Virginia’s shame: When children are torn from their parents here, nearly three in four may never go home.

If the family police take your children in Virginia, odds are nearly 3 in 4
they're never coming home

● While other states celebrate June as Family Unification Month, in Virginia, every month is family destruction month.

● North Carolina, Connecticut, Texas and Michigan are almost as bad

Think back for a moment to that time when the first Trump Administration was tearing thousands of children from the arms of their parents at the Mexican border. Listen again to their anguished cries.

It’s likely that 70% of those children eventually were reunited – after enduring unspeakable trauma. But when it comes to reuniting families separated by government, there’s a place with a far worse record: the Commonwealth of Virginia and its county child protective services agencies.

Unlike the Trump Administration, the caseworkers who take children in Virginia almost always mean well; but the children cry out the same way for the same reasons.  And for the Virginia children, nearly three out of four (73%) will never get to live with their parents again, at least for the remainder of their childhoods. Virginia reunifies children with their own parents at the lowest rate in the country, a rate nearly 40% below the national average. North Carolina, Connecticut, Texas and Michigan are almost as bad.

In Virginia, a child torn from his parents is more likely to wind up adopted by total strangers than reunified. And Virginia child welfare authorities hold families in so much contempt that they allow nearly one in five foster children to age out of the system with no home at all – well over double the national average – rather than help their families reunify.

So while other states celebrate June as Family Uunification Month, in Virginia every month is family destruction month.

 Some officials might argue that Virginia supposedly takes proportionately fewer children in the first place than most states, so those they take must be severely harmed. But any such claim doesn’t stand up to scrutiny: 

● Of all the children torn from their families in Virginia in 2023, 82% were in cases that did not involve even an allegation of sexual abuse or any form of physical abuse. In 60% of cases, there was not even an allegation of any form of drug abuse.  These figures are almost identical to the national average. 

In contrast, multiple studies find abuse in one-quarter to one-third of family foster homes, and the rate of abuse in group homes and institutions is even worse. So on top of the lifelong emotional trauma, Virginia is putting children at risk of abuse by taking them needlessly, often when family poverty is confused with neglect. 

● At least four places whose official rates of taking away children are as low or lower than Virginia reunite a significantly larger proportion of the children they take. 

But perhaps most important: 

● Virginia doesn’t really have a low rate of removal at all. It’s a shell game, involving various ways of keeping placements off the books, by coercing families into giving up children “voluntarily.” It’s commonly known as hidden foster care. Lawmakers shamefully legitimized some of these coerced placements last year when they slapped the euphemism “Parental Child Safety Placement” on them – but they’re not reported as entries into foster care. If they were, they alone would add 30% to Virginia’s rate of removal.  

But when Virginia created this new category it didn’t stop counties from continuing to do it the old way – with even less accountability.  So it’s likely that Virginia still tears apart more families using various forms of hidden foster care than the number it officially reports. That means the real rate of removal in Virginia may be well above the national average.

So no, there is no excuse for inflicting the lifelong trauma of permanent separation – and even aging out with no home at all – on so many children. It reflects the contempt that the system has for the overwhelmingly poor disproportionately nonwhite families who get caught up in its net. 

What can be done? At a bare minimum, the Legislature should revisit its legitimization of hidden foster care. It should demand that any time any child is placed out-of-home because a county CPS agency “asked” that it happen, it be counted as an entry into foster care and reported in a public database. 

More important, every family needs high-quality legal representation – from the moment it comes under any form of scrutiny from a child protective services agency. No, that’s not to get “bad parents” off. It’s to protect children from being forced needlessly into any form of foster care, open or hidden, and finding alternatives to the cookie-cutter “service plans” often churned out by CPS. This approach has been proven to safely reduce needless foster care. The federal government will pay half the cost in many cases, and the rest can be made up through savings from reduced foster care. 

One would hope that when it comes to permanent family separation, Virginia could at least do better than Donald Trump.