NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending September 9, 2026

● Two years after one sensation-seeking member of the Board of Supervisors and one Pulitzer-sniffing journalist for the San Jose Mercury News in Santa Clara County set off the worst foster-care panic anywhere in America in decades, the other members of the Board are starting to wonder if they did the right thing. They brought in a panel of state and national experts for a study session. As The Imprint reports, they made clear the answer is no. The Mercury News also eventually published a story. I have a blog post about that one. 

● The Tampa Bay Times follows up on its outstanding expose of the enormous harm of hidden foster care. Among other results, a Florida member of Congress will now cosponsor a bill that would require states to at least keep track of – and disclose – how many children they place in hidden foster care. 

● Also in Florida: I don’t know if the underlying decision to remove the child in the case I write about here was right, though there is strong cause to doubt it. I do know that everything else the Florida Department of Children and Families did was wrong – and probably far more common than the agency will ever admit. See especially the bodycam video revealing the appalling behavior of caseworkers. 

● As the time approaches for Minnesota to implement a law requiring county family police agencies to do more to keep families together, it seems the state and the counties have spent more time whining about the law than preparing for it. The Imprint reports that “an advisory council has issued a report saying the state lacks the ability to assess” whether the law is working. 

“Whether the law fulfills that promise will not be determined by its enactment,’’ its authors wrote. “It will be determined by whether Minnesota builds the standards, services, authority, accountability, and enduring infrastructure necessary to make its protections real in families’ lives.” 

● The Davis Vanguard offers an excellent overview of the confusion of poverty with neglect. From the story:

Consider a family facing eviction because it cannot pay several thousand dollars in back rent. 

One possible government response is to allow the family to lose its housing, investigate the parents because their children no longer have stable shelter, remove the children, pay foster parents or residential providers, assign caseworkers, appoint attorneys and require parents to complete a series of services before reunification. 

Another possibility is to prevent the eviction. 

● And in Georgia, the Albany Herald compares two counties with starkly different rates of taking away children – and starkly different rates of poverty. 

● In The Imprint, Ruth White, executive director of the National Center for Housing and Child Welfare, and a member of the NCCPR Board of Directors, writes about the “vexing admixture of learned helplessness, paternalism and institutional parochialism among the professional class” that prevents youth aging out of foster care from getting the housing benefits to which they are entitled and which are readily available under a federal program. (It’s an excellent program regardless of who insisted on slapping her name on it.) 

● Virginia has a “reasonable childhood independence” law. But when have mere laws stopped the family police? Lenore Skenazy writes in Reason about what happened to one mother in Virginia who gave her child reasonable childhood independence. See also this story about the case from The Washington Post. 

● Some better news from Virginia: In that state, the law was unclear about whether, if pregnant women were taking prescribed medication to treat opioid use disorder, mandated reporters still had to turn them in to the family police. In the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Robert Melvin of the R Street Institute praises lawmakers for passing legislation clarifying that the answer is no. 

For pregnant women receiving medication for opioid use disorder (MOUD), like methadone or buprenorphine, clear health guidance is critical. They need to be able to talk frankly with their doctors about their situation without triggering a mandatory-reporting call to CPS. That fear is the biggest impediment, which is why Virginia’s approach is so important. 

In this week’s reminder that the horror stories go in all directions: 

● If the allegations in the lawsuit that is the topic of this story from WEHT-TV are true, Indiana’s hair trigger for tearing apart families may have cost a three-year-old boy his life. 

In March, 2022, Leon Morrero was born with medical issues so complex that his mother, Nicole, had to complete three months of medical training before her son could be released from the hospital. More than three years later, his mother brought him to the hospital for more treatment. 

As the story explains: 

Nicole reportedly spent time with Leon daily, while balancing the needs of her other children. 

On September 21, a release says Nicole went to the hospital to visit Leon, leaving her other child in the care of her 14-year-year-old daughter to babysit. Nicole then went to dinner with a friend and fell asleep at the friend’s house. 

The next day, Nicole was reportedly arrested at the hospital and charged with child neglect for allowing the child to babysit her younger sibling. 

The Vanderburgh County Department of Child’s Services removed all of Nicole’s children from her care due to the allegations. Her contact with Leon was also limited by DCS while he stayed in the hospital. 

But, the lawsuit alleges, the foster parents got only a few hours of training. It wasn’t enough. Within days the boy needed emergency medical care. But he was returned to the same foster parents. Four months later, he died. 

● From the Missouri Independent: 

A children’s Christian residential facility whose director has spent three years urging Missouri lawmakers to allow unlicensed religious organizations to care for foster children in state custody is being sued in federal court by former residents who allege they were subjected to forced labor and sexual abuse. 

