What happens when the family police and their enablers in politics and journalism treat impoverished children and their families as sub-human? A story in The New Yorker has some answers.

A story in The New Yorker notes that “A.C.S. acknowledges that many of its caseworkers have
 ‘experienced the toddler whose little fingers have to be pried off of her mother.’” 

There is a standard line used by those most fanatical about tearing apart families and throwing the children into foster care. It comes from the worst of the advocates and politicians, and it’s eagerly quoted by the worst of the journalists. You hear it in an effort to roll back even the most modest reforms, and to justify foster-care panics, sharp, sudden increases in children torn from everyone they know and love in response to high-profile tragedies. 

The exact wording varies, but it’s some version of: Foster care isn’t perfect, but at least the children aren’t dead. 

The first thing to understand about this kind of statement is: It’s inaccurate. In typical cases, not the horror stories, children placed in foster care actually are more likely to die, and suffer severe, debilitating illness, than comparably maltreated children left in their own homes. I’ll get to the details about that, and links to the various studies that prove it, below. 

But first, I want to turn to the part about “foster care isn’t perfect…” Anyone who uses that phrase is inherently unqualified to talk about foster care, because it is, in itself, an act of emotional abuse, a way to diminish and dismiss the inherent severe pain and trauma of removal as a mere imperfection. I don’t just mean the high rates of abuse in foster care itself. I mean the kind of routine trauma documented in a story published last week by Larissa MacFarquhar in The New Yorker. 

The story deals with a class-action lawsuit against the family police agency in New York City, the Administration for Children’s Services, challenging their routine abuse of “emergency” power to literally, take-the-child-and-run, tearing children from the arms of their parents and throwing them into foster care without asking a judge for permission first. What do I mean by “literally”? As the story itself notes: “A.C.S. acknowledges that many of its caseworkers have ‘experienced the toddler whose little fingers have to be pried off of her mother.’” 

As The Imprint points out in its own story on the lawsuit, the practice isn’t limited to New York City. In fact, it’s probably worse elsewhere. 

But perhaps the most important contribution the New Yorker story makes, and what makes it so relevant everywhere, is the way it brings home the inherent trauma of removal, trauma that lasts long after the children are back home.  Here’s what it did to the children in the family of one of the named plaintiffs in the suit, children who never should have been taken away in the first place: 

They stayed in foster care for almost three years. The first set of foster parents found Jasmine too difficult to handle, so she was sent to another home without her brothers, then to a third home, and then a fourth. The various parents found her so troublesome that they repeatedly called 911. She was forcibly medicated; on about ten occasions, she was sent to psychiatric wards, something that had never happened when she lived with her family. Her mother was not allowed to visit her in the hospital. … 

The three years of separation and foster care will leave a permanent mark on the family. Daevon, who is five, fearfully apologizes to his mother if he does something wrong. … Jasmine withdraws much of the time. While she was away, she once threatened to hurt herself and said that she wished she were dead. She blames herself for things that happened to her in care. When Jeremiah, the middle child, who is seven, was in his foster home, he started pulling out his eyebrow hairs and wetting the bed. He now tells his mom that she is not a bad mother. 

And this is what happened to the children of the other named plaintiff; again, children who never should have been taken away in the first place: 

After A.C.S. conducted its emergency removal of Lorimer’s children … they were taken to the Children’s Center in Manhattan, a holding place for kids who have entered the system. The children were separated from each other and assigned to dormitories by age. It felt to them like a jail. (Many children say they have been assaulted there.) Zoe arrived carrying a spiral notebook that contained years of drawings; it was taken away because wire wasn’t allowed, and she never got it back. 

Although the most recent removal was shorter than the first, [Larimer] sees that her kids have been changed by it. The girls cling to her. Kayden cries when she leaves. Zoe fills her book bag with as many things as she can carry—extra clothes, her sisters’ stuffed animals. … 

Now imagine pain like this inflicted up to 175,000 times every year. That’s how often children are thrown into foster care – officially. It does not, of course, count hidden foster care* placements.  It is a tsunami of children’s suffering, routinely dismissed by the child welfare establishment and its enablers in politics and journalism. 

What does it really mean when they dismiss this pain as “foster care is not perfect” or (inaccurately, it turns out) some version of  “well, at least they’re not dead.” Can you imagine any of these same people being so sanguine if the family police pounded on their door and said: “We’re taking your children tonight. A child died on this block, so we’re just going to take every child on this block – just in case. After all, we don’t want your children to wind up dead.” 

But the enablers of foster-care panic, and those who oppose any effort to curb needless removal, are overwhelmingly middle-class professionals and disproportionately white. So they know full well that their children are largely immune from the harm caused by their own advocacy. It is extremely unlikely a family police agency caseworker will show up at their door at all, much less walk off with the children. 

What this really suggests is that, deep down, the overwhelmingly middle-class professionals who run these systems, govern these systems from statehouses, and write about them from newsrooms, don't really view these overwhelmingly poor, disproportionately nonwhite children, or their families as fully human. They are something less. The suffering of children like theirs somehow doesn’t count the way the suffering of children like ours counts. 

It reveals itself in so many ways: 

● The casual cruelty of never giving Zoe back her notebook – and the fact that even worse acts of cruelty, denying children whose parents were taken from them forever even mementos of their former lives, sometimes is routine. 

● The behavior of journalists in West Virginia – child removal capital of America - who can write 10,000 words about foster care with not one of those words coming from a parent whose children were taken, or from children saying they never needed to be taken. You can find similar behavior among some journalists in other states as well. 

