Child welfare in New Mexico: Which metrics matter when it’s YOUR child?

 

New Mexico has a child-confiscation-at-birth policy, in which newborns who test positive for certain substances are automatically taken away instantly and held for at least 72 hours and often far longer. A prominent proponent of the policy loves to claim that, since it took effect, no child has died. And, she says, “there is no other metric that matters.” 

The first thing to know about the claim is that it needs a huge qualifier: No child has died yet. Because the research is overwhelming that, between the high rates of abuse in foster care and the emotional trauma that will lead to all sorts of rotten outcomes, in typical cases placement in foster care actually increases the odds that a child will die.  It’s even possible to calculate the odds. It won’t necessarily be right away; it may be years from now. That will make it easy for those advocating for policies like confiscation-at-birth to avoid accountability. But it won’t make the children any less dead. 

And yet some New Mexico media love that “only metric that matters” line. But then, journalists in New Mexico, like everywhere else, are overwhelmingly middle-class and disproportionately white. That makes them largely immune from intervention by agencies that should be called the family police. 

But what if that were not the case? Suppose, hypothetically, you’re a New Mexico journalist, or lawmaker, or other prominent public figure and you’ve found yourself in the position of, say, Pete Buttigieg. Suppose someone who didn’t like one of your bills, or one of your stories, decided to file a false, malicious child abuse report accusing you of the most vile crimes against children. And now, suppose New Mexico had an analogous policy for these kinds of cases: Suppose that policy said: If the allegation is sufficiently heinous, we take the child first and investigate later. 

So now, it’s happening to you, and the caseworker is at your door. The dialogue might go like this: 

YOU: But I’m innocent. You can see the children are unharmed!

CASEWORKER: It doesn’t matter. We don’t evaluate case-by-case; it’s a blanket policy. The allegations are heinous, so we take the children. That way, no child will die, and that’s the only metric that matters.

YOU: But there’s abuse in one-quarter to one-third of foster homes; the rate in group homes and institutions is even worse. And this is New Mexico, where children get moved from home to home at one of the highest rates in the nation. Think of the chances they’ll be abused.

CASEWORKER: That metric doesn’t matter.

YOU: But if it drags on long enough, they’ll fall behind on their education.

CASEWORKER: That metric doesn’t matter.

YOU: They’ll be more likely to wind up in the juvenile justice system.

CASEWORKER: That metric doesn’t matter.

YOU: They’re more likely to be unemployed.

CASEWORKER: That metric doesn’t matter.

YOU: They’re more likely to wind up in jail than to graduate from college.

CASEWORKER: That metric doesn’t matter.

YOU: They’re more than four times more likely to die before age 20 than even comparably maltreated children left in their own homes!

CASEWORKER: That metric doesn’t matter. 

So what do you say then? Do you say: Oh, well, you’re right. Whether children die – right away – is the only metric that matters, so of course I’ll sacrifice my child to this policy and let my children suffer all those other consequences. Or do you fight like hell? And do you start to wonder how many scores, maybe hundreds of other children have been taken needlessly and subjected to the harm from all those other metrics – because those metrics – and those harms – don’t matter? 

When you ignore people who already are stereotyped and stigmatized (using the same tactics Trump uses to stereotype and stigmatize immigrants, by the way), it’s easy to dehumanize them. When you dehumanize them, it's easy to convince yourself that they don’t love their children the way you love yours, and to convince yourself those children don’t love their parents the way your children love you. So it’s easy to convince yourself that all those other metrics – about all the harm done by separation – don’t really matter for them. You can even wrap yourself in the self-righteous conviction that you’re saving the children instead of putting them at greater risk. 

Perhaps the New Mexico journalists and lawmakers most keen on confiscation-at-birth and the whole take-the-child-and-run mentality should try speaking to families who’ve gone through needless removal (families with all perspectives, not just one parent put forward by proponents to confess her sins and express her gratitude for having her child taken). Then they might reconsider their love for an approach that only applies to people like them and not to people like us. They might even find out that the people like them are full-fledged human beings who typically love their children as much as people like us love ours. 