Three lawsuits filed against Show-Me Christian Youth Home allege that the former residents were forced to perform heavy manual labor under threat of food deprivation, isolation or more work. The lawsuits also allege the three plaintiffs, who each spent time in the same Show-Me household between 2007 and 2012, were touched sexually, beaten while naked, surveilled in the shower by their “house father” and punished when they reported the abuse. … 

Show-Me Christian Youth Home, which is based in La Monte, denies the allegations. In Aug. 24 court filings, the organization also argued it cannot be held liable because any alleged harm was caused by employees acting “outside the course and scope of their employment.” It contends the lawsuits violate the First Amendment by asking the court “to rule on or excessively entangle itself in religious doctrine, policy and administration.” 

● You know all those exposés about group homes and “residential treatment” centers? As The Guardian reports, the problem isn’t just limited to the United States.

The San Jose Mercury News is deep in denial about the foster-care panic it did so much to start

How Santa Clara County compares when entries into foster care are compared to the
impoverished child population in each jurisdiction. (Sources here.)

Julia Prodis Sulek is the reporter for the San Jose Mercury News who is one of the two people most responsible for setting off a foster-care panic in Santa Clara County that is among the worst anywhere in America. So it’s no surprise that in her latest story she seems desperate to pretend the panic doesn’t exist.

Granted, just writing a story with the words “foster care panic” in it is a big step up for Sulek, as is quoting people warning about such a panic and including actual comments from a parent whose child was wrongfully taken, and also from that family’s lawyer. She also quoted Prof. Kelley Fong when she cited the study she co-authored finding that increasing foster care does nothing to curb child abuse fatalities. 

That did not stop Sulek from writing the story in a way that implies children weren’t dying in the county before the child welfare agency started curbing needless entries into care. That is, of course, untrue. 

But that implication fits with what I think was the primary purpose of the story: to deny there’s a panic but still be able to say “we covered that” when the issue arises, and then return to fomenting more panic. Decades ago, in his groundbreaking work The Media Monopoly, former Washington Post editor Ben Bagdikian explained how journalists who have strong feelings about a story deal with the side of that story they don't like: They cover it. Prominently. Once. 

So, in her story about a presentation by several state and national experts to the county Board of Supervisors (a presentation that can be seen in full here, starting at about six hours and two minutes in), Sulek cited only part of a presentation by Dr Wendy Wiegmann, project director at UC Berkeley’s California Child Welfare Indicators Project. 

Weigman compared entries into foster care in Santa Clara County to entries in other counties and the state as a whole. But her graphs compared entries only to total child population.  She flagged this very point by also showing a separate table indicating that Santa Clara is, of course, one of the most affluent counties in California. This is crucial because poverty is both a risk factor for actual abuse and also a factor commonly confused with neglect. So the only true apples-to-apples comparison is one that compares entries into foster care to the impoverished child population in each county. 

When you do that, the result practically screams foster-care panic. 

In the index NCCPR publishes concerning America’s ten largest cities and their surrounding counties, we compare entries both to total child population and impoverished child population. Notice the huge change between them for Santa Clara. 

When you factor in poverty, Santa Clara recently has become very much an outlier. Santa Clara County takes away children at a rate 7% higher than Los Angeles, more than double the rate of New York City and nearly quadruple the rate of metropolitan Chicago. I wish Dr. Wiegmann had presented entries compared to impoverished child population for every California county. The Mercury News should have done just that. But that, of course, would have undermined Sulek’s thesis. 

So we’ve done it for her. Using the same counties Dr. Wiegmann used, we compared entries to the impoverished child population. One county, San Francisco, which has its own long ugly take-the-child-and run history still is higher than Santa Clara. But all the other counties are lower. So is the state average.

                               San Mateo       Contra Costa   California     Alameda  SANTA CLARA      SF

                                     Sources: Entries: California Child Welfare Indicators Project, Poverty: Census Bureau Small Area Income and Poverty Essimtate

Sulek also left out a supervisor’s suggestion that Santa Clara officials look at New Jersey, a state-run system with one of the lowest rates of child abuse deaths in the country. When you factor in poverty, the rate of removal in Santa Clara County is nearly triple the rate of New Jersey. 

Other problems with the story 

● Though the story does include that one example of wrongful removal, it leaves out crucial context. The case involved a mother whose two-year-old autistic son Nathan was taken after 

social workers determined that his mother failed to protect him from witnessing a domestic violence incident when his visiting father allegedly struck his mother — an experience the county said placed Nathan at substantial risk of physical harm. 

Despite the mother’s contention that she was protecting him from that violence and had agreed to a safety plan, her child was placed in foster care one day after Jaxon [Juarez’s] death. He was moved among four foster homes over four months as Jimenez complained about bite marks and other injuries she noticed during her weekly visits. 

