Pope Francis will be welcomed by children bearing flowers, a 21-gun salute and a candlelight vigil after he lands in Papua New Guinea on Friday. It will be the first papal visit in three decades to the Pacific Islands, a deeply Christian region — but one that has played a little-known role in the clergy abuse scandal that has stained the Roman Catholic Church.

Over several decades, at least 10 priests and missionaries moved to Papua New Guinea after they had allegedly sexually abused children, or had been found to do so, in the West, according to court records, government inquiries, survivor testimonies, news media reports and comments by church officials.

These men were part of a larger pattern: At least 24 other priests and missionaries left New Zealand, Australia, Britain and the United States for Pacific Island countries like Fiji, Kiribati and Samoa under similar circumstances. In at least 13 cases, their superiors knew that these men had been accused or convicted of abuse before they transferred to the Pacific, according to church records and survivor accounts, shielding them from scrutiny.

It has been widely documented that the church has protected scores of priests from the authorities by shuffling them to other places, sometimes in other countries. But what sets these cases apart is the remoteness of the islands the men ended up in, making it harder for the authorities to pursue them. The relocations also gave the men access to vulnerable communities where priests were considered beyond reproach.

Notably, at least three of these men, according to government inquiries and news media reports, went on to abuse new victims in the Pacific.

Most moved to or served in 15 countries and territories in the region in the 1990s, but one still serves as an itinerant priest in Guam, an American territory, and another has returned to New Zealand, where he has been cleared by the church to return to ministry. Both deny the allegations of abuse.

Christopher Longhurst, a New Zealand-based spokesman for the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, a support group, said the organization planned to press the pope on the movement of the priests to the Pacific while he is in Papua New Guinea.

The pope’s next stop is East Timor. In 2022, the Vatican punished Bishop Carlos Ximenes Belo, a hero of the nation’s independence movement, over allegations that he had raped and abused teenage boys decades ago in East Timor.

Francis has made a string of apologies for the church’s global sex abuse scandal. He has ordered clergy to report allegations of sexual abuse and cover-ups and issued a broad apology to all Catholics. But the remedies he has offered, survivors and critics say, fall well short of his words.

Michelle Mulvihill, a former nun and adviser to the Australian Catholic Church, has long accused Catholic organizations of using the Pacific Islands as a “dumping ground” for abusive priests.

“We’re moving pedophiles and pederasts into the poorest countries in the world,” Ms. Mulvihill said after being told of The Times’s findings. The church “used them to discard those people who they didn’t want to confront.”

Allegations or convictions have previously been documented for all the priests and missionaries in question, but, in more than a dozen cases, this is the first time their subsequent move to the Pacific has been reported. It is also the first time a widespread pattern of such movement to the Pacific Islands has been identified.

‘There’s No Vetting’

In Fiji, one of the first public accusations of abuse against a priest or missionary was made in 2022. That was the case of Felix Fremlin, who said he was abused as a child by New Zealand missionaries working in Fiji. His father did not believe his accusations and instead beat him.

“If you say something against the church, it’s like saying something against God,” said Mr. Fremlin, who is now estranged from many family members and suffers from depression. Correspondence between his lawyer and Catholic officials shows that Mr. Fremlin reached a monetary settlement with the church.

Peter Loy Chong, the archbishop of Suva, the capital of Fiji, said he had no records of abusive priests being moved to his archdiocese.

But such cases were possible, Ms. Mulvihill said, because of the way the church is organized. Many of the accused priests and brothers belonged to Catholic religious orders that are supposed to be supervised by their own superiors, and not by diocesan bishops and archbishops.

Others were priests who belonged to Catholic dioceses and therefore required individual approval from local bishops before moving. But often, Ms. Mulvihill said, bishops were “probably not asking questions” when colleagues requested transfers for such men. “There’s no vetting,” she said. “It’s become normalized.”

Each order and diocese ultimately reports to the Vatican. Matteo Bruni, the Vatican’s spokesman, said he had no knowledge of the cases and said it would be inappropriate to comment about them because he did not know the specifics of each. He emphasized Francis’ “commitment to ensure abuses are never tolerated” and referred The Times to the individual dioceses and orders.