● Or someone like Prof. Sarah Font, who’s actually suggested that older foster youth may be better off “aging out” with no home at all than being reunified or placed in guardianship with relatives, because, if they age out, they’ll get more financial benefits. 

As I’ve noted before, this attitude, that poor children, especially poor nonwhite children, don’t really suffer when taken from their parents, or at least not enough for it to matter, and all these suggestions that somehow love means less to them than to our children, reminds me of nothing so much as a notorious comment by Gen. William Westmoreland about Asians during the Vietnam War:  “'The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does a Westerner,” Westmoreland said. “Life is cheap in the Orient." 

For the worst of the child welfare establishment, and their political and journalistic enablers, the lives of poor, nonwhite children and their parents are cheap indeed. 

Where are children more likely to die? 

That also may explain why this same establishment, and those same enablers, can’t even face up to the simple fact that their approach not only doesn’t save lives, it makes it more likely that more children will die. 

For starters, recall the massive study which found that tearing apart more families does nothing to curb child abuse deaths, and reducing foster care does nothing to increase them. 

But it’s even worse than that. An honest version of the statement about deaths in foster care would be: “…at least they’re not dead yet.” 

Because, as I’ve noted in previous posts, there is now a vast body of research from around the world showing how, in typical cases, children placed in foster care typically fare worse even than comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes on all sorts of measures – including premature death. 

So, for example, a Swedish study found that in typical cases, among maltreated children left in their own homes, 1.8% died by age 20. Among children facing the same level of maltreatment at home, when placed in foster care, 8.6% died by age 20. The foster youth were more than four times more likely to die. The most common cause of death: Suicide. 

And we’re not talking about dying at age 70 instead of age 80 – as though that wouldn’t be bad enough. We’re talking about dying before turning 21. 

Premature death is just the tip of the iceberg. Many more will suffer from serious illness and disability. 

There are so many similar studies measuring so many rotten outcomes for foster youth that it’s actually possible to project how many more children will die and will suffer such illness and disability due to a foster care panic, like the one in Santa Clara County, California right now, and how many lives have been saved in places such as New York City and New Jersey that have safely reduced needless foster care. 

So I wonder if Larissa MacFarquhar was really speaking to some of her fellow journalists when she wrote this: 

In the lawsuits against A.C.S., a legal victory may actually be less important than changing public perception, because the law as written isn’t the main problem: the problem is that A.C.S. isn’t following it. A.C.S. isn’t following it because public pressure is pushing it in only one direction. Insofar as most people know anything at all about child-protective services, they know that its caseworkers are people who rescue children from danger. They hear about A.C.S. only when this mission fails and a child ends up dead. Therefore, A.C.S. follows the mantra of “better safe than sorry,” where “safe” often means preventing the kind of harm to a child that A.C.S. might be blamed for, while discounting the harm of separating children from their families. An unpublished report in 2020 found that some A.C.S. staff “described an internal culture that operates on fear and intimidation. . . . This frequently means that staff err on the side of safety for themselves, by seeking removal.” 

This means sending into foster care thousands of children who would be better off with their parents. …  The litigators hope that the seizure lawsuit will bring public attention to unwarranted A.C.S. removals, because, if sufficient outrage can be generated, then “safe”—both for children and for A.C.S. staff—can be redefined. 

*=Some official placements and many hidden foster care placements are with relatives. Those typically inflict less pain. But those most extreme about tearing apart families also are among those most hostile to these kinship foster care placements.

Illustration by ChatGPT

NCCPR in the CT Mirror: CT’s DCF, slouching back to mediocrity: To save more children, it must refocus on keeping families together.

New legislation “sends a clear and powerful message,” says a lawmaker. 

“It is time to look at what is not working and fix it,” says another lawmaker. 

“It’s got to be all hands on deck,” says an advocate. 

If throwing cliches at a problem would solve it, Connecticut would have the best child welfare system in America. Instead, the tired thinking reflected in those tired cliches explains the real problem: A state that once really might have become the best, or at least the least bad, child welfare system in America has been slouching back to mediocrity or worse. 

Read the full column in CT Mirror

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending May 28, 2026

● Because of its vast unchecked power and no real accountability, few (if any) government power centers are easier to weaponize than the family police. Look who’s weaponizing them now:

Abortion, Every Day has learned that Child Protective Services (CPS) has targeted mothers in multiple states who helped their daughters seek out abortions. In one case, CPS removed a teen from her home—and threatened her mother with murder charges—to stop her from getting an abortion. Another mother, one who lives in a state where abortion is legal, faced an investigation from both CPS and local police after helping her teen end a pregnancy. 

These stories—shared with AED by the attorneys and advocates at If/When/How—represent a new and largely unexamined consequence of the end of Roe. It’s no longer enough that women have to worry they’ll die of sepsis while surrounded by doctors that can’t legally treat them, or that they’ll be arrested for how they dispose of their miscarriages. Now the government is using family separation as an anti-abortion … 

See also the sidebar on how If/When/How is fighting back. It starts with another example of family police brutality. 

Some better news on the litigation front: 

● He’s known in court papers as K.W. He was never accused of harming his newborn son in any way. And for a week, he was allowed to keep his newborn, unmolested by New York City’s family police agency, the Administration for Children’s Services. But, as amNY reports,  according to his lawsuit, suddenly, six days later, the family police showed up, took the child – and held him in foster care for three years. 