What Sulek leaves out, and probably doesn’t know, is that taking away a child under these circumstances is even more traumatic than taking the child when the child has himself been victimized. In fact, it is so traumatic that, as a result of a class-action lawsuit, in one state, New York, it is illegal. The research underlying that decision is summarized here. 

In such cases, there is nothing to stop law enforcement from protecting the child by, say, arresting the abuser and removing him to jail. Instead, panic-motivated removals like this only discourage survivors of domestic violence from coming forward to seek help. 

● Sulek also writes that: 

Supervisor Sylvia Arenas expressed frustration with the recent tragedies, including Jaxon’s death that came after 18 months of state oversight and reforms. 

“We can’t keep up this rate of death in our county,” Arenas said. “I’m not saying foster care is a solution. What I was hoping to hear from you is that there were other strategies that were being used … somewhere where we might be able to mitigate for those deaths. …” 

She didn’t get easy answers. 

But she did get answers; they just weren’t the answers that Arenas, the other prime instigator of the foster-care panic, wanted to hear. 

In fact, many ideas were presented by the panel of experts, but Arenas rushed to dismiss them as too expensive. On the contrary, they all cost less than foster care, and those expenses almost certainly are skyrocketing – due to the foster-care panic. 

It is particularly disturbing to hear Arenas make her claim in the context of the death of Jaxon Juarez – since, as is explained in detail here, the foster-care panic itself may have contributed to Jaxon’s death because, at a crucial turning point, the county didn’t opt for a simple, and very inexpensive, option. 

● That isn’t all that frustrated Arenas. Over and over she tried to get the panel to say one could draw conclusions about systemic failure based on child abuse deaths. But no matter how many ways she asked, and no matter how frustrated she got when she wasn’t told what she wanted to hear, the panel unanimously disagreed. While each is the worst imaginable tragedy, even the panelist most prone to defend foster care, UC Berkeley Prof. Jill Duerr-Berrick, said they also are “outlier events, that are unpredictable and rare.” 

Perhaps this frustrated Sulek, too, since she left it out of her story. 

● Sulek also left out what Supervisor Betty Duong actually said when she bravely discussed what happened to her own family, growing up poor in East San Jose. Sulek said only that Duong “grew up with interventions from social workers for most of her childhood.” 

What Supervisor Duong actually said was: “We were in an environment where poverty was equated with neglect.” 

A massive experiment without informed consent 

● The most unintentionally revealing quote in the story actually came from Prof. Berrick, again the panelist most eager to defend the take-the-child-and-run approach. But in the course of doing so, she said this: 

[W]e don’t know whether [foster care is] a powerful intervention toward the positive or a powerful intervention toward the negative. 

The first thing to note about this is that Berrick is mistaken. There is a mountain of evidence showing that, while foster care is the less detrimental alternative in the horror story cases, for the overwhelming majority of children, those in the typical cases, it is, indeed, “a powerful intervention toward the negative” both because of the high rate of abuse in foster care itself, and the enormous trauma of removal, trauma so great it can lead to early death. 

The evidence is so strong that researchers actually have been able to estimate how many more children will die and become ill because of the panic itself. 

But suppose, hypothetically, Berrick is right and we’re as ignorant as she says we are. 

That means that for decades, arguably centuries, we have been conducting a massive uncontrolled experiment on millions of test subjects without their informed consent – and we have no idea if we’ve actually been harming them. That would be bad enough if the test subjects were adults, but in this experiment, the unwitting, unconsenting test subjects are children. 

If a California pharmaceutical company tested a new drug that way, those performing such an experiment might well be arrested and jailed.

So without intending it, probably without realizing it, what Berrick really is telling us is that “child welfare” as currently practiced in the United States is a fundamentally immoral enterprise. 

Why would anyone want to encourage such an enterprise with a foster-care panic?

Bodycam video reveals the appalling behavior of Florida family police

Street art on a bridge in Pensacola, Florida. (Image from Freekenlee.com)

I don’t know if the underlying decision to remove the child in this case was right, though there is strong cause to doubt it. I do know that everything else the Florida Department of Children and Families did was wrong – and probably far more common than the agency will ever admit. 

Kenlee Zuraff was five years old when she was taken from her mother, Joy, on March 6, 2024. She reportedly was returned in June of this year, after the Florida Department of Children and Families failed in an attempt to take the child from her mother forever. 

I saw the video embedded below when it first was posted publicly last January. I did not write about it at the time because, though the behavior of caseworkers for DCF was atrocious, I could find no objective source of information about the underlying facts of the case. I hoped that a mainstream news outlet would dig into the story. That didn’t happen. 