And then they might even ask those who say fatalities are “the only metric that matters” why they support approaches that, in addition to all that other harm, actually make it more likely that children will die.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending July 28, 2026

● The Washington Post has done a lot to advance the story of the trauma inflicted on Pete Buttigieg’s family as a result of a malicious false report of child abuse.  Among other things, the Michigan Attorney General’s office has announced it will be investigating the investigation. That’s because, a spokesperson says, “Common sense would have shown that this targeted report plainly lacked credibility on its face.” 

Well, yes. But apparently the Attorney General doesn’t know that Michigan law prohibits the exercise of common sense. If an allegation even “minimally” meets the definition of child abuse or neglect in state law, it must be investigated – something we pointed out in this commentary for Bridge Michigan 

● There’s another excellent commentary on the Buttigieg case from Viviana Bonilla López of the ACLU Women’s Rights Project in The 74. Bonilla López points out: 

What set Buttigieg apart was not that his family was treated unjustly, but that he had the money, legal representation and public support that families with fewer resources will never have. 

● People often ask for a formula for successfully reducing needless foster care, as though there is a checklist of interventions that fits every case. But the places that succeed know that the actual formula is: “whatever it takes.” Case in point: this story from The Imprint on how the Osage Nation dramatically reduced foster care, at one point even going six months without a single child being taken. 

● There is fury, as there should be, over the New Mexico family police agency effectively abandoning a 15-year-old at the Mexican border. But some of those screaming loudest may have helped create conditions that set the crisis in motion. I have a blog post about it. 

● The Imprint reports on some good news from Santa Clara County. In that county, children have been ripped from their families at a pace so frantic it’s been the worst foster-care panic anywhere in America in decades. The new cases so overloaded the agency providing family defense that they said they’d have to shut down. But the County is stepping in with additional funding to save most of the work. Most, but not all. One of their strongest programs, providing defense counsel before a case ever reaches court, won’t be funded unless someone else steps up. 

● The news is uglier in San Bernardino County. There, two lawsuits filed by victims of horrific abuse are a reminder of why private agencies should not get virtual immunity from such suits. Nor should they get a bailout to help pay their insurance premiums. I have a blog post about it. 

● One of the children allegedly abused in these cases, in her case fatally, was disabled. The Imprint reports on efforts by the Trump Administration to make sure we all know less about how disabled children and parents fare at the hands of the family police. Mother Jones also has a story. 

In this week’s reminder that The Horror Stories Go in All Directions: 

From WSOC-TV: 

The family of a 13-year-old Chester boy is demanding answers after investigators said he was stabbed and held underwater by two older teens at a South Carolina lake. Daryl Lowry, who was in foster care at the time of his death, was killed during a confrontation near a boat dock in McCormick County, according to state authorities.

UPDATED: Child abandonment in New Mexico: Was a crucial opportunity missed?

This is the Bridge of the Americas border crossing - where the New Mexico 
family police agency reportedly told a 15-year-old to cross the border alone
to reunite with his mother. 

Did the New Mexico child welfare agency fail to offer help when extended family (or maybe it was godparents) couldn’t cope with a child’s behavioral problems? Or were the godparents willing, but blocked by a hospital and the child welfare agency? Did that set off an awful chain of events? These are not rhetorical questions. Maybe it didn’t happen that way. But New Mexico media should be asking. 

UPDATE, AUGUST 1, 2026: The New Mexico Attorney General is suing the state family police agency, the Children, Youth and Families Department, demanding that the agency return the child from Mexico. The Complaint the agency has filed may shed new light on what happened. This Associated Press story does a good job of summarizing the Complaint. But, like CYFD itself, the Attorney General’s office is an unreliable source, resorting to Trump-style tactics to demonize families. That’s why we call our analysis of the Attorney General’s April report about CYFD Two Epic Fails.

