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| Source: California Child Welfare Indicators Project |
KEY POINTS
● The result was what may well be
the worst foster-care panic in decades anywhere in America. The number of
children torn from everyone they know and love and consigned to the chaos of
foster care nearly doubled in a single year, and increased by another 50% the
year after.
● In addition to the enormous harm
to the children needlessly taken, the panic instigated by Arenas and The
Mercury News plunged the entire system into chaos (something one of Sulek’s own
stories even acknowledged – while taking no responsibility for it). That left
workers no time to investigate any case, or any potential caretaker, carefully.
● Now another child is dead. And,
however unintentionally, Arenas’ demagoguery and The Mercury News’s reporting –
and the shutting out of all dissent – may have contributed to that death.
● The Imprint reports that, as a result of the skyrocketing caseload the contracted provider of family defense in Santa Clara county has decided they can no longer do quality work - so they're shutting down. That means even more children are likely to endure the trauma of needless placement.
● But instead of learning from
their horrendous blunders, Arenas is doubling down – now joined by County
District Attorney Jeff Rosen. Sulek’s
stories are cheering them on. Rosen is
threatening prosecutions and County Executive James Williams is warning
that any or all of ten child welfare agency employees placed on paid leave
might be fired. Yet no scrutiny has been
directed toward the role of Arenas, Rosen or The Mercury News.
● Through it all, Arenas has reveled
in humiliating the leadership of the child welfare agency, with every
humiliation chronicled almost gleefully in The Mercury News.
● This risks setting up an endless cycle of
child death, foster-care panic, public humiliation, more panic, and another
death. And while it was never their intent, Arenas, Rosen and The Mercury News
share responsibility for the terrible consequences.
In a story on February 26, 2025, The Mercury News in San Jose and its sister papers in the Bay Area News Group quoted caseworkers describing the chaos in the county’s child welfare system:
“The workers and supervisors are in crisis mode, triaging
cases and doing the minimum when it comes to child abuse investigations,” said
one worker. Said another:
“We have children who are placed in foster care who are not able to visit their families … We have children who are placed hundreds of miles away from their communities. We have children and families who are not adequately served because we don’t have language capacity to meet their needs. Court matters are being delayed, continued for weeks, if not months due to the influx of cases, and we don’t have any staff to handle that.”
What The Mercury-News did not tell readers is which county institution is most responsible for this chaos:
The Mercury News.
Aided and abetted by a grandstanding member of the County Board of Supervisors, The Mercury News has set off, and continues to fuel, what is probably the worst “foster-care panic” in America in decades, perhaps ever. In the time since The Mercury News blamed the horrific deaths of three-month-old Phoenix Castro and six-year-old Jordan Walker in 2023 on a supposed fanatical desire to keep families together, the number of children torn from their families and consigned to the chaos of foster care in Santa Clara County nearly doubled in a single year, and surged another 50% in the following year. Now another child is dead – and while it was never their intent, the foster care panic that the newspaper and the politician started may well be one of the reasons why.
● The Imprint reports that, as a result of the skyrocketing caseload, the contracted provider of family defense in Santa Clara county has decided they can no longer do quality work - so they're shutting down. That means even more children are likely to endure the trauma of needless placement.
And let’s be clear about which children are suffering most: In Santa Clara, the child population is 35% Black and Latino. The foster care population is 81% Black and Latino.
A once-great regional newspaper hollowed out by a hedge fund appears desperate to recapture its former glory by falsely scapegoating efforts to keep families together for high-profile child abuse deaths, no matter how many children suffer in the process. Children endure the enormous inherent emotional trauma of needless separation. As a result, in typical cases, not the horror stories in which The Mercury News revels, study after study finds that children left in their own homes typically fare better in later life even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care. One recent study from Sweden found that, again in typical cases, when compared to comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes, children placed in foster care were four times more likely to die by age 20. The most common cause of death: Suicide. There’s also the high risk of abuse in foster care itself.