But in the months since, some state legislators have taken an interest – one of them, State Sen. Jason Pizzo, is even defending the mother in court, pro-bono. That has prompted some good ideas for legislation and some news coverage, though still not enough to get at the underlying facts of the case. 

As you’ll see on the website created by the family’s supporters, the case has gotten a lot of attention on various far-right sites. For someone like me, who comes from what I like to call the “Family Values Left,” that can be a problem. What does one do when the only national news story about the case comes from One America News? (In fact, in this case, their story met all normal journalistic standards.) But I’ll bet that’s made other reporters hesitant. Of course, this may only illustrate a point I’ve made often before: Nothing will get some of my fellow liberals to renounce everything they claim to believe in about due process and civil liberties more quickly than whispering the words “child abuse” in their ears. 

There is analogous hypocrisy among some on the right. This issue creates divisions within both Left and Right, but where some of us have common ground, we’ve come together in a group called Untied Family Advocates. And some of the legislative proposals on the FreeKenlee.com website are similar to some of NCCPR’s own recommendations. 

One thing I do know: After more than two years in foster care, Kenlee finally was returned to her mother. I believe that, had there been no video, that wouldn’t have happened. I believe that, had there been no video, the child’s right to live with her mother would have been taken away forever. 

What we know about the case 

Kenlee has Cystic Fibrosis. According to her mother, Joy, a doctor prescribed a medication that comes with a “black box warning” from the Food and Drug Administration. According to the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health, “Black box warnings are added only when substantial clinical data shows the drug can cause severe harm, hospitalization, or death.” Kenlee had had a bad reaction to a similar drug. So Joy said she wanted a second opinion. That, she says, prompted the doctor, a mandated reporter, to call DCF. 

The most detailed account of these underlying events comes from a letter that an adult with Cystic Fibrosis wrote to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, seeking their involvement. (I don’t know if they ever replied.) The letter also describes how often the mere fact that a child has CF puts a family on the family police radar. So add such families to the long list of people who are inherently more vulnerable to having the family police in their lives because of a disability. 

There are elements in the video which I think support this account. On the other hand, Joy’s brother and mother in South Dakota reportedly have defended DCF’s decision. 

What we know for sure 

Kenlee was torn from her mother and sister and placed in a stranger-care home in Jacksonville – six hours away. The distance, of course, made visiting extremely difficult, compounding the trauma of removal. 

When Joy dared to speak out, a judge imposed a gag order. Although court hearings themselves are supposed to be public in Florida, termination of parental rights hearings are an exception. So no reporters could see what was going on, and Joy herself couldn’t tell anyone. That’s just the way family police agencies like it. 

But most damning of all is this video, showing what happened when DCF and Sheriff’s deputies came to take Kenlee. It runs nearly 45 minutes, and it’s hard to watch, so let me call attention to some key moments: 

● The behavior of the DCF workers starting just before five minutes in.

 

● The look on one DCF worker’s face at 11:54 in.

 

● Then watch as the DCF workers rely on the same mother who allegedly is mis-medicating her daughter to explain to them what medications the child is taking and how they should be administered.

 

● See also the DCF employees’ behavior toward Kenlee’s older sister toward the very end of the video.

 

Throughout, they refer to the mother only as “mama,” denying her even the dignity of being called by her own name.

 

As I said, this all took place on March 6, 2024.  Only after the video became public did DCF issue a statement justifying the removal, but adding that 

“the conduct displayed by the Department employees in the video was inappropriate. It failed to demonstrate the level of professionalism and compassion expected in such circumstances, and the Department is addressing this.”  

According to one news account, shortly after the video became public, one of the DCF workers was fired.

 

But while the video only became public in January 2026, surely DCF should have had it for nearly two years. So why did DCF wait until the video became public to address the “inappropriate” behavior? (Yeah, that’s a rhetorical question.) If a worker was fired, was it for the behavior or for forgetting she was on camera?

 

How common is such behavior when no one is recording it? I’m sure most DCF workers don’t behave this way. There are stories from all over the country, equally well-documented, of caseworkers going above and beyond to help keep families together. But this was no aberration either.

 

A grand jury in the same region where this case took place found 12 instances in which DCF workers or subcontractors doing case management were accused by law enforcement of falsifying records. And, of course, there’s no reason to believe DCF workers are better behaved than their private “lead agency” counterparts in Tampa, whose behavior was just exposed by the Tampa Bay Times.

 

Solutions

 

As I noted, the group supporting Kenlee has some good ideas. For starters: require DCF workers to wear body cameras (to which I would add the equivalent of an “exclusionary rule”: if they forget to turn the camera on, or the cameras malfunction, then no information obtained during the unrecorded interviews/inspections could be used in court or in DCF records.)

