NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending April 29, 2026

● What is the result when some of the worst journalism about child welfare and some of the worst political demagoguery about child welfare happen in the same place? The mother of all foster-care panics. And that panic may well have contributed to the latest child abuse death in Santa Clara County, California. I have a blog post about the enormous harm done to children by the Silicon Valley foster-care panic – and who is responsible. The post includes a link to an excellent story from The Imprint on one key aspect of this tragedy – the closure of the provider of family defense in the county. 

● The second-worst example of political demagoguery about child welfare at the moment is coming from the Attorney General of New Mexico (see our recent Issue Brief). With everyone feeling the pressure to look tough, the state appears headed toward further ratcheting up the danger to children. In a column for the Albuquerque Journal, Layal Bou Harfouch, a drug policy expert for the Reason Foundation, writes: 

Under the proposed rules [to implement a new state law], any pregnant patient who admits to substance use, including prescribed medications or legal substances such as alcohol, tobacco or marijuana, can be required to comply with a Plan of Safe Care (POSC), including mandatory substance use treatment, even in the absence of a clinical assessment or diagnosis. Families accessing medication-assisted treatment, like methadone or buprenorphine, would be subject to the same requirements as those using illicit substances. Families deemed “noncompliant” with these plans can be referred directly to the Children, Youth and Families Department for assessment, bypassing the multilevel response system outlined in [the new state law]. 

● Meanwhile, Source NM reports that the author of a report from the Attorney General, which accused the state child welfare agency of supporting family preservation “at almost any cost” and of being guilty of a “systemic moral failing,” says NCCPR’s response is “not only misguided, but hyperbolic.” You be the judge. 

● Want to know why New York State – and every state – needs a Family Miranda law, so families know their rights when the family police pound on the door? Read this account, in the Albany Times Union, of what an investigation of a false report did to one family. 

● The Imprint interviewed Rowan Wilson, the chief judge of New York’s highest court, the Court of Appeals. Asked about public misconceptions about foster care and child welfare, he replied: 

There are a few. One is that unless you are sort of putting your child in danger by abusing the child or something like that, your child can’t be taken away from you. That’s not true. You can lose your child for various reasons, a lot which have to do with poverty.  

If you’re middle-class and you’ve got a child who shoplifts something, you’ll take care of that — you’ll go to the store, you’ll deal with the person, you’ll pay them, and the thing is never going to wind up in the criminal justice system. If not, your child is apprehended, and things start to snowball. You may be in public housing, and the fact that your child is found with a small amount of marijuana — not any longer, but previously — may then disentitle you from public housing. So now you’re in a shelter. There are all sorts of snowball effects like this that disproportionately affect poor people and result in their children being taken away. …

● Still another review of the ever-growing mass of evidence shows that Judge Wilson is right. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities concludes: 

When parents have enough money to pay their bills, buy nutritious food, and spend quality time with their children, they are better able to respond to their children’s needs and create a nurturing home, something every child deserves. 

Supporting families and improving economic security have many benefits, including reducing near-term hardship among families with children. Evidence from a wide range of income support programs also shows another important benefit — reducing involvement in the child welfare system. 

By now you’d have to be willfully blind to think otherwise. But, unfortunately, in “child welfare,” where so much is in short supply, willful blindness exists in abundance. 

● ChildTrends reports that their new analysis of federal data 

… shows that parental drug use is a factor in roughly one in three children’s entry into foster care, although the rate of children entering care for this reason is at its lowest since 2009. 

What that also means is that, contrary to the impression those same willfully blind fearmongers try desperately to leave, in two-thirds of entries into foster care, parental drug abuse was not a factor.

● The “child welfare” system has long been obsessed with adoption by strangers as the only “real” form of permanence for children. Never mind that we don’t even know how often these adoptions fail.  But this Associated Press story offers some alarming clues. From the story: 

An Associated Press investigation finds that a business known for tough-love boarding schools for rebellious, rich teenagers has also set its sights on a different demographic: adopted kids. Experts say adoptees, only 2% of American children, account for an estimated 25-40% of those in residential treatment. 

Adoptees told the AP they believe they’ve been enmeshed in a shadow orphanage system where children end up with the very fate that adoption was supposed to spare them — promised ‘forever homes’ but institutionalized instead, some for years, in oppressive and sometimes abusive facilities. … 

Police reports reveal children as young as 9 experience or witness violence, chaos, self-harm and sexual abuse inside facilities. Adoptees and adoptive parents said children left more traumatized than when they arrived — if, that is, they ever left. Some have died inside the facilities that promised they would keep them safe. … 

The industry no longer relies exclusively on the checkbooks of wealthy parents. The COVID-19 pandemic prompted more bipartisan political support for youth mental health funding, bolstering programs that tap public taxpayer dollars via healthcare, child welfare, juvenile justice and school systems. 

Two footnotes: The estimate that 25 to 40% of those in residential treatment are adoptees does not mean that 25 to 40% of adoptive placements fail, only that adoptees are overrepresented among the institutionalized. And those adoptees include many who were not adopted from foster care. 

● Even when the adoption doesn’t fail, often it still means cutting children off not only from parents but also extended family, friends, teachers, classmates and often even siblings. It’s permanence on paper, but for the child welfare establishment, that’s all that counts. In Youth Today, Molly Bernard, a youth connections advocate with Raise the Future, argues that it’s time to emphasize not paper permanence but the real thing. She writes: 

Legal permanency has long been the goal of the child welfare system. But too often, it fails to deliver what young people actually need: lasting, supportive relationships that continue into adulthood. 

● In 2024, Minnesota passed a law that does little more than require counties, which run family policing in that state, to get serious about helping families so their children don’t endure the trauma of needless foster care. In the state’s largest county, Hennepin, it may already be showing success. But what’s really startling about this article in The Imprint, is that what the law demands hasn’t been standard operating procedure all along. And yet, now rural counties are whining about how being given a mere three years to prepare to do their jobs isn’t enough and the law should be delayed. 

● The Trump Administration’s persecution of immigrants extends to children, of course. Whether they crossed the border alone or were swept up in raids targeting their parents, some are institutionalized, sometimes in the same institutions that family police agencies use for foster youth. One of those places was Children’s Village in Dobbs Ferry, NY. Now, CNN reports, Children’s Village 

faces allegations of physical abuse, including placing some children in isolation in a so-called “red room,” according to multiple sources who spoke with CNN about what’s unfolded at the shelter. 

One teen who was transferred to another facility recalled spending four days alone in what he described as a “red room” with a red light and no door, according to an account shared with a shelter clinician in early January and reviewed by CNN . … 

Over those four days, the teen said he didn’t bathe and was only provided bread for food. The boy said the room was located near the shelter’s security staff office, so personnel could monitor him while he was confined to the room. 

The teen also recalled a so-called “special” unit that would swoop in when fights occurred or restraints were required. He said he was thrown to the floor and hit, as well as placed in restraints, nearly two dozen times. 

Even Trump’s Office of Refugee Resettlement is investigating the allegations, which Children’s Village denies. Children’s Village is no longer housing migrant children. It still houses foster youth.