The Times sought comment from the orders or dioceses of all 34 men. Many did not respond, and some declined to comment. Most that did answer said they had no records whatsoever of the men or that they received reports of abuse only after the men returned from overseas.

Twenty-two of these priests and missionaries were convicted of abuse, admitted to allegations or were considered credibly accused by their religious orders or dioceses. Four others died before the claims against them were made public.

Three of the men, who denied allegations of abuse, were investigated by the police but did not go to trial because of health or mental fitness issues. Prosecutors charged three others who also denied accusations of abuse, but the first man died before trial, the second man’s case was stayed by a judge for procedural reasons, and the third man’s case was stayed by a judge for reasons that are not clear. The latter’s diocese did not respond to questions. The remaining two priests, the ones now in Guam and New Zealand, deny the claims of abuse and have not faced charges from prosecutors.

Brother Gerard Brady, the Oceania head of one order, the Christian Brothers, apologized and said, “We acknowledge that some past responses fell well short of the processes and standards which are in place today to protect children.”

A Stint at the Vatican

In Papua New Guinea and East Timor, Francis is visiting two overwhelmingly Christian countries. Catholicism is the biggest denomination in Papua New Guinea and accounts for more than a quarter of the population. The faith is followed by 98 percent of the people in East Timor.

Christianity spread in the Pacific Islands during the 18th and 19th centuries through a strong partnership between missionaries and local leaders. Today, many countries in the region have intensely religious cultures where more than 95 percent of people identify as Christian.

The Rev. Julian Fox taught in Catholic schools around Melbourne, in his native Australia, for decades after he was ordained. He rose to be the Australian head of his order, the Salesians of Don Bosco. But in 1999, according to documents released by an independent inquiry established by the Australian government, he moved to the small Pacific Island nation of Fiji. Around the same time, according to news media reports, a former student accused the priest of rape.

Subsequent reports in the news media and from the Salesians diverge on whether Father Fox left Australia before the allegation was made or because of it. But both show that church leaders did not require him to return to Australia, even as other accusations of abuse by Father Fox were reported to them. He was within his legal rights to stay in Fiji, and that kept him out of the reach of the Australian authorities. After spending several years in Fiji, he took an assignment at the Vatican.

Father Fox returned home a decade after the initial accusation, according to media reports, which the church settled privately through a broad settlement program called Towards Healing. He then faced allegations in court and was convicted in 2015 for abusing five children, some of whom he beat and violated with a pool cue, according to Australian media reports.

The Salesians of Don Bosco in Melbourne did not respond to repeated requests for comment, and Father Fox could not be located for comment. The Dallas Morning News first reported on his case in 2004, alongside two other abusive Salesian priests who moved to the Pacific.

An Admission of Abuse

Frequently, church officials knew priests and missionaries had committed abuse before sending them to the Pacific.

In 1986, a couple went to a priest in Baltimore to talk about Brother William Morgan, an American missionary who had briefly returned from Papua New Guinea, according to a report issued by the Maryland Attorney General’s Office years later.

The couple said that Brother Morgan had touched their 4-year-old granddaughter with his penis and in the past abused other children, according to notes taken by the Baltimore priest that were quoted in the Maryland report. A letter by the priest showed that Brother Morgan later admitted that he had “fondled and touched” children several times while he was in Papua New Guinea. Despite his admission, Brother Morgan’s superiors at the Society of the Divine Word, his religious order, sent him back to the island nation for five years.

The Maryland Attorney General’s Office, which obtained the notes and correspondence, found no record of a report to law enforcement.

The Rev. Adam Oleszczuk, the leader of the Chicago province of the Society of the Divine Word, which includes Baltimore, said he had no records concerning Brother Morgan.

In multiple cases, moving to the Pacific seemed to offer Catholic figures an escape.

In 1971, Brother Rodger Moloney was appointed by the Hospitaller Brothers of St. John of God, a Catholic order, as the leader of Marylands School in Christchurch, New Zealand. His job was to care for disabled children. Six years later, one person anonymously reported to the brother’s superior in Australia that Brother Moloney had sexually abused a child, according to a New Zealand government inquiry.

Months later, he was transferred to serve in a pharmacy at the Vatican. He then moved to Papua New Guinea, the inquiry found, where he worked in the 1980s and 1990s, and eventually to Australia.