 

For decades, NCCPR has advocated requiring all interviews to be recorded – with a similar
exclusionary rule. The recommendation goes back so far that originally we spoke of how easy it would be to do this on microcassette tape recorders. Now that bodycams are available, should we take that leap? There are concerns this might intimidate families. But Kenlee’s case illustrates how sometimes recording interviews alone would not be enough. I don’t think DCF ever would have taken action concerning its caseworkers in this case, and chances are, Kenlee still would be in foster care, if not for that bodycam video.

 

They also recommend, as do we, explicitly giving families the right to make recordings of their own, and informing families that they have that right.

 

Kenlee’s supporters also put a lot of emphasis on providing high-quality legal representation for families, something we have long advocated and consider one of the most important ways to curb needless removal of children and other family police abuses.

 

One of the lawmakers supporting Kenlee and her mother, State Sen Don Gaetz, has another excellent idea. As the Tampa Bay Times reports: 

One of Gaetz’s proposed changes would be to have the department secretary, who is appointed by the governor and confirmed by the Florida Senate, review all cases where there is a proposed termination of parental rights. 

In other words, Ms. or Mr. Secretary of DCF: If your agency is going to impose child welfare’s equivalent of the death penalty, you must personally sign off on the execution request. 

Also from the story: 

[Gaetz] also said parents must have due process, and should be able to dispute inaccurate information from the agency without fear of being retaliated against. Gaetz also said the department should not unnecessarily move children hundreds of miles from home. 

Concerning the retaliation issue, the story mentions no specifics. 

But it’s good to see lawmakers begin to make efforts to curb family policing.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending September 1, 2026

● The big news this week includes publication of an outstanding new book. In Making Families, Breaking Families, child welfare’s foremost academic historian, Dr. Mical Raz, brings a scholar’s perspective to the story of the fearmongering and smears that ultimately led Congress to pass the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act. Although the print edition won’t be out until later this month, the electronic edition is available now from Amazon or Barnes and Noble. 

I’m proud that NCCPR and the work of several NCCPR Board Members are cited in discussing the efforts to fight back and set the record straight. The lessons from that time are urgent; there is much to be learned. And while it’s not pleasant to be reminded of how bad things got, it’s encouraging to see how far we’ve come. 

● Reporters for the Tampa Bay Times spent more than a year digging into “hidden foster care” in Florida. Even if you think you know what that term means, and even why it’s so harmful, I guarantee you’ll still be shocked by some of what you’ll read. It is the best – and most horrifying  -- story I’ve seen anywhere in the country on the topic. 

● The Baltimore Banner has a column, and Investigate West has a story that have something in common: Each illustrates the confusion of poverty with neglect. I have a blog post about it with links to both stories. 

● And while both Maryland and Oregon are throwing away money on makeshift placements and/or institutions, The Imprint reports that California is moving in a better direction: bolstering “wraparound” services. The story does an excellent job of answering a question I get all the time: Yes, but what is wraparound anyway? 

● You’d think it’s kind of obvious, but, The Imprint reports, the federal government has sent out guidance to the states reminding them that, when an adoption fails, they are not supposed to keep paying subsidies to adoptive parents who aren’t adoptive parents anymore. And states can require paperwork from those parents documenting that they are, in fact, still the adoptive parents.

In this week’s reminder that the horror stories go in all directions: 

● From The Marshall Project: 

The chief executive of one of Ohio’s largest residential treatment centers for youth is accused of driving nearly three hours to meet someone for sex whom he believed was a 14-year-old girl. Instead, he met a police officer, according to police and court documents.

Confusing poverty with neglect, from coast to coast

Two stories in the news last week aptly illustrate that, no matter how deep in denial the child welfare establishment may be about it, they do indeed regularly confuse poverty with neglect. 

From Oregon … 

For decades, Oregon has torn apart families at a rate well above the national average. Things have improved, but as of 2025, it was still about 34% above that average when rates of family poverty are factored in. But that 34% figure is just a statewide average. Now, Investigate West reports that 

Since at least 2020, rural counties have consistently accounted for the highest rates of foster care involvement in Oregon, with some southeastern communities seeing rates three times higher than Multnomah County, the state’s most populous county. 

But that’s not because those rural counties are cesspools of depravity with triple the rate of child abuse. It’s for the obvious reason: Fewer services and more difficulty getting to them. From the story: 

KayCee Weeks … who oversees programs in rural Crook County, said many families she works with came to the attention of child welfare caseworkers because of parenting issues related to economic hardship. 