Though they had six days to do it, ACS never asked a court for permission. Suddenly, after leaving the boy and his father alone for six days, ACS decided the case was an “emergency” and snatched away the child without going to court first. Such abuse of “emergency” power is common in New York City and all over the country – something to keep in mind whenever the family police and their apologists dredge up that tired lie about “we can’t take children on our own.” From the story: 

My infant son was torn from my arms by ACS when he was just a few days old and put into foster care with strangers,” said K.W., the father in his appeal. “I fought with all my heart and might to get him back for nearly three years. After my son came home, we’ve been fighting to right that devastating wrong.” 

K.W. hasn’t won his suit. But an appellate court at least is allowing it to move forward. 

● And just today (May 28) the Family Justice Law Center, which represents K.W., joined by several other groups, including the Legal Aid Society’s Juvenile Rights Practice, which represents children in these cases, have filed a class-action suit to stop ACS’s rampant abuse of its emergency removal power. As FJLC explains: 

ACS often violates families’ basic constitutional rights by conducting emergency removals in situations that are not true emergencies. ACS’s own data show that most child removals now happen without prior judicial authorization – almost 1,500 last year alone. And when these cases finally reach family court, at the very first hearing judges find no justification for children to remain in state custody nearly 30 percent of the time – indicating that many of these purportedly “emergency” removals never met the legal standard for a removal in the first place, yet the lasting harm has already been done.

As one of the plaintiffs said:

“ACS workers are wolves in sheep’s clothing, and you have to be very cautious with them when you’re a Black or Latino parent,” said Plaintiff Denise Archer, who filed under a pseudonym to protect her family. “I tried to go to ACS to seek some type of assistance when my family was going through a hard time, and it turned into an almost three-year separation where I had to fight every step of the way to get my kids returned home. Even though ACS is supposed to be the entity you go to when you’re a family in need, they have their own hidden agendas, and my family and I had to pay the price of that.”

● Families won a big victory from New York State’s highest court, the Court of Appeals: The Court is refusing to allow what amounts to a shadow, hidden foster care system that started in Illinois and metastasized into many other states to take hold in New York. I have a blog post about what should be called sugar-frosted foster care, including links to stories about the decision from The Imprint and Courthouse News Service. 

● In New Mexico, Source NM reports that the state branch of the ACLU and two courageous legislators are suing to block an order issued by the governor demanding that any child who tests positive for certain substances be confiscated at birth. From the story: 

The petition cited a December letter signed by more than 70 New Mexico providers saying that pregnant women may forgo prenatal care or treatment due to concerns of losing their children and called the directive “dangerous.” 

Rep. Micaela Lara Cadena (D-Las Cruces), who joined Sen. Linda López (D-Albuquerque) in filing the petition, told Source NM the policy is “patently unlawful.” 

“We have a state-sanctioned policy, when we are removing kids without an individualized finding, not based on what’s happening in their particular family, in their particular pregnancy, their circumstances, just a blanket policy that says, ‘if there was exposure in this pregnancy, we are automatically taking your child at birth,’” Lara Cadena said. “So for me, that’s a dangerous precedent; among other things, it’s going to push people further into the shadows.” 

● And in Maine, the Maine Monitor reports, the state Supreme Court overturned the termination of five children’s rights to their parents (a more accurate term than termination of parental rights) that was based largely on the fact that a supervisor told the court she read in a record somewhere that the mother allegedly hadn’t passed two drug tests (which, by the way are notoriously unreliable to begin with). 

And some better news about safety – if the lessons are learned 

● Ten days ago, we published a post about calculating the price of foster-care panic. Because there are now so many studies documenting how, in typical cases, children placed in foster care fare worse even than comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes, it is now possible to calculate how many children will suffer serious harm to their health, and even premature death, because they were needlessly thrown into foster care. 

It works both ways. It’s also possible to calculate the lives saved in places like New York City and New Jersey that have safely reduced foster care placements. This week, we have a post with those data. 

● It’s a lesson that urgently needs to be learned right now in nearby Suffolk County, where it looks like a foster-care panic may have started, for the usual reasons. 

Legislators seem to be getting smarter, too  

● You may recall that some rural counties in Minnesota are whining about a new law requiring them to actually get serious about helping families so their children don’t endure the trauma of needless foster care. They wanted implementation of the law delayed. But Minnesota lawmakers didn’t get suckered. Instead, they passed legislation which, if signed by the governor, will give the counties some more money to do what they should have been doing all along.  One element of the bill is concerning, though.  As The Imprint reports: 

If enacted, counties would receive the funds based on the number of children who live within their borders as well as the number of screened-in reports of child abuse or neglect, and open child protection cases. 

The problem with this should be obvious. 

● In March, I wrote about how the family police agency in Tennessee wanted the authority to get rid of “problem” foster youth. They wanted to be able to throw in jail any foster child who they felt was getting out of line, or even threatening to get out of line. Lawmakers refused, in part because of the superb advocacy efforts of a former foster youth, Ella Bet-Ami. Now The Imprint has a profile of Bet-Ami. 

In other news: 

From NCCPR's op-ed column in CT Mirror: 

If throwing cliches at a problem would solve it, Connecticut would have the best child welfare system in America. Instead, the tired thinking reflected in those tired cliches [from legislators and advocates] explains the real problem: A state that once really might have become the best, or at least the least bad, child welfare system in America has been slouching back to mediocrity or worse. 

