1. Short title This Act may be cited as the Bindu Philips and Devon Davenport International Child Abduction Return Act of 2017 . 2. Findings Congress finds the following: (1) In 2016, 629 American children were taken from the United States by one parent without the consent of the other, often in direct violation of valid United States court orders, United States criminal law, and the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction. (2) Abducted children in a foreign country are often blocked from any contact with the American parent, losing half of their family and heritage. (3) Such children are also at grave risk of serious emotional and psychological problems. Many such children experience anxiety, eating problems, nightmares, mood swings, aggressive behavior, resentment, and fear. Every day the abduction continues only compounds these harms. (4) The Department of State had at least 944 open cases of child abduction in 2016, only 152, or 16 percent, of which were resolved with return of the abducted child to the United States. (5) Tragically, abductions resolved with a return of the child to the United States hit a three-year low in 2016. (6) In contrast, the number of abduction cases closed by the Department without the child being returned reached a high mark of 189 in 2016. (7) Such low return rates encourage parents to abduct their children rather than to abide by the laws of the United States. (8) The United States is a party to the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction ( Hague Abduction Convention ), which provides a framework for the prompt resolutions of international abductions between the United States and the 76 other countries with which the United States has reciprocal obligations. (9) The Hague Abduction Convention does not have an enforcement mechanism and countries regularly ignore their legal duty—without consequences—to return abducted children whose habitual residence is the United States. (10) In the 2017 Annual Report on