Some parents repeatedly missed their child’s health care appointments, because the provider was an hour away and they could not afford the cost of gas or repairs to a rundown vehicle, Weeks said. Others said they struggled to keep up with cleaning and maintaining their home, on top of everything else that is on their plate. 

Some of the responses in the story are disappointingly sanguine. They boil down to: We can’t do anything unless the state spends more. That’s not true. It would be nice if the state would spend more, but there’s no need to sit around waiting for that. While the data are old, Oregon probably already spends at a rate more than 80% above the national average, again, when rates of child poverty are factored in. 

So Oregon could accomplish a lot by shifting some of the money it wastes playing whack-a-mole with the state’s most vulnerable children. 

One other thing the story reveals, though it’s never mentioned: Oregon is engaging in a massive violation of federal law. That law requires that states make “reasonable efforts” to prevent children from being consigned to the chaos of foster care. 

Congress never defined that term. But common sense suggests that: “We don’t have anything except foster care so we’re throwing your kids into foster care” does not qualify. 

Unfortunately, in this respect, Oregon is not unusual. Across the country, ignoring “reasonable efforts” is far more the rule than the exception. 

… to Maryland 

In The Baltimore Banner, columnist Leslie Gray Streeter writes with rare insight and compassion about Kahliyah Gooding, a poor mother who was arrested after she left her children home alone. She quotes from the police report: 

“She leaves her children at home because daycare is too expensive and she has to work.” 

Yes, the usual crowd of affluent, censorious “professionals” can gleefully wag their fingers and say it wasn’t poverty “alone” because the house also was filthy. (Why, oh why didn’t she just hire a maid? Oh, wait…) 

Streeter knows better. So does Prof. Shanta Trivedi, associate professor of law and faculty director of the Sayra and Neil Meyerhoff Center for Family, Children and the Courts at the University of Baltimore. From the column: 

“… Most moms don’t want to leave their kids alone. I don’t think she left them because she thought it was a good idea,” Trivedi said. “She did what she had to do to put food in their mouths.” 

It’s possible Gooding’s children are now in foster care, though we don’t know. “The state will pay for other people to care for your children, but the same money could be used for daycare so that they could stay with their mom,” Trivedi said. “We put a lot toward foster care and adoption but very little on prevention.” … 

So why don’t parents in need avail themselves of the system? “Calling social services guarantees some sort of intervention, and you really run the risk of losing your kids anyway,” Trivedi said. 

This seems like a good place for a reminder that Maryland is planning to spend more than $1 billion over the next five years, just to buy 637 institutional beds to warehouse children.

Graphic by ChatGPT

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending August 25, 2026

● Maine’s highest court has ruled that no, the state family police agency can’t keep a family apart forever just because mom can’t afford housing. But the agency sure did try – and they may yet succeed. As the Maine Monitor put it in their excellent story about the case: 

The ruling highlights the ongoing debate in Augusta about whether Maine’s child welfare system too often conflates lack of financial resources with abuse or neglect, as well as Maine’s recent history of taking children into foster care at higher rates than other states. It also puts into stark relief the consequences of Maine’s affordable housing crisis. 

And if you compare what Maine authorities did here to the remarkable restraint shown by their Ohio counterparts in a case with some striking similarities, it highlights something else, too.  I have a blog post about it.  

● A family police agency chasing a mother all the way to another state and harassing her also was the issue in a major appellate court decision in New York.  As The New York Times reports, the court said New York City’s family police agency is not allowed to do that – something one could kind of see coming given how the oral argument went. 

● Workers in Missouri were desperate to find a placement for Korbin Papadopoulous, a 17-year-old with diabetes and autism. They were desperate because a foster-care panic has sent the number of children torn from their homes skyrocketing – creating an artificial “shortage” of foster homes. 

So they wound up placing the youth in a home that wasn’t licensed to take in nonrelatives and wasn’t equipped to meet his medical needs. The foster parents did their best – and at least twice asked the state family police agency, the Children’s Division, to take the youth back. By the time they finally agreed, it was too late. As the Missouri Independent reports, the boy died of diabetic ketoacidosis. 

The head of the Children’s Division, Sara Smith, responded exactly as anyone familiar with her track record would expect: with a flurry of CYA memos, effectively attempting to shift blame to frontline workers. But, with her foster-care panic and her fanatical demands to take away more children, Smith herself bears more responsibility for this tragedy than any overwhelmed frontline worker. 

Oh, and if you’re thinking: Well, these things happen when abused children have to be removed, here’s the thing: This child was never abused. 

As the Independent story explains: 

Korbin first entered foster care in 2019. His father told The Independent he and Korbin’s mother approached Children’s Division for help after their son was diagnosed with diabetes and autism. They couldn’t afford the treatment their son’s doctors advised, Papadopoulos said, and the division indicated they could provide resources. 