Brother Moloney was extradited to New Zealand in 2006, convicted of abusing five boys and sentenced to nearly three years in prison, according to court records. He died in 2019. His order did not respond to questions.

In Fiji, Mr. Fremlin now coordinates a support network for survivors of clerical abuse, most of whom keep their experiences secret. All “have marriage problems, job problems,” he said. “Some are violent towards women, some have problems with drugs.”

He added: “Overseas, you’ve got specialists. Here in Fiji, we’ve got nobody. The only counseling we get is when we sit and talk with each other.”

Elisabetta Povoledo contributed reporting from Rome.

Reporting for this story was supported by a grant from the Peter M. Acland Foundation, a New Zealand media charity.

After Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, was assassinated in late July, Hamas officials told Qatari mediators that they had new demands for the already deadlocked cease-fire talks, according to one Arab and one American official.

The suggestion worried the Qatari prime minister, who had spent months urging Hamas to compromise. With the support of his staff, he pushed back in meetings and calls with the Palestinian militant group, the officials said.

Hamas ultimately dropped the idea.

As the talks for a cease-fire and the release of hostages have stalled and sputtered in recent months, Qatar has leveraged its influence with Hamas in an effort to break through myriad impasses, according to interviews with more than a dozen officials with knowledge of the negotiations, including ones from the region and from the United States. Most of the officials spoke on condition of anonymity so they could share details of the closed-door discussions.

Since the war began, Qatar, along with Egypt, has emerged as a crucial mediator between Israel and Hamas, hosting marathon discussions with Palestinian representatives in air-conditioned rooms in downtown Doha, the Qatari capital, and channeling messages from the Biden administration to Hamas. The Qataris have also been working with the Israelis, even though the countries do not have formal diplomatic relations.

The Qatari efforts have taken on more urgency as the negotiations appear at a standstill. Hamas and Israel remain far apart on a deal — and the goal posts seem to be constantly shifting.

Two American officials said Hamas in recent days had added new demands for the release of hostages, asking for more on the release of Palestinian prisoners in the opening phase of the agreement.

The officials hope Qatar can persuade the militant group to again drop those demands and even reduce their request for a prisoner release following the killing of six hostages in Gaza.

It has been an ongoing effort to keep to talks on track. Qatar coaxed Hamas back to the negotiating table after Israel invaded Rafah, in southern Gaza, in May, four of the officials said. In the weeks that followed, it pressed Hamas to accept compromise language in the proposal.

More recently, Qatar has persuaded Hamas to stay involved in the talks, even as the militant group says it no longer wants to negotiate. While Hamas has publicly claimed it did not participate in the last two rounds of official talks in Cairo and Doha, it has privately engaged in less formal discussions with Qatari and Egyptian officials about those meetings and offered feedback on specific points, one Arab and two American officials said.

“Qatar has been pressuring both sides to commit to a deal and to make difficult decisions within the negotiations to reach that deal,” said Majed al-Ansari, the Qatari foreign ministry spokesman.

Qatar has maintained close relations with Hamas for more than a decade and has hosted its exiled political leaders since 2012. The former Qatari leader, Emir Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, became the first and only head of state to visit Gaza under Hamas’s tenure. And Qatar has funded Al Jazeera’s Arabic channel, which has amplified Hamas’s messaging.

Throughout the war, the Persian Gulf emirate, which has a history of ties with Islamists, has tried to present itself as an international interlocutor capable of narrowing the gaps between the warring parties.

Qatar is also host to the largest U.S. military base in the Middle East. And the Gaza mediation efforts have given the country another opportunity to prove to the United States that it can be a strategic ally on important American foreign policy objectives.

“The Qataris always want to show they can be a good partner,” said Dana Shell Smith, the U.S. ambassador to Qatar from 2014 to 2017. “The cease-fire talks allow them to do just that.”

With a small army, Qatar relies on the United States to provide it with a security blanket, Ms. Shell Smith said, noting that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Gulf powerhouses, have occasionally taken hostile positions against their Qatari neighbors.

U.S. officials have praised Qatar’s handling of the cease-fire negotiations, saying it has backed U.S. attempts to put pressure on Hamas at key moments. But the coziness between Hamas and Qatar has also given some American officials pause, two U.S. officials said.

