NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending February 17, 2026

Before the look back, a brief look ahead: 

● There’s a big event on Feb. 26: Check out this webinar, sponsored by the National Association of Counsel for Children, on The Legacy of Control: The Racist Roots of the Family Policing System. 

And now the news: 

● Remember how horrified we were when we saw pictures of Liam, the five-year-old boy detained by ICE? In Psychology Today, psychiatrist Rupinder Legha wants us to remember something else: 

[F]amily separation is systemic and … its harm extends far beyond immigration enforcement. 

Child welfare, foster care, and juvenile justice follow the same logic—separating families in the name of safety. In practice, though, they often end up causing predictable harm through separation, surveillance, and displacement that land hardest on Black and Brown communities. There have been countless instances of Black, Latine, and Indigenous children being removed from their families under the guise of protection—when the real issue is poverty, not neglect.​ 

Dr. Legha urges the research and provider communities to change course: 

Research conducted in child welfare and juvenile detention tends to normalize family separation because it often develops and evaluates therapeutic interventions within the very institutions perpetuating toxic stress. One study found that Black parents receiving parent training while under child welfare surveillance were depressed. The authors suggested adding depression treatment—instead of recognizing the likely role that the surveillance itself was likely playing. 

This research is rooted in circular logic: The more detention harms children’s mental health, the more we study how to treat them there, when instead we ought to be questioning the harm of the system itself. …

Providers might believe they are helping people in need. But I believe that instead they're legitimizing the idea that healing is possible while detained, which contradicts what we know about trauma and safety. Such providers might, for example, prescribe sleep aids for insomnia caused by sleeping in an unfamiliar or unsafe facility and antidepressants for sadness rooted in separation from family. Medicalizing predictable responses to confinement makes it challenging for them to question the confinement itself.

● Consider, for example, the ongoing detention of another little boy, not by ICE but by the Oregon family police agency. And while, normally, one might at least be able to draw the distinction that the family police are well-motivated, in this case, that’s not so clear. 

Last year, Oregon lawmakers refused to pass a bill sought by the family police and the governor that would make it easier to exile kids to out-of-state institutions and harder to prevent abuse in group homes and institutions. It was one of the few times Oregon’s way-too-influential Senator Soundbite, who has done so much to make a bad system worse, actually did the right thing – she opposed the bill. This case, reported by Oregon Public Broadcasting, sounds like it may have been motivated by revenge, at a 9-year-old boy’s expense. 

● Last week’s round-up included a link to this stunning investigative report from The Marshall Project on how the family police harass new mothers who test positive for drug use – even when the test is wrong or the drug is medically prescribed. Well, some new mothers, that is. In a blog post, we compare what The Marshall Project found to what happens when the mothers are white and affluent. 

● New York’s greedy private foster care agencies are back seeking a bailout to pay their insurance premiums. The premiums are high because so many children have been abused on their watch. This blog post explains why, if the latest scheme becomes law, no matter how abominably agencies allow the children in their care to be treated, and how much that jacks up their insurance premiums, they need never change, secure in the knowledge that taxpayers will pick up the tab. 

● Georgia has a law that guarantees parents accused of abuse by a medical professional the right to a second opinion. But, of course, a doctor can’t provide a second opinion without the medical records. Families say some of the places that diagnosed alleged abuse are stonewalling when it comes to providing the medical records. So now, WXIA-TV reports, one lawmaker is introducing a bill to fine providers who fail to promptly provide those records. 

In this week’s edition of The Horror Stories Go in All Directions: 

● From the Redding Record Searchlight 

A young woman who said she was sexually abused by two men for years while living in a Shasta County foster home has sued her former foster parents, as well as a second man who she said repeatedly raped her. … 

The victim's aunt and her psychotherapist made reports to county officials in 2014, the lawsuit naming the Sheriff's Office said. No action was taken to investigate their claims, the suit alleged. 

At one point, the teen tried to tell a Shasta County official making a routine visit to the foster home in 2008 about the ongoing sexual abuse, said the lawsuit naming [the county child welfare agency]. The unidentified official who came to the home called her "a liar," the lawsuit said, and told her if any abuse was happening, she had been "asking for it."