[Korbin’s mother, Natisha Jett] said she and Papadopoulos went to the division because they “just wanted to get (him) the help he needed so he could have the life he deserves.” 

Korbin “didn’t need a family,” Papadopoulos said. “He already had a family.” 

Papadopoulos said Korbin had more than 15 placements in residential facilities and foster homes before his death. 

● In the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Dr. Mical Raz tells the story of Foster Care Youth United, the pioneering publication founded in 1993 that, at long last, let foster youth tell their own stories – unfiltered by the adults who built and maintained the system that enmeshed them. And yet, their voices were shut out when Congress debated a law that would profoundly worsen many of their lives, the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act. 

Dr. Raz writes about how the magazine’s founder Keith Hefner was shocked by  

…[t]he prevalence of sexual abuse endured by young girls while in foster care … He recalled observing that among the magazine’s writers, the vast majority of girls and many of the boys reported experiencing sexual abuse, often in group homes or foster families.35 In one heartbreaking essay, a young woman, who chose to remain anonymous, described how her social worker repeatedly coerced her into sexual relations. She recounted how, the first time he raped her, she “wanted to scream, but I also wanted to go on a weekend pass with my mother.” She knew her assailant was the one who could approve such a visit. 

● Never underestimate how low private foster agencies will sink to rub salt into the wounds of children abused on their watch. The Sacramento Bee reports that once again, in California, they’re trying to curb the right of those survivors to receive compensation for what was done to them. (It’s not just private foster care agencies; school districts also are fine with making things more miserable for those abused on their watch.) 

● So it’s a good thing even more survivors in San Diego are suing now, including residents of a shelter that was once notorious. As the San Diego Union Tribune reports: 

One of the new cases comes from former residents of the Polinsky Children’s Center, the temporary shelter in Kearny Mesa that treats children who are removed from their homes for their own protection. 

In this week’s (further) reminder that the horror stories go in all directions: 

● From KABC-TV, Los Angeles: 

A Riverside foster parent has been charged with multiple felonies after allegedly sexually assaulting at least three girls and one boy who were under his care over a period of nearly 20 years.

Maine fails to keep a family apart forever just because of poverty – but not for lack of trying

The Maine Supreme Judicial Court

Compare the trauma Maine family police inflicted on this family to the restraint shown by their counterparts in Ohio in a case with some remarkable similarities – and one huge difference. 

It turns out that even in Maine, you can’t reach thousands of miles into another state, tear a child from his mother, and then keep him away forever solely because the mother can’t afford an apartment in Maine. But not for lack of trying. It took years of court battles before Maine’s Supreme Judicial Court ruled unanimously last week that a lower court was wrong when it did exactly that. And even now, the ruling doesn’t mean the child necessarily will get his mother back. 

The case illustrates one of the many points the take-the-child-and-run evangelists are desperate to avoid: Even when a child isn’t taken because of poverty “alone” and even when, as in this case, the court itself concludes the mother has gone “above and beyond” to do everything demanded of her, poverty alone often is the reason a family is not reunified. At least three separate studies have found that 30% of America’s foster children could be home right now if their families just had decent housing. This is the story of one such family. 

In this case, it appears, Maine’s family police agency, the Department of Health and Human Services, strove to keep this family apart forever for two reasons: It was more convenient for the agency, and they were “comparison shopping” and liked the foster parents better. 

As the Maine Monitor put it in an excellent story about the case: 

The ruling highlights the ongoing debate in Augusta about whether Maine’s child welfare system too often conflates lack of financial resources with abuse or neglect, as well as Maine’s recent history of taking children into foster care at higher rates than other states. It also puts into stark relief the consequences of Maine’s affordable housing crisis.

The facts 

The mother, referred to in the decision as “Karen,” has lived all her life in New Mexico. Her son has autism and “exceptionally high needs.” But the mother had a support network in her home state, and no one in either state ever accused her of not meeting those needs. She was living in an apartment in New Mexico she paid for in part with a Section 8 housing subsidy. 

But in 2021, Karen took her son with her to Maine to meet in person a man she’d met online. The man had prior convictions for domestic violence and assault, but there is nothing in the court decision to indicate that Karen knew that. But Karen apparently figured out she’d made a bad choice. Then she made another bad choice and a good choice at roughly the same time. She got drunk. But she didn’t stay with the man. On the contrary, she called 911 and asked for a ride home to New Mexico. 