Qatar’s good will with Hamas partly comes from years of financial backing for Gaza. Qatar had sent hundreds of millions of dollars to Gaza — with Israeli approval — for poor families, infrastructure projects and public sector employees’ salaries, though Israeli officials have recently said they regretted the decision since it enabled Hamas to divert some money toward military operations.

Since the war began 11 months ago, the Qatari prime minister, Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani, has dedicated a considerable amount of his own time attempting to broker a cease-fire, even at the expense of other government projects, according to three of the officials with knowledge of the talks. The premier, they said, has met with Hamas representatives as frequently as twice a day.

In June, Qatar intervened when it appeared once again that cease-first talks were stuck.

Israel was insisting that a later stage of negotiations focus on multiple issues, while Hamas wanted to limit the scope to the swap of prisoners and captives.

Working with the United States, Qatar presented three possible wording choices to Hamas as compromise language, according to Husam Badran, a senior Hamas official based in Qatar. Hamas representatives chose one of them, he added.

Hamas agreed that the later stage would focus in particular on the swap issue, wording that left the door open to potentially discussing some other issues.

“We did that because we’re keen on the issue of a cease-fire,” Mr. Badran said. “If there are some phrases that will make the negotiations easier and lead to the same result — the end of the war — we have no problem.”

Three of the officials familiar with the negotiations said Qatar had to push hard to get Hamas to agree to that compromise language.

Mr. al-Ansari, the foreign ministry spokesman, said Qatar had been exerting pressure by putting ideas on the table, setting deadlines for replies and reminding both sides of the gravity of the situation.

“Qatar is able to interact with Hamas in a serious and open way because of its long relationship with it and its support for Gaza,” said Tamer Qarmout, a professor of public policy at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. “Hamas realizes that if the Qataris are pressuring them, they need to engage with them and respond positively.”

Qatar’s sway has its limits, with both Israel and Hamas staking out seemingly irreconcilable positions.

Along with the issues over the prisoner exchange, the negotiations have been stuck, in part, over the fate of the Philadelphi Corridor, a narrow strip of land in Gaza along the border with Egypt. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has insisted the Israeli military should remain in the corridor, while Hamas has said any deal requires Israel to withdraw from Gaza, including that border zone.

Several of the officials familiar with the negotiations expressed concern that Mr. Netanyahu had in recent weeks put forward new demands that could further delay or even torpedo an agreement, including keeping Israeli forces in the corridor.

Hamas, too, has put up roadblocks throughout the process.

At a meeting this summer with Hamas officials, Qatari mediators pressed the Palestinian militant group to agree to the version of a cease-fire agreement with Israel that was on the table.

The Hamas officials responded that even if they were prepared to do so, they could not greenlight it without the approval of the group’s leadership inside Gaza, in particular Yahya Sinwar, the most powerful figure in the territory. The Qataris acknowledged the point and the meeting ended without a breakthrough, according to several of the officials familiar with the talks.

“The last word is with those on the battlefield,” Mr. Qarmout said.

On the day Ukraine launched its daring incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, the Federal Security Service, the Russian agency most responsible for protecting the border, played down the seriousness of the operation. Calling it “an armed provocation,” the agency said its forces were working to push the Ukrainians back.

That was nearly a month ago. Since then, Ukrainian forces have occupied a small but significant patch of Russian territory and killed or captured hundreds of Russian troops, according to officials, analysts and satellite imagery.

President Vladimir V. Putin has said an assessment of the failures in Kursk would be made only after the situation in Russia’s border region had stabilized, but intelligence experts say that a large measure of the responsibility rests with the Federal Security Service. Despite its sprawling networks of agents and vast budget, the agency, known as the F.S.B., first failed to anticipate the Ukrainian incursion and is now struggling along with the Russian army to dislodge a sizable Ukrainian fighting force.

There were clear signs that something was brewing. Days before the incursion, Russian bloggers, citing local residents on the Ukrainian side, reported a massive build up of Ukrainian armor. But if it noticed anything amiss, the F.S.B. failed to prepare sufficiently. When Ukrainian troops charged across the border on Aug. 6 and pushed dozens of miles into Russian territory, they encountered almost no resistance.