● Two children with diabetes died in Arizona group homes after not getting the medical care they need. Now, KNXV-TV reports, the lawyer for their families wants the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate the Arizona family police agency for discriminating against the disabled, in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. It would be the second such investigation in Arizona. As the story notes: 

In 2024, the DOJ's Civil Rights Division found DCS discriminated against parents and children with hearing disabilities and forced the agency to make changes. 

● The Imprint reports that the federal Administration for Children’s Services is making it easier for states and localities to incorporate seven specific programs into their plans under the Family First Act. One of those programs is Homebuilders – possibly the only approved program under this act that actually can provide families with what they often need most – concrete help. And oh, how the take-the-child-and-run crowd hates Homebuilders! 

In this week’s reminder that The Horror Stories Go in All Directions: 

Anybody see a pattern in these two stories? 

● From KARE-TV, Minneapolis:  

A north metro psychiatric residential treatment program is closing at least temporarily after its license was suspended over "an imminent risk of harm." … 

DHS alleged that the children served by the program did not have their basic rights protected. MDH alleges that suspected maltreatment was not reported, medications were not administered safely and accurately, there was not enough appropriately trained staff to ensure residents' treatment needs were met, and treatment services did not include adequate supervision to support residents' safety. DHS also alleges the facility was not kept in good repair. 

● From WBFF-TV Baltimore:

Maryland officials are preparing to remove foster children from Silver Oak Academy after the state confirmed for the first time that youth will no longer remain at the troubled Carroll County facility beyond June 30, marking the clearest sign yet that the privately operated program is effectively shutting down. 

This update follows months of reporting by Spotlight on Maryland documenting more than 100 emergency calls tied to the campus since January 2025, including reports of assaults, arson, runaway juveniles and staff concerns that the young residents were “overtaking the campus.” 

And, WBFF reports, the state either can’t or won’t even say how many children are missing from foster care. 

But this is not deterring Maryland from spending $1.2 billion over five years to warehouse children in 637 beds in a bunch of other institutions.

There will be no sugar-frosted foster care in New York

 

NOT SOLD IN NEW YORK!

The state’s highest court slays what one critic called “a hydra-headed quasi-foster care monster, with all of the hallmarks of foster care but none of the legal protections the law demands.”

A scheme to create what amounts to a second, hidden foster care system in New York, without even the bare minimum due process protections in the formal system, has been shut down by the state’s highest court. 

In a unanimous decision, the New York State Court of Appeals ruled that the state’s family police agency, the Office of Children and Family Services, had no legal authority to allow a system of so-called “Host Homes.” The model is based on, and developed in close consultation with, an organization called Safe Families For Children, which has similar models in multiple states. 

In other states, Safe Families has gotten state lawmakers to authorize the program. We can only hope New York legislators won’t be suckered into doing the same. 

Proponents portray Safe Families / Host Homes as just a purely voluntary program in which parents under stress, perhaps due to an illness, or homelessness, or some other financial problem, get a total stranger to take in the kids for a while. Sometimes this “voluntary” arrangement is “suggested” by a state or local family police agency. The parents, it is said, can get the kids back anytime they want.  But Safe Families actually is sugar-frosted foster care. 

Here’s the biggest catch. 

Unlike a family that leaves a child with a relative or a close friend, these families are leaving children with total strangers who know, at the outset, that the family has some kind of problem. Odds are the strangers will be a different race and class from many of the children. 

So what happens if the parent says, “OK, I’m ready to take my child back,” but the stranger doesn’t agree that they’re ready? The stranger can call the formal family police agency, which almost certainly will launch an investigation. The risk is even greater if, as often happens, the family police agency already is involved with the family and is looking over everyone’s shoulder from the start. 

The family desperate to find a place for their children – because no one is offering the kind of help they might need to keep them in their own home – may not know that. There is no lawyer looking over the paperwork, no one to say: “Wait a minute, maybe we can get you food aid or housing assistance so your children don’t need to lose you for a matter of days or weeks in the first place.” And there’s no one to point out that the stranger always has the option to call the family police. 

No wonder OCFS received at least 17 letters from advocates for both children and parents, opposed to letting this program into New York. One letter called it “a hydra-headed quasi-foster care monster, with all of the hallmarks of foster care but none of the legal protections the law demands.” The lawsuit to stop the program was led by lawyers who regularly represent children in child welfare cases. 

The founder of Safe Families for Children, David Anderson, says the program has taken 77,000 children into its volunteers’ homes since 2003. A lawyer for OCFS told the Court of Appeals that 99% were returned to their own homes. The Imprint reports, however, that it’s 93%. Either figure represents, as the OCFS lawyer said, “better numbers than foster care.” 

But that is the wrong comparison. Safe Families is a program used for families that either have no connection to the formal family policing system or are referred there by family police agencies as a form of “diversion” because even the agency doesn’t think they’re so unsafe they need to be taken by force of law. Of course, such a program will have a better reunification record than those placed in formal foster care. But the best track record, of course, would be attained by not putting poor people in an impossible position where their only option is to “voluntarily” surrender their children, because no one will provide them the help they really need. 

And Safe Families’ own figures mean that anywhere from 770 to 5,390 times, parents who thought they could get their children back anytime – they didn’t. 

