In child welfare, possession is 9/10 of the law – if you know the loopholes

 

There is so much in this brilliant story by Sandy West in the Texas Observer that it’s hard to know where to start. 

The centerpiece of the story involves representatives of private agencies, sometimes licensed, sometimes not, sometimes nonprofit, sometimes not, suddenly showing up and offering contracts to new mothers, sometimes just days after giving birth. The contracts, may or may not be in a language the mother actually can read. They involve the mother giving temporary custody to someone chosen by the agency.  At least it’s supposed to be temporary. 

But that isn’t the worst of it. 

The worst is how easy it is for middle-class foster parents handed these children to exploit legal loopholes, go into court and say, in effect: “We’re better people than this child’s parents, so we should get to keep the child!” They can do it even when the private agency objects. They can do it even when the state family police agency objects. 

It’s one more example of the ugliest of family policing realities: attempts by those with enough money to step right up and take a poor person’s child for their very own. 

In one of the two cases examined in the story, this happened: 

At the hearing, [Judge] Fisher said the Louisiana couple would be ineligible to sue again for custody based on their time caring for the child while the state sought another placement. 

“If that were the case, I could go kidnap a child from the playground and keep it for six months and then file for adoption,” Fisher said, per the court transcript. “They don’t have permission to have the child, so they don’t have standing.” …

But the Phillipses have continued their efforts to terminate the teen’s parental rights and adopt her daughter ever since, court records show. 

Texas is not even the worst. Many states formally allow foster parents to “intervene” if they’ve had a foster child for long enough, a practice exposed by ProPublica and The New Yorker.  This year, Indiana lawmakers even made this odious practice easier.

The Texas Observer story points to other issues: 

● This is still another form of hidden foster care. Such placements have even less in the way of due process protections than official, openly-acknowledged foster care. And these placements are not counted as entries into care, making a state’s foster care numbers look artificially low. 

This is at least the second form of hidden foster care discovered in Texas. The placements described in the Texas Observer story are in addition to the many so-called “parental child safety placements” in Texas.  Were “parental child safety placements” counted as foster care, which, for all intents and purposes they are, they would nearly triple the number of children reported torn from their parents in Texas every year. 

● This also illustrates the danger of various forms of what should be called sugar-frosted foster care.  That’s when private organizations, such as Safe Families for Children, offer to help impoverished families by finding volunteers to take in their children, as opposed to, say, finding volunteers to help ease their poverty. There is nothing nefarious in it. Those running the program have the best of intentions and they don’t try to trick or coerce anyone. But it’s open to the same sorts of abuses if a volunteer “safe family” decides they want to keep the child for their own and either goes to court or simply calls child protective services.