“We are talking about many, many units which should have seen something and they failed,” said Andrei Soldatov, an author who has spent his career researching Russia’s security services.

The F.S.B. is a muscular, authoritarian version of the American F.B.I., with a broad national-security mandate that includes defending against threats from within Russia and in former Soviet republics.

But the agency is hindered by infighting, rivalries with other security agencies and an aversion to delivering bad news to Mr. Putin. Particularly since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the F.S.B. has also been distracted by a large-scale crackdown on internal dissent.

As a result, the agency has suffered a series of damaging intelligence failures since the start of the war, Western officials and experts say. Kursk was just the most recent.

In March, the agency ignored specific warnings from the United States and failed to prevent a terrorist attack on a Moscow concert hall that killed more than 140 people.

Ten months earlier, the agency was caught off guard when Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner mercenary group, launched a rebellion aimed at toppling Russia’s military leadership. And it was the F.S.B. that famously informed Russia’s military that its troops would be greeted with flowers when they launched their invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

In each instance, though, there were few visible repercussions from Mr. Putin, and there is no indication that there will be after the debacle in Kursk.

A week after Ukrainian troops crossed the border, the agency’s longtime director, Aleksandr Bortnikov, made a public appearance in which he seemed to place blame for the incursion on local municipalities in the border region, even as he made assurances that everything was under control.

“At the moment all necessary measures are being taken to protect our citizens,” he said.

Mr. Putin on Thursday sought to downplay the incursion. Speaking at international conference in Vladivostok, he said that Ukraine had made a mistake in deploying “fairly large and well-trained units” to the Kursk offensive and that Moscow’s “first-priority goal” was its military’s offensive in eastern Ukraine.

But Ukraine’s continued presence has dealt an embarrassing blow to Mr. Putin, whose power in large part rests on the projection of strength and stability.

The F.S.B., as the primary domestic successor to the Soviet-era K.G.B., is perhaps the most important pillar of Mr. Putin’s power, responsible for suppressing dissent within the Russian population and keeping other government entities, including the military, in line. Despite the failures, Mr. Putin simply cannot do without the F.S.B., Mr. Soldatov said.

“It’s the lesson he learned from Stalin,” Mr. Soldatov said. “During war you cannot punish your agencies because it might be more dangerous for you.”

Other agencies besides the F.S.B., including the military intelligence service and the National Guard, as well as the Army, have intelligence gathering resources that could have detected the Ukrainian buildup. Part of the problem, experts say, is a lack of coordination within the military and intelligence operations that is likely to have impeded any Russian response.

It is a problem that has bedeviled the Russian war effort from the first days of the invasion, but one that Mr. Putin appears reticent to address.

This is in part by design, said Douglas London, a former C.I.A. clandestine officer. Mr. Putin seems to be as wary of his own military and intelligence services as he is of the Ukrainians, Mr. London said, and has created a system of competition between them so that no single entity can become too powerful.

Instead of collaborating, part of the F.S.B.’s job is to spy on other government agencies, particularly the military, which Mr. Putin, as a former K.G.B. officer, was trained to distrust, he said.

“If agencies are collaborating they could also collaborate against him,” Mr. London said.

The F.S.B. was not the only intelligence service to be surprised by the Ukrainian incursion. Planning was carried out under such strict secrecy that even Ukraine’s allies did not know about it, officials in Ukraine and Washington said.

Senior members of Ukraine’s own intelligence services were kept in the dark, and even the soldiers involved in the operation did not know until the last instant that they would cross the border, said Gen. Valeriy Kondratiuk, a former head of Ukraine’s military and foreign intelligence service, who still maintains contacts among senior officials.

“We needed to seize the initiative and achieve something at the front,” he said.

Even so, with hundreds of troops and heavy armor on the move, it was impossible to remain completely hidden.

On Aug 1., five days before the incursion, a Telegram channel that provides news for the Russian border town of Sudzha reported a huge deployment of Ukrainian armor spotted on the other side of the border.

If F.S.B. officers or others picked up on anything unusual, they may have dismissed the movements as normal Ukrainian operations to fortify the border, experts and officials said. In any case, local residents along the border inside Russia said they saw no evidence of increased security in the days before the incursion.