So, for example, the Complaint alleges that, at one point, CYFD workers yelled at the child for returning from Mexico. At another point, CYFD workers allegedly told the Border Patrol that the child was now “Texas’ problem.” Indeed, if the Complaint is to be believed, the Border Patrol treated this child more humanely than CYFD. But is this Complaint to be believed?

Further complicating the matter: At key points the Complaint is redacted. Is that legally required? Is it done to protect the child’s privacy? Or would an unredacted version call into question some of the claims? Given how much the Attorney General postures about others’ failure to be transparent, at a minimum there should be an explanation.

So with those caveats, the post below (and the headline above) have been amended to add the new information where it appears to be reliable. In these places, new information is in red, the original version is crossed out.

There is fury in New Mexico, as there should be, over how the state family police agency, the Children, Youth and Families Department, handled the case of a 15-year-old boy. They got a court to award custody to his mother, whom the child had not lived with for at least nine years and who had just been deported to Mexico. Then they took him to a border crossing and said: Go cross the bridge – alone – and meet your mother. 

The 15-year-old didn’t want to go. But he went into Mexico, and when he couldn't find his mother, Instead, he crossed several lanes of traffic, went back to the United States. When CYFD refused to take him back, the Border Patrol took him to fled to Texas, was held in a shelter in Texas. The Texas child welfare agency ultimately reunited him  there and then, ultimately, reunited with his mother in Mexico. 

In short, CYFD committed child abuse and child abandonment.  

There were three crucial blunders here; the third of which, perhaps the most important, has gotten no attention. 

1.     1. It shouldn’t be necessary to even say this one: You don’t abandon children at an international border and, in effect, throw them away. Whether placement with the mother is right or wrong, this is inexcusable. 

2.     2. The child did not want to return to his mother in Mexico. The return to the mother apparently was approved by a court. But where was the child’s lawyer? In New Mexico, children age 14 and over are entitled to their own lawyers. Those lawyers are supposed to tell the judge what the child wants. It’s not clear how vigorously they are required to advocate for the child’s wishes. 

What should have happened is that the child’s lawyer should have fought tooth and nail for the child’s wishes, making the best possible case on the child’s behalf. That’s not because the child was necessarily right. It’s because deciding what’s best is what judges are for, and they are most likely to make the right decision if all sides are allowed to make the strongest possible case for their positions. 

Did that happen here? We don’t know. In New Mexico, these court hearings are supposed to be open, but this one reportedly was closed. 

Is there a vital failure no one is talking about? 

There are two versions of what happened here, each of which reflects a failure by CYFD. Version 1, as originally published here: 

3.     3. The most important failure may have happened a month or two earlier. News accounts vary, but it appears that this child was living either with relatives or family friends acting as godparents. According to one story: 

The boy was hospitalized in May because of behavioral health issues. When he was discharged in June, however, no one was able to take him in.

According to another account, which refers to the caretakers as godparents, those godparents were willing to keep the boy’s siblings, but not him.

Why?

We don’t know. But there are many cases in which caretakers, whether parents, extended family, foster parents or adoptive parents, simply find a child’s behavioral problems so difficult, they feel they have no choice but to surrender the child. That’s what happened, for example, to a child in Baltimore, Kanaiyah Ward. Her mother was desperate to get her help. Instead, Maryland’s family police agency dumped her in a hotel where she committed suicide. In the New Mexico case, the child also has a heart condition. 

If, in fact, this was the case here, if this was another case of overwhelmed family/guardians who felt they could no longer care for the child, CYFD might have avoided this entire crisis by offering Wraparound services – intensive help in which the family is provided whatever it needs to cope with any behavioral and medical conditions. Yes, sometimes caretakers are so overwhelmed, and so rightly distrustful of family police agencies, that it takes some convincing. Once again, I give you my favorite