Teresita de Jesús Padilla held her sons again after 41 years. Tim Rolnick, 41, and Travis Murdoch, 37, were taken from her as infants in Chile and adopted by American families. All three boys grew up in the Maryland area, geographically close to each other and entirely unaware of it, while their mother remained in Chile. Wondering for the rest of each day where they were and whether they were alive.
On November 11, 2026, in Santiago, the reunion took place at the offices ofNos Buscamos, the Chilean NGO that helped piece together what had been deliberately broken. Three sons. Three separate acts of theft. One woman who had been carrying the weight of all of it for over four decades.
Tim was illegally taken from his mother’s arms first. Four years later, his brothers, twins Travis and Chris, suffered the same fate and were also adopted by an American couple. “God gave me back my children, whom I thought I had lost forever,” Padilla said at their reunion.
The Search That Started With a Swab?
In 2020, Tim Rolnick began investigating his medical history and took a consumer DNA test. The results answered some of those questions. They also answered questions Tim hadn’t known how to ask yet.
Rolnick discovered not only that he and his two brothers had been trafficked to the United States. But that he also had another sibling who remained in Chile. He found Travis and Chris living near his home in Maryland and contacted them. The brothers had spent their childhoods in the same state, possibly passing each other at the grocery store, possibly going to school near each other.
Tim and Travis built a relationship before travelling to Chile to meet their mother. Alberto, the brother who had remained in Chile, had died before the reunion could happen. While Travis flew to Santiago, Chris was severely injured in a car accident in 2013 and was physically unable to make the long trip. Six years after Tim’s initial contact, the two brothers were finally able to share their first embrace with Teresita in the Chilean capital.
Tim said meeting Padilla felt as though he had known her all his life. Travis described his nerves before meeting Tim, and then noticing immediately how much they looked alike. They are building something new out of what was taken, which is not the same as getting it back.
Read More:Pregnant Teen Chose Adoption: 33 Years Later, She Reunites with Her Son.
What Was Done to These Women?
Though cases ofillegal adoptionemerged from the 1960s up until the 2000s, the practice peaked during the 17 years of General Augusto Pinochet’s violent dictatorship starting in 1973. Pinochet’s regime actively pushed international adoption as a poverty eradication strategy, directly targeting Indigenous communities andvulnerable mothersfrom impoverished regions.
The targeting was structural, aimed at specific women, women who were young, poor, rural, often Indigenous. And therefore least likely to have the resources to fight back or even understand what was happening to them. Investigators and rights groups say the illegal adoptions were facilitated by various networks across the country. Made up of social workers, healthcare staff, religious officials, lawyers, and international adoption agencies.
Padilla was one of these women. Her children were taken from her while she was still in the hospital, still recovering from childbirth. “These women took my children away from me under threats, through sheer terror. And I suffered because of it my entire life,” she said.
According to reports from the Chilean judiciary obtained bythe Associated Press, there were some 20,000 cases of coerced or criminal adoptions overall. Civil society organizations such asNos Buscamosestimate that more than 50,000 Chilean families have been affected. The gap between those two numbers represents everything that was hidden well enough to avoid being counted. As of mid-2025, a Chilean judge had formally accused five people for their alleged roles in the illegal adoption network. Though no convictions have been secured.
Who Is Finding These Families?
Nos Buscamos, the name translates roughly as “We Are Looking for Each Other”. Was the organization that helped Tim and Travis find their mother. Nos Buscamos estimates tens of thousands of babies were taken from Chilean families in the 1970s and 1980s. Based on a report from the Investigations Police of Chile which reviewed records of Chilean children who left the country and never returned.
Constanza del Rio, founder and director of Nos Buscamos, has described the targeted families as “poor women that didn’t know how to defend themselves.” Over the past nine years. Nos Buscamos has orchestrated more than 450 reunions between adoptees and their birth families.
Nos Buscamos has partnered with the genealogy platformMyHeritage, which provides free at-home DNA testing kits for distribution to Chilean adoptees and suspected victims of child trafficking in Chile. This made Tim’s 2020 search possible, the intersection of consumer genealogy technology and an NGO that knew how to interpret the results, trace the distant cousins. And work backward through decades of deliberately falsified paperwork.
DNA testing reunites familiesacross borders and decades, but the Chilean situation carries a particular weight: these reunions are happening in the context of crimes that were committed by a government using its institutions against its own people.
Accounts from Chilean families include children being removed under misleading medical explanations or through adoption procedures that families did not understand or freely agree to. Some were told their babies had died. Some were told the child needed medical treatment and never received them back. Teresita de Jesús Padilla knew her sons had been taken. Living with that specific knowledge, knowing they existed somewhere, not knowing where, is its own kind of sustained injury.
41 Years Is Not Nothing?
The reunion happened. Two of the three brothers made it to Santiago. The third couldn’t travel. The fourth had already died. The mother who had spent her adult life carrying this loss stood in a room and held her children.
What comes next is genuinely unknown. These are adults who share biology and nothing else, no shared language, initially; no shared memories; no childhood photographs together; no inside jokes from decades of family dinners. Tim Rolnick, 41, and Travis Murdoch, 37, stood with Padilla in Santiago and began, from that first embrace, the long process of becoming a family.
What Is Still Owed?
Teresita de Jesús Padilla is 66 years old. She spent most of her adult life not knowing where her children were. She is not an edge case. She is one woman in a number that runs somewhere between 20,000 and 50,000. A spread wide enough to suggest the actual truth is simply not fully recoverable.
The women who were targeted were chosen precisely because those in power believed they would not be able to fight back. It took 41 years, a consumer DNA test, a network of volunteers. And two sons with enough curiosity and courage to start pulling at threads before the truth surfaced even partially. The babies separated at birth from their mothers were not anomalies in this system. They were the system’s intended output.
People did it, an NGO that refused to stop looking, distant cousins whose DNA happened to match. A genealogy platform that made a test affordable. And a 41-year-old man who swabbed his cheek one day in 2020 because he wanted to know his medical history and ended up finding out he had a mother waiting in Santiago. The reunion was joyful. The injustice it represents remains entirely unresolved.
AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.