Stuck in Brazil with premature baby, Minnesota family fights bureaucracy to return home

Greyson Leo Phillips turned 9 weeks old this week. He’s finally out of neonatal intensive care after 51 days, and he has more than doubled his birth weight of 2 pounds, 2.6 ounces.

But he’s not home, unless an Airbnb in the Brazilian coastal city of Florianópolis counts as home. Instead, Greyson is stuck in a Brazilian bureaucratic nightmare, unable to leave Brazil and go to his real home in Minnesota.

Greyson and his parents, Chris and Cheri Phillips of Cambridge, have been battling a maddening bureaucratic Catch-22 after his premature birth during a winter trip to Brazil. Because of a technicality, Brazilian authorities haven’t issued his birth certificate; they say they cannot issue a birth certificate because Chris and Cheri’s passports, like all American passports, don’t list their parents’ names.

Without a birth certificate, Greyson can’t get a U.S. passport. And without a U.S. passport, Greyson can’t go home to Minnesota.

“We’ve been working on this since day one, and we have nothing yet,” Chris said.

Their odyssey began in mid-February. Chris, who used to live in Brazil, has a daughter from a previous relationship who lives with her mother in Florianópolis, about 700 miles southwest of Rio de Janeiro. He and Cheri traveled there to celebrate his daughter’s eighth birthday. Cheri’s doctors encouraged her to make the trip; she’d had zero complications and had yet to enter her third trimester. This was the time to do it, they told her.

A couple days before their scheduled return in March, Cheri felt back pain, then contractions. Early the next morning, she was bleeding. They went to a hospital at 4 a.m. For days, doctors tried to stop labor.

“That was our hope — just calm down her body and get on planes and go home,” said Chris, who works in marketing and communications at Children’s Minnesota. “It soon became apparent that was not going to happen. This baby was going to be born in Brazil.”

Greyson was born March 12 with a hole in his heart, struggling with apnea. As Chris and Cheri huddled over their son in an incubator, their real estate agent and mortgage broker completed the sale of their St. Louis Park condo and purchase of their Cambridge house. Friends and family moved their stuff into their new home.

The main holdup seems mundane. Brazilian hospitals give parents a certificate of live birth, then parents must visit a local registry office for an official birth certificate. But officials refused to issue the birth certificate, Chris said, since Chris and Cheri’s passports don’t have their parents’ names. (While American passports don’t include parents’ names, Brazilian passports do.)

Chris’ uncle shipped the couple’s birth certificates and marriage license, which have their parents’ names. Those were deemed unacceptable because they don’t have an apostille stamp, which authenticates a public official’s signature for use in a foreign country. They hired a lawyer to secure Greyson’s documentation. A month later, their case hasn’t gone anywhere.

After the Brazilian birth certificate, the couple will need a consular report of birth abroad and a U.S. passport from an embassy or consulate in Brazil. But according to U.S. State Department policy, applicants must physically go to the appointment.

This presents multiple problems: The nearest consulate is 300 miles away in a region that’s experiencing severe flooding. Greyson can’t fly without documentation. And Greyson is too small for his car seat, so they can’t drive.

The family received a bit of good news this week: After pressure from U.S. Sen. Tina Smith’s office, the embassy agreed to send a representative to Florianópolis to process Greyson’s American documentation.

But only after they secure a Brazilian birth certificate.

“Mentally, we are not doing well,” Chris said Wednesday as he drove to a federal office in Florianópolis to extend their tourist visas. In their “first piece of bureaucratic good news yet,” Chris said, Brazilian authorities extended their visas until Aug. 21.

“It’s mentally exhausting,” said Cheri, who works as a philanthropy services manager at Saint Therese Senior Living. “Now that he’s, quote-unquote, ‘home’ in an Airbnb, it’s honestly even harder on me. The only reason we’re here now is because of all the bureaucracy. I’m either on the verge of crying or I’m mad or I’m just sitting on the couch with Greyson, cuddling or nursing him.”

There’s been only one blessing from this experience, Chris said: Spending more time with his 8-year-old daughter, Melory, who he typically only sees three times a year.

“And she’s had the opportunity to bond with Greyson,” Chris said. “That’s the only silver lining.”