How many children torn needlessly from everyone they know and love during the Silicon Valley Foster Care Panic will be dead by age 20? Who will be held accountable then?
The other price of panic
At the same time, “triaging cases and doing the minimum” only makes it more likely that children in real danger will be overlooked.
In its coverage, The Mercury News has been the ultimate no-dissent zone. Other than one early story, good luck finding the voice of an older child wrongly taken, the parent of such a child, or an attorney for such a parent or child.
Something else has been missing as well: The current foster-care panic followed several years of effort to reduce needless foster care. The Mercury News has failed to tell readers that, rather than creating what the newspaper proclaims is a “child safety crisis,” the reduction in entries into foster care was accomplished with no compromise in safety, according to the standard measure used by the state and federal governments.
A throwback to an ugly era
There was a time when this kind of news coverage was common. A child “known-to-the-system” dies. The casefile has more “red flags” than a Soviet May Day parade. Everyone rushes to blame a supposed overemphasis on family preservation. Whether driven by the news media itself or politicians whose false message they amplified, the result was a foster-care panic – a sharp, sudden surge in children needlessly torn from their families and thrown into foster care. It’s happened in Los Angeles, of course, and also New York, Chicago, and many places in between.
But children known-to-the-system keep suffering horrendous abuse; sometimes deaths increase because workers are now so overwhelmed they have even less time to notice the red flags. The failed, take-the-child-and-run response to the deaths of Phoenix Castro and Jordan Walker may well have contributed to the death of Jaxon Juarez. In that case, though, of course, it was never their intent, Arenas and The Mercury News share responsibility for this latest tragedy.
In much of the country, the journalism of child welfare has matured. At one time, The Mercury News even was a leader in getting these issues right. But now, what’s left of the newspaper has sunk to a pathetic pursuit of cheap glory.
As a result, in the five decades I have followed child welfare, first as a journalist and author and now as an advocate, the worst foster-care panic I’ve ever seen, by far, is the one underway in Santa Clara County. When rates of child poverty are factored in, Santa Clara County now takes children from their loved ones at a rate double that of New York City and quadruple the rate of metropolitan Chicago. It’s even surpassed Los Angeles, a county once notorious for its take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare. But just days ago Arenas said that still wasn’t enough!
Caseworkers are rushing to take away children not to protect the children, but to protect themselves from the wrath of the cheerleaders for panic, Arenas, Sulek and District Attorney Rosen, who has pledged to investigate who, besides the actual killer, “is responsible criminally, civilly, morally, ethically, and systemically for what happened in this case…”
Over and over, almost from the moment Phoenix Castro died, Sulek wrote that “a Bay Area News Group investigation found that county policies favored family preservation over child safety.” And despite the mind-boggling increase in the number of children torn from their homes since then, Arenas repeated the same false claim just days ago.
The data on child safety outcomes – data The Mercury News never shared with readers – show that the claim is false. In place of evidence, The Mercury News demonizes families the way Donald Trump demonizes immigrants – they rely on horror stories.
They also cite a report in which the state Department of Social Services said sometimes the county got it wrong – while omitting any quotes from the county’s response. The state report made no claim that the county was putting family preservation ahead of child safety; Sulek, Arenas and their allies dreamt that up themselves.
The Mercury News and Arenas assume that, since children are dying in cases that sure seem obvious, what else could it be other than some sort of Vast Family Preservation Conspiracy? The fact that now another child has died, even after entries into foster care skyrocketed, has not dimmed their enthusiasm for this theory.
But most of the time, the tragedies occur because workers are overwhelmed. They must rush from case to case, so they make terrible errors in all directions. A foster-care panic only makes that worse.
In the most recent tragedy, Jaxon was placed with a relative who had been convicted of felony child endangerment related to a DUI arrest in 2014. Her son is accused of killing Jaxon. Why might workers place a child in such a home? One possibility is that they all gathered in a conference room to brag about how they didn’t care if Jaxon was safe because all they care about is family preservation.