Alesya Torba, a 41-year-old resident of the border town of Sudzha, which is now under Ukrainian occupation, said that she saw news of Ukrainian military movements on Telegram, but said she received no information from the authorities. There was no sign of the Russia military, she said, even after the Ukrainians had launched their attack.

“There was nothing, no aviation, nothing, not even notifications asking people to evacuate,” she said in an interview in the Russia city of Kursk, where she had fled.

The lack of resistance took the Ukrainians by surprise, and exposed a lapse in Russian oversight, a senior Ukrainian official said.

“They overestimated their own intelligence,”said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

One major mistake the Russians made, the official said, was interpreting previous cross-border raids by the Ukrainian forces as isolated episodes. In March, Ukraine launched a series of raids along a portion of the border, crossing onto Russian territory, but quickly falling back into Ukraine.

The raids appeared timed to disrupt Mr. Putin’s re-election campaign, but the senior official said they also served an important reconnaissance function that aided the planning of the August offensive.

Now, a month after the incursion, the F.S.B. has released no information that might shed light on how the Ukrainians were able to cross the border successfully, and has given no sense of when Russian forces might be in a position to push them out.

The only information provided by the F.S.B.’s press service has been about criminal cases opened against Western and Ukrainian journalists, who followed the troops onto Russian territory without following Russian customs procedures and getting passport checks.

Nanna Heitmann contributed reporting from Kursk, Russia.

“I do not want to go to Brazil.”

To National Football League executives, who have worked for years to bring Friday night’s opening-weekend game to Brazil, the comment from Philadelphia Eagles player Darius Slay on his podcast last week had already gotten off to a bad start.

Then it got worse.

“They already told us not to leave the hotel,” he continued. “The crime rate is crazy. You know what I’m saying? I’m like, N.F.L., why do you all want to send us somewhere with a crime rate this high?”

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At least 17 children died when a fire ripped through the dormitory of their boarding school about 60 miles north of the Kenyan capital of Nairobi, the police said on Friday, and there were concerns that the death toll could rise.

The cause of the fire on Thursday night is not yet known, but it brought renewed attention to safety concerns in Kenyan education, particularly in boarding schools.

There were at least 150 children in the dormitory of Hillside Endarasha Primary School in Nyeri County when the fire broke out, said Resila Onyango, the spokeswoman for the national police.

The authorities rushed to the scene, where they were investigating the cause of the fire and assessing the extent of the damage it caused.

Sixteen children were burned beyond recognition, while one died while being rushed to hospital, Ms. Onyango said. An additional 15 children were being treated for injuries.

“This is devastating news,” President William Ruto said on social media. “Those responsible will be held to account.”

Kenya has a legacy of boarding schools, dating to the country’s colonial period. Public and private schools are popular with parents, sometimes as a form of prestige or, in rural areas, to spare children from commuting long distances to receive an education.

But there have been long-running concerns about the safety record of the schools. The government appointed a task force in late 2016, in response to a series of arson attacks related to student unrest.

But in 2017, just weeks after the investigation into safety standards had concluded, 10 students died in a fire at a prestigious girls’ school in Nairobi.

The report laid out a set of requirements intended to prevent overcrowding and requiring better building standards.

Rigathi Gachagu, Mr. Ruto’s deputy, urged schools on Friday to enforce the safety and security measures imposed by the education ministry and other agencies in order to “avert such incidences.”

For three decades, China sent tens of thousands of young children overseas for adoption as it enforced a strict one-child policy that forced many families to abandon their babies. Now the government will no longer allow most foreign adoptions, a move that it said was in line with global trends.

The ban raises questions for many of the hundreds of families in the United States who were in the process of adopting children from China and had heard earlier this week from adoption agencies that China was moving to bar international adoptions. The official confirmation came in the form of a brief comment by China’s foreign ministry on Thursday.

“We are grateful for the desire and love of the governments and adoption families of relevant countries to adopt Chinese children,” said Mao Ning, a spokeswoman for the ministry. She offered few details about the new policy, except to say that exceptions would be made only for foreigners adopting stepchildren and children of blood relatives in China.