One of the very examples Safe Families showcases illustrates the problem. A story about the program in The Imprint begins with a family that Safe Families likes to showcase as a success: 

In the summer of 2012, Corisma Gillespie hit a crisis point. Pregnant with her second child, the 20-year-old from the west side of Chicago had lost her job at McDonald’s. Her car was impounded, and she was about to become homeless. Desperate to provide for her children, she asked herself: “How can I do this?”  

A local program had an answer. She could hand her daughter over to a volunteer family through Willow Creek Community Church, almost an hour away in the suburbs. There would be no court hearings, judges, or lawyers involved when her child moved in with these strangers, and it would take almost no time to arrange. Her daughter could live in this “Safe Family” home for as long as Gillespie needed. All she had to do was sign a form. … 

After three weeks, she found a job and her first apartment, and her daughter came home to Chicago. 

Gee, what might either government, a charity, a church or a group of churches do instead? How about simply providing enough cash to tide the family over so Ms. Gillespie could stay in her apartment until she found another job? How about helping with the job search? 

One need only compare the Safe Families white savior rescue approach to what happened when communities themselves developed networks of mutual aid during COVID – and the federal government provided families with cash: Child abuse decreased. 

Indeed, early in the program’s history, in a comment posted anonymously on a television news website, one viewer understood the problem immediately: 

During the second World war Jewish family were separating from their children for the sake of children survival. The Nazis were set to kill them all. And now in the richest and, so far, peaceful country the best solution to the economic crises it to give up your children to charitable Christians for the sake of survival. Millions of homes taken by banks stay empty. Parents cannot buy children shoes, there are sleeping in subways. Instead of buying shoes and providing decent shelter for families with children "Good people" solve the state problem and offer their solution, they take children to their Christians homes. What country is that? What country allows that to happen? Charity starts with courage of thoughts. Courage of social changes. But as long as this is acceptable and cherished solutions, any real change in hearts and minds is impossible. 

Safe Families cites a study comparing outcomes for children in Illinois involved in a family police investigation, in which those who were placed in a Safe Families home (which, for all intents and purposes, is foster care) were less likely to end up in, uh, foster care than those who got conventional preventive services. 

So, for starters, if a family police agency is saying: We’re investigating you and we recommend you put your child into this “voluntary” program while we’re investigating you, that’s not exactly voluntary. 

Second, a comparison to conventional preventive services misses the point. Conventional preventive services usually mean lots of counseling and parent education, while doing nothing to ameliorate problems like the kind Ms. Gillespie had. 

And third, the study author, Prof. Mark Testa, says he had to omit results from Chicago for a disturbing reason. As The Imprint explained: 

As part of his research, Testa found “anecdotal evidence” that some Cook County child welfare workers were using the host program “as a way station” and “holding-pen” for kids while they completed their investigations. He had to exclude that county’s data in his final study. 

David Anderson, the group’s founder, has said, “The Lord gave me the idea of Safe Families for Children.” 

I am not religious and certainly have no expertise in theology. But the public record leads me to wonder if The Lord may have had a broader array of preventive services in mind. Surely one of the best-known Bible passages is this, from Matthew 25:35-40:

For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me. 

Nowhere in the Bible does it say: “I was a stranger and you invited my cute little kids in, but left me outside.” 

Illustraton via ChatGPT

How NYC’s reduction in foster care saves children’s lives; and Suffolk County’s foster-care panic puts those lives at risk

In addition to saving lives, the efforts of New York City and New Jersey to curb needless foster care
also saved thousands of children from other harm.

We all know the knee-jerk response whenever a child previously known to the New York City Administration for Children’s Services dies: “See?” goes the false claim. “See? It’s because the ACS has caved in to the ‘woke mob’ and has been taking fewer children from their families.” 

And now, after the discovery of the horrifying death of Jor'Dynn Duncan in the home of her father’s fiancé in nearby Suffolk County, we will hear that Suffolk County isn’t tearing apart enough families – even though the number of children in foster care in Suffolk County has increased by more than 30% since 2021. 

A massive study, involving 3.5 million records and more than 24,000 child abuse deaths, has demonstrated that the knee-jerk response is wrong. The study found that reducing entries into foster care caused no increase in child abuse deaths and increasing entries caused no decline in such deaths. 

But new research shows that the news is better than that – for New York City, and worse in Suffolk County. The new research, from Kevin Campbell and Elizabeth Wendell of Pale Blue. and Family Seeing, demonstrates that New York City’s moves to curb foster care have saved children’s lives – probably an average of anywhere from 9 to 27 children per year. There were similar gains in New Jersey, which also has worked hard to safely reduce entries into foster care. 

Conversely, the recent increase in foster care in Suffolk County may have contributed directly to the death of Jor'Dynn Duncan and may contribute indirectly to more. 

Here’s what the research shows us: 

A vast scholarly literature from around the world has accumulated over decades, using various means to compare outcomes for children left in their own homes to comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care in typical cases – cases that are vastly more common than the horror stories and which often involve confusing poverty with neglect. 

The studies show that, when compared to comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes, the foster children typically fared worse on an enormous range of outcomes – including premature death. 

There are a variety of reasons for this. In some cases, it’s the high rate of abuse in foster care itself. But also, there is the enormous stress of removal itself. Being torn from everyone loving and familiar, taken away, sometimes literally kicking and screaming, is the ultimate “adverse childhood experience.” So it’s no wonder that, for example, a Swedish study comparing foster children to comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes found that the foster children were four times more likely to die by age 20 – and the most common cause of death was suicide. 