One can imagine the glee with which the foster-care-at-all-costs crowd will greet those facts. Substance use! Risk of domestic violence! Certainly not poverty alone! But, of course, if Karen had money, she could simply have called a rideshare, gone to a hotel with her son, sobered up, and caught a plane home the next day. I wonder how many rich people do something similar after parties in Hollywood or the Hamptons? Since Karen didn’t have that option, she had to call police, who called DHHS, which promptly took away the child. 

Special note to the take-the-child-and-run finger-waggers

Before you get too censorious about Karen, be sure to compare her case to this other case, from Ohio, in the news lately. Here, too, Mom could be accused of making a bad choice in men, picking someone with a long list of “allegedlies” in his past – all of which he denies. But she married him, had a child with him, and, if her allegations are correct, (and again, he denies them), he committed domestic violence against her – in front of their two-year-old child. 

Family police agencies routinely investigate such mothers and often take the children, for “failure to protect” because they “allowed” their children to “witness domestic violence.” If the allegations are true, one certainly could make a case that, with hindsight, this mother’s decisions were as bad as Karen’s. Yet in this case, it seems, authorities have shown commendable restraint. No news account mentions this young child spending so much as a day in foster care. Anyone care to guess why?

Now, back to Karen’s story. After rubber-stamping the removal of Karen’s child, the court then ordered Maine to contact its New Mexico counterpart, the Children, Youth and Families Department, to arrange a placement in New Mexico. It took more than three months, but the child eventually was returned to Karen in New Mexico, but still under the supervision of the Maine family police. 

About three months later, a Maine caseworker called Karen. Apparently, Karen sounded intoxicated, so the Maine worker asked New Mexico authorities to check. According to the court decision, CYFD “took the child into custody” – but refused to keep him. The decision doesn’t say why. But as the Maine Monitor put it: 

Maine’s child welfare agency disagreed with its New Mexico counterpart. It took the child and put him in a foster placement across the country in Maine and thousands of miles away from his mother.  

As the story notes, at the time Maine had much more of a hair-trigger for taking away children than New Mexico – though New Mexico since has gotten far worse. 

Along with custody came the usual cookie-cutter “service plan.” Karen did it all, and then some.  As the court decision explained: 

The mother has resided in New Mexico throughout this case, having been a resident for her entire life. As to the requirements of the reunification plan, the court expressly noted that she went “above and beyond” what she has been asked to do by [the Department] to address her own individual issues.” She has completed intensive outpatient programs for both substance abuse and mental health treatment, in addition to receiving a neuropsychological evaluation. She continues to participate in mental health counseling and regularly attends parenting classes. Further, the mother joined and actively engaged with a domestic violence support group. All her random substance screenings have been negative. 

The mother “remotely attends many of [the child’s] medical and service provider appointments” and has become involved in multiple organizations, in New Mexico and online, focused on autism. She has a safe, well-maintained apartment in New Mexico, that is covered by a housing voucher. 

So what was the problem? Before reunifying the family, Maine DHHS wanted supervised in-person visits and a trial reunification. And DHHS insisted, for some reason, that had to happen in Maine. But hey, it’s not like they didn’t help: They paid Karen’s airfare and lodging – for two whole days – so she could search for housing she could afford in Maine. 

Now, consider: Even if you think everything DHHS did up to this point was justified, even if you think the supervised visits and trial reunification were essential, that still leaves one crucial question: Why didn’t DHHS simply send the caseworkers to New Mexico, bring the child, and supervise the visits there? Why didn’t the caseworkers stay in a hotel while the trial reunification took place in Karen’s actual home? 

But no.  I guess that would have been too inconvenient. Instead, the failure to find that apartment in Maine in two days became the sole reason a trial court terminated Karen’s son’s right to his mother (a more accurate description than termination of parental rights). 

There was also the matter of the foster parents, who have received high praise throughout, which suggests DHHS simply liked them better. 

Fortunately, the Supreme Judicial Court didn’t buy it. As the Monitor story noted: 

The high court reasoned that the mother had faced an impossible “Catch-22”: Either move to Maine, lose her housing voucher and be found unfit because she didn’t have stable housing; or stay in New Mexico with stable housing but be found unfit because she couldn’t be in Maine to take part in in-person supervised visits. 

So the termination has been undone. But that’s all. (In a concurring opinion, two justices suggested that the court should have done more.) The court did not order the family reunified. It did not order the child sent back to New Mexico. Maine DHHS is free to keep right on, in effect, holding him hostage in the foster home they love. They remain welcome to keep trying to dredge up other grounds to keep them apart forever – as long as they don’t repeat the mistake of explicitly blaming housing. 

That means, of course, that now that the case has dragged on so long, DHHS can take the ultimate low road and try to play the “bonding card” – since their preference for the foster parents is so clear. 

At least it will not go back to the same trial court judge. She’s retired.