Before the Covid pandemic, China was a top country of origin for international adoption, having sent more than 160,000 children overseas since 1992. But its program had been tainted by past allegations of corruption and by its association with China’s harshly enforced birth restrictions. Many families left their babies in alleyways or at the doors of police stations or social welfare institutions, to avoid severe penalties for violating the one-child policy.

Unable to pay for the care of these children, orphanages turned to international adoption to help fund their services.

“This is, in a way, the end of an era and the closing of one of the most shameful chapters of the three and a half decades of social engineering known as one-child policy,” said Wang Feng, a professor of sociology at the University of California at Irvine who specializes in China’s demographics. “The Chinese government created the problem and then they couldn’t deal with the financial constraints and that is why they allowed foreign adoption as a last resort.”

Today, China’s population is shrinking as the country grapples with one of the lowest birthrates in the world. It maintains a nominal policy of limiting families to three children, and it has been trying to encourage births.

Nearly all foreign adoptions involve children with disabilities, according to the Chinese government. Adoptees from China have largely been girls, because of a cultural preference for boys, along with some boys with physical and developmental disabilities, said Zhou Yun, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Michigan.

Being adopted by families in countries far from their place of birth, with vastly different cultures, has left many adoptees wondering about their identity, Ms. Zhou said. “It touches on some of the most emotionally fraught and politically charged questions of citizenship, belonging, nationalistic sentiments, and gender and racial politics,” she said.

In recent years, Chinese officials have sought to promote domestic adoptions. International adoptions peaked and began to slow in the mid-2000s, as China’s economy boomed and the government allocated more money to support orphans.

Fewer children have been put up for adoption, too, a reflection of slowing birthrates and more support for children with disabilities. By 2018, the number of children registered for adoption had fallen to around 15,000, from about 44,000 in 2009, official statistics show. There were 343,000 orphans in China in 2019, according to Chinese officials.

Some Chinese may have regarded the international adoption program as a form of national humiliation, said Guo Wu, an associate professor of Chinese studies at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania.

The new ban “might reflect the popular feelings of rising national pride and a kind of resentment of America,” Mr. Wu said. “This policy might fulfill that feeling that ‘we don’t need to send our kids to America.’”

Activists like Peter Moller, a Korean adoptee raised in Denmark who is a co-founder of the Danish Korean Rights Group, welcomed the halt in international adoptions, which in general reflects concerns about abuse and neglect of adopted children, he said.

“International adoption has been proven very problematic in both donor and recipient countries, and international adoption takes a toll on both adoptees and the adoptees’ biological families,” he said.

Other countries have started to wind down or stop foreign adoptions in recent years, including Ethiopia, Russia and Kazakhstan. Some European overseas adoption agencies have also stopped their operations amid national concerns about abuse, falsified documents and accountability.

At the same time, China’s decision came with little advance warning for many American families that were already in the process of adopting children. More than 82,000 children from China have been adopted by families in the United States, according to the State Department.

The State Department said that China’s civil affairs ministry told the United States that it had completed processing of cases with previously issued travel authorizations, but it would not continue to process cases other than exceptions for those with relatives.

“We understand there are hundreds of families still pending completion of their adoptions, and we sympathize with their situation,” the State Department said in response to questions about the issue. The civil affairs ministry in China did not respond to a faxed request for comment.

At least six of these families told The New York Times they were in a panic, devastated by the news that they would no longer be able to bring home the girls and boys that they had been matched with in China.

They said they had already received approval by both China and the United States to adopt children in 2019 and early 2020, before China closed its borders, and had been preparing to welcome them. They had bought clothes and modified their homes to accommodate the disabilities that some of the children had. Several described spending months communicating with the children they hoped to bring home through video calls, letters and photos exchanges.

Courtney Moore and her husband, who live just outside Houston, said they had sent packages every year for Christmas and the Lunar New Year to the southern Chinese city of Guiyang, where the young boy they had been matched with was living in an orphanage. Then they stopped hearing back from the orphanage at the end of 2022.

“It’s really hard that there are hundreds of families that are waiting, that have a place prepared and we sit here hopeless, with our hands tied,” said Ms. Moore, who met her husband when they were students studying Chinese in the city of Nanjing.

“We loved the country, we love the people and part of my grief is for the connection with China.”

Edward Wong contributed reporting.