There now are enough data to calculate how many more children will die, and suffer serious disability, when a community endures a foster-care panic, a sharp, sudden increase in the number of children torn from everyone they know and love and consigned to the chaos of foster care. That happened in Suffolk County starting in 2022, and it may well happen again now. In a previous post, I discussed how this research has been applied to the foster-care panic now underway in Santa Clara County, California. 

Conversely, it’s possible to estimate how many children’s lives have been saved in places that have safely and systematically reduced foster care, as New York City has done. 

In New York City, the number of children in foster care has been cut from nearly 16,000 in 2010 to about 7,100 in 2022. The authors of the formula calculate that among the children who were not taken away, there are between 110 and 325 who would have died had they been taken.  Many more would have suffered serious health problems. 

Conversely, after the death of Thomas Valva in Suffolk County, there followed the usual knee-jerk reaction: a foster-care panic, a sharp, sudden increase in the number of children taken from their homes. 

In addition to the enormous harm to the children needlessly taken, a foster care panic overwhelms workers, so they have less time to find children in real danger. That may have contributed to the failure to save Jor'Dynn. 

But also, we know from all that research that some of the children taken needlessly in Suffolk County because of the panic will suffer disability. Some will die prematurely. 

One factor the study could not take into account and might reduce the benefit from the reduction in foster care in New York City: The reduction in entries has come with a huge concomitant increase in onerous surveillance.  New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services may not take as many children, but they’ll still pound on doors in the middle of the night demanding entry, require children to be awakened and sometimes stripsearched. Even when the caseworkers leave, everyone knows they could come back and walk out with the children next time. As a result of this trauma, years later, some children run to hide in closets or under beds. I know of no comprehensive studies of the health effects of that kind of toxic stress.  

What needs to be done 

No, this does not mean that no child ever should be taken from her or his home. But it means all family police agencies need to be far more careful about which children they take, making sure to weigh the danger in the home and the risk of allowing the child to stay there against what the science tells us will happen to many of them if they are taken. This is why various laws across the country raising the threshold for removal to standards like “imminent risk of serious harm,” or some variation  - the very laws that give the take-the-child-and-run crowd fits – are essential to keep more children safe. 

Here are the other lessons in New York: 

● New York City needs to continue reducing the number of children in foster care – and it needs to reduce the scope of the child welfare surveillance state. 

● And New York City needs to resist the knee-jerk response to horror stories – no more foster-care panics. 

All that goes double for Suffolk County.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending May 19, 2026

● The big news this week, and some of the biggest in years, is the release of a study showing that it is possible to estimate the number of children who will suffer severe illness and even die prematurely because they were needlessly torn from everyone they know and love during a foster-care panic. The authors have applied their formula to what is now, proportionately, the worst such panic in decades, the one in Santa Clara County, California. I have a blog post about it. 

● Last week, I highlighted the latest in a long line of studies showing the transformative power of cash in child welfare. This week MLive examines the program that was the subject of the study, Rx Kids. 

Here’s how their story begins: 

Ni’esha Wright didn’t feel comfortable raising her son in the Kalamazoo residence she was living in when she got pregnant last year. Thanks to Rx Kids, she didn’t have to. The 31-year-old qualified for a $1,500 “lifesaver” payment that helped cover her moving costs and the deposit on a new, safer place to call home. 

Subsequent $500 monthly checks were also “hugely helpful” for affording essentials like a crib, clothing, and diapers for her son, Shiloh. 

“That first year is extremely expensive,” Wright said. “This money helps cover those costs and it’s a way to jumpstart savings for him for larger expenses down the road.”

● What’s the opposite of a program that treats impoverished mothers as fully human and knows that what they need is a helping hand? How about a program that subjects more than 16,000 mothers to slipshod drug testing and actually calls itself “Motherrisk”? It wasn’t some fly-by-night operation, either. It was run out of one of Canada’s most prestigious hospitals. In Filter magazine, a mother whose family was victimized by Motherisk writes that all these years later, the trauma continues. And even those who exposed the testing flaws are missing the point: 

A 2018 review largely focused on “fixing” flawed testing methods and oversight. But by framing the problem as a technical failure, we avoided a harder conversation about the deep-seated biases—the moral judgments about drug use and parenting—that made this junk science so easy to believe in the first place. 

● And speaking of ludicrous policies concerning drug use and child welfare, last year New Mexico’s governor ordered the state family police agency to seek to confiscate at birth children born to mothers who test positive for certain substances, without any assessment of the risk to the individual child or consideration of alternatives. Now the ACLU of New Mexico and two courageous State Legislators are asking the State Supreme Court to overturn the governor’s order. 

As the ACLU’s press release explains: 

“We all want what is best for New Mexico’s children, and our laws aim to prioritize child well-being while also preserving family unity,” said Deanna Warren, staff attorney at the ACLU of New Mexico. “There will be times when parents are not in a position to provide the care their infants need, but a decision to remove a newborn from their mother should not be determined by a blanket policy. Instead, it should be made through an individualized assessment of the particular circumstances of each child. The right to due process of law requires that every family be treated as an individual family unit –– not treated as a category. New Mexico children deserve the chance to grow up with the people who love them and for decisions made about their wellbeing to be grounded in law, medicine, and their actual circumstances." 

The directive causes the very harm it purports to prevent. Stigma and criminalization drive families away from care — parents may avoid prenatal appointments, travel out of state to give birth, or conceal their health history from providers, leaving both mother and child worse off.

