not on the merits but on a limitations technicality.

None of this means the Masts are villains. It means the system that produced this outcome deserves scrutiny, not celebration. A child's life was decided by a procedural clock that started ticking while she was on the other side of the world, in the arms of the only family she knew.

The silence that followed

An attorney for the Masts declined to comment, citing a court order not to discuss the case publicly. Lawyers for the Afghan family said they were not yet prepared to comment. A circuit court protective order shields the Afghan couple's identities — they fear their families still in Afghanistan might face retaliation from the Taliban.

The child at the center of all this has no public voice. She was injured on a battlefield in September 2019. Her parents and siblings were killed. Every adult and institution that has touched her life since then claims to have acted in her best interest.

The Virginia Supreme Court has spoken. The law, as applied, has produced an outcome. Whether it produced justice is a question the four-justice majority didn't need to answer — and the three-justice dissent couldn't stop asking.