A more likely possibility: With the number of children torn from their families soaring from 149 in SFY 2023 to 276 in 2024 to 421 in 2025 – they simply had no time to carefully examine the record of the relative with whom Jaxon was placed when he died or to weigh the merits of alternative placements.
For example, other relatives, in Arizona, had said they would take Jaxon, but that would make it impossible for his father to visit. Did the workers in this case have time to weigh that option or engage in the complex process of interstate placement? At one point, Jaxon’s grandfather had custody, but couldn’t get him to visits with his father. An agency that wasn't drowning in needless removals of children could have provided the transportation, instead of changing the placement. If the foster care panic is the reason none of these alternatives was considered, then the foster care panic itself was a key factor in Jaxon’s death.
The typical cases
Most cases are nothing like the horror stories. In Santa Clara County, fewer than ten percent of foster children are there because of allegations of physical or sexual abuse. More than 85% are there because of “neglect.” Sometimes that’s extremely serious. More often, it means the family is poor.
That explains what we know thanks to the data about what happened to child safety when Santa Clara started emphasizing family preservation. The key measure used to evaluate safety is the percentage of children left in their own homes who are allegedly abused or neglected again. During the time Santa Clara County reduced foster care, that measure stayed the same. The evidence shows that Santa Clara County saved hundreds of children from the trauma of needless separation – and the high risk of abuse in foster care itself – with no compromise of safety.
Reveling in “an epic takedown”
The journalism of foster-care panic is nothing new – though happily, across the country, there is less of it. But what sets the behavior of Sulek (and Arenas) apart, even from the worst examples in other cities, is what appears to be a willingness not only to see families torn apart, but an obliviousness to the consequences. The Mercury News seemed almost to gloat about getting its foster care panic – while Arenas complained early on, and again just days ago, that it still hadn’t gone far enough.
Consider the scene at a Board of Supervisors meeting in 2024, as Arenas both literally and figuratively looked down on Wright and his boss, Department of Social Services Director Daniel Little.
As Sulek gleefully reported at the time and then reminded readers months later:
Last summer, after an epic takedown of Wright and Little 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.
Little did it. Wright, to his credit, did not, allowing him to leave with some dignity. But Sulek wasn’t through trying to strip him of that dignity. In two stories, she lamented the lack of firings, noting that
Only Wright has resigned, and he did so on his own accord, announcing the day after Christmas that his father’s recent death — not any pressure related to the investigations — led to his departure.
Apparently, for The Mercury News, nothing short of tarring and feathering will do.
Arenas seems to take a Trump-style pleasure in humiliating anyone she can. A few days ago, she drove Wright’s successor, Wendy Kinnear-Rausch, to tears, suggesting Kinnear-Rausch didn’t care if “brown children” died. The Mercury News loved it.
Through it all, Arenas has never indicated how many children
must be torn from their homes before she will be satisfied. She implies that
the criterion is that no child will ever die of abuse. That is always the only
acceptable goal. But with nearly two million people, Santa Clara is the 18th
most populous county in America – it’s bigger than 11 states. I know of no
jurisdiction of that size that has ever achieved that goal. And, as we’ve seen
with the death of Jaxon Juarez, while it was never their intent, the behavior
of Arenas herself, and The Mercury News, may have moved Santa Clara
County farther from that goal.
The harm to the public officials Arenas and The Mercury News have scapegoated and humiliated pales compared to the harm it’s all done to children.
Now, Santa Clara children cry themselves to sleep hundreds of miles from everyone they know and love, others may bounce from home to home, increasing the chances that they will emerge years later unable to love or trust anyone – or die at their own hand before they turn 20. That’s even if they defy the odds – at least one in four, and probably greater – of being abused in foster care itself. And what evidence there is, from the few jurisdictions large enough to measure, is that the odds of children in real danger being overlooked have increased – as we may have just seen in Santa Clara County itself.
Perhaps Arenas and Sulek, and their respective colleagues, should take some time to reflect on that.