● Last week, I highlighted a story from Indiana about a foster mother, portrayed in the story as a living saint, who, according to the story, fell in love with a foster child – until she found out the state wouldn’t subsidize the baby’s child care. This week, USA Today shows us what love really looks like in child welfare – and not surprisingly, it involves exactly what the child welfare establishment has been denigrating for decades: blood ties. 

● Want to hear everything you never knew you wanted to know about the intricacies of how family policing is paid for and how the incentives are all wrong? I’m glad to oblige on this edition of the Torn podcast. 

● KUOW Pubic Radio reports on the lawsuit brought by Children’s Rights documenting how the Washington State family police agency fails to protect immigrant foster children. What’s particularly disturbing in this story is the callous indifference revealed by the comments of the head of that agency. 

● The comments are all the more disturbing in light of this New York Times story on how perilous life is for immigrant children now. The story notes that 

[M]ore than 100,000 children have been separated from their parents during the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. And roughly three-quarters of those children … are likely U.S. citizens, according to estimates from the Brookings Institution that were shared with The New York Times. 

● The Deseret News reports on a bill introduced in Congress that would make it harder for family police agencies to confuse reasonable childhood independence with neglect. 

● In a story on the fifth annual Black Mothers March on the White House to protest family policing, The AFRO quotes Maleeka “MJ” Jihad, a former foster child, whose consulting firm works to “empower and guide those navigating the complexities of the child welfare and criminal justice systems.” Says Ms. Jihad: 

“When a child tells a counselor they’re hungry, the counselor quickly assumes that means the parents are neglecting them, and while that may be the case, more often it means the family just can’t afford to pay the bills. CPS uses that information to break up the family and separate the children. Children like me feel we’re to blame and that feeling not only scars us, but often leads us down a path of spiraling, negative emotions and actions.” 

● The New Hampshire Bulletin reports that New Hampshire lawmakers have approved a bill that would impose penalties for malicious false child abuse reports. But New Hampshire still allows anonymous reports, making the new legislation largely pointless. 

● The Alaska Beacon reports that state lawmakers have passed a series of bills intended to curb needless prolonged stays – and abuse – in “residential treatment.” Some of those bills may be marginally useful.  How marginal? One bill included a requirement that state inspectors check on the conditions of the children while checking on the conditions of facilities. If they found abuse, they would have to notify, among others, parents or guardians. That provision was removed. 

But most important, Alaska tears apart families at what is, by far, one of the highest rates in the nation – more than triple the national average.  As long as that continues, the state will remain dependent on institutionalizing children. The reason we have abuse in group homes and institutions is because we have group homes and institutions. 

In this week’s reminder that The Horror Stories go in All Directions: 

● From the This Should Surprise Nobody file, this from the Columbus Dispatch: 

Abuse and neglect, painful restraints, bullying and intimidation plague youth residential treatment facilities across the state, according to Disability Rights Ohio. 

Unfortunately, DRO’s recommendations to deal with these problems are pathetic. 

● Also from the This Should Surprise Nobody file, this from the Baltimore Sun: 

A 16-year-old foster child placed at Silver Oak Academy has been missing for more than nine days, according to sources familiar with the case and public records obtained by Spotlight on Maryland, deepening scrutiny of a privately operated juvenile facility already facing calls for closure from local law enforcement, lawmakers, former staff and residents. 

Carroll County Sheriff Jim DeWees said the latest disappearance is not an isolated incident, but part of what he described as a growing pattern of instability and danger at the rural campus, which has generated more than 100 emergency calls since January 2025. 

● And we end back in Santa Clara County: From The Imprint: 

Calling their case a “profound institutional betrayal,” seven former California foster youth have sued a pediatrician and Santa Clara County child welfare officials for sexual abuse they say they suffered nearly two decades ago. 

Identified only by their initials, the plaintiffs accuse Dr. Patrick Clyne, former foster parent and chief pediatrician for the county’s foster care system, of inappropriately touching and penetrating their genitals during medical exams. 

Oh, and by the way: This happened not when the county was emphasizing family preservation but when it was tearing apart far more children than it is taking even now.

Calculating the price of foster-care panic – in children’s lives and health

Researchers estimate that the foster-care panic in Santa Clara County will lead to anywhere from four to 12 foreseeable premature deaths, and a whole lot of serious illness, that would not have happened had the children been left in their own homes.

Their methodology can be applied to any foster-care panic anywhere, and to states that regularly tear apart families at rates far above the national average. 

KEY POINTS

 ● Researchers have examined scores of studies following millions of foster children around the world, showing the inherent harm of foster care placement. They were able to estimate the percentage of children who will have worse outcomes – including premature death – because they were taken from their families and placed in foster care. They were able to show that the harm to health and the premature deaths are directly attributable to the separation from their families, not anything their families supposedly did to the children beforehand. 

● Then they applied the findings to what is, proportionately, the nation’s worst foster-care panic, the one in Santa Clara County, Calif.  In that county, over the past two years, entries into foster care over the course of a year nearly tripled. Over that time, 399 more children were torn from their families than would have been taken had there been no panic. They applied their findings about harm to health and premature death to those 399 children. 

● Their conclusion: 42 children will suffer long-term illness and/or disability that they would not have suffered had they remained in their own homes. 

● Between four and 12 children will suffer premature death that would not have happened had they remained in their own homes. The researchers emphasize that the death estimate is conservative. 

● Their report, sent to the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors on Saturday, includes seven specific recommendations for making all vulnerable children in the county safer.

