Legal Question in Family Law in California

I am not an international adoption expert, but I believe you are mistaken that you need to get the child to the US before adopting. In fact, I think the opposite is true. I think you need to obtain at least a guardianship of the child under the birth jurisdiction, and probably complete the adoption there. I base this on the fact that I adopted a child from another U.S. state, and we had to do the whole adoption proceeding in the other state. We were allowed to bring him to California once we were granted a guardianship, but we still had to do the adoption in the other state.