 Among the most popular pages on NCCPR’s website is one that summarizes some of the mass of evidence comparing what happens to children in foster care when compared to comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes. Over and over, the studies find that in typical cases,  the foster children do worse. 

Most recently updated last year, the page includes this prediction: 

Perhaps most intriguing, these studies suggest it actually may be possible to quantify the harm of a foster-care panic. 

Thanks to these studies, we now have an estimate of how much worse foster children do on key outcomes compared with comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes.  It’s also usually possible to calculate how many more children are taken away during a foster-care panic. 

So it should be possible to estimate how many more children will wind up under arrest, how many more will become pregnant and how many more will be jobless as a result of a foster-care panic. 

Now it’s time to update that page again. Because two researchers, Kevin Campbell and Elizabeth Wendell, founders of Pale Blue. and Family Seeing have done almost exactly that. 

Using some studies cited in NCCPR’s paper, and many more from all over the world, they not only calculated how many more children would suffer, they also calculated how much worse the suffering would be, depending on the type of placement.  The results should come as no surprise.

Source: Kevin Campbell and Elizabeth Wendel, "Health and Mortality Gradient: 
Child Welfare Placement Type, 30-Year Morbidity Trajectory, and Premature Mortality Risk"

For children left in their own homes, seven to 24 percent were likely to suffer adverse health outcomes.  In kinship foster care, by far the least harmful, that figure rose to 18 to 36 percent. For family foster care with strangers, even when it was a single, stable placement, the figure for adverse health outcomes rose to more than half  - 55%, and the proportion who would die prematurely was more than double the proportion among children left in their own homes.  By the time you get to the worst placement of all, institutionalization, a staggering 88% are likely to experience adverse health outcomes – and they are anywhere from four to 5.5 times more likely to die prematurely.  

Again, this is not because of anything that happened before placement – it’s because of placement itself.  So, as the authors emphasize, these are foreseeable outcomes. 

How, then does this apply to Santa Clara County? In the wake of two high-profile child abuse deaths, the Vice President of the County Board of Supervisors, Sylvia Arenas, and the San Jose Mercury News, in particular, reporter Julia Prodis Sulek, rushed to falsely scapegoat efforts to keep families together. That set off what is, proportionately, the worst foster-care panic I’ve seen anywhere in America in at least 40 years. 

In fact, of course, there were tragic child abuse deaths in Santa Clara County long before the county started trying to do more to keep families together.  There was another tragedy in April, - the death of Jaxon Juarez, long after the county was tearing apart families at a fanatical rate. Indeed, the panic may have made the latest tragedy more likely by overloading workers, so they have less time to investigate any case thoroughly. None of that has stopped Arenas or Sulek from continuing to throw gasoline on the fire. Neither has the massive study of more than 3.4 million case records and more than 24,000 child abuse deaths which found that increasing entries into foster care does nothing to decrease such deaths. 

What all this research tells us is that increasing foster care does nothing to save lives, but can, in itself, lead to premature deaths. 

Arenas seems to relish governance by humiliation and demanding that everyone else “reflect” on their behavior. Sulek seems to relish watching Arenas do it. In one story, Sulek wrote about how 

Last summer, after an epic takedown of [top county child welfare officials] during a board meeting, Supervisor Arenas demanded they each write a “letter of reflection” about their leadership failures that led to the child safety crisis.  

But now, Campbell and Wendel have applied their methodology to the Silicon Valley Foster Care Panic.

 Their conclusion: 

Among the 399 children taken because of the panic, 42 will suffer “limiting long-term illness and/or disability” that they would not have suffered had they been left in their own homes. Between four and 12 will die prematurely, who would not have died prematurely had they remained in their own homes. 

The death estimate is conservative. It assumes all 399 additional foster children stayed in the first placement. For each subsequent move, the risk increases.

Source: Kevin Campbell and Elizabeth Wendel, "Santa Clara County Foster Care Surge, 2024-2026

One doesn’t have to stop at Santa Clara County. One can apply the same methodology to the foster-care panic set off by the Miami Herald in 2014, by the Minnesota Star Tribune that same year, by assorted politicians in Maine in 2018 and New Mexico in 2023 (and probably again right now) and so many others over the years, and calculate how much more illness and how many premature deaths those panics caused. 

The methodology also can be applied to states that, even in the absence of a panic, regularly take away children at a rate far above the national average, states like worst-in-the-nation West Virginia, for example.

In Santa Clara County, there’s still a chance to stop the panic and reverse course – perhaps saving some lives, both short-term, by giving workers more time to find children in real danger, and long-term, by preventing some foreseeable premature deaths caused by the trauma of placement. 

That requires three steps: 

● First, of course, stop taking all those children needlessly. But also: 

● Do an in-depth review of every case in which a child is now in foster care, and see how many can be quickly reunited. Then, provide intensive support for the reunited family, because even a short-term removal does children long-term damage, and it takes intensive help to mitigate that harm. 

● Where placement genuinely is essential, make intensive efforts to place children with extended family members and genuinely support those family members. Kinship foster care placements typically are vastly less harmful than any form of stranger-care placement.  As we discussed in our first post about Santa Clara County, had Jaxon Juarez’s grandfather gotten that kind of support, Jaxon might be alive today. 

Now that the price of panic can be so clearly quantified, perhaps the supervisors and the reporters and editors at the Mercury News, and their counterparts across the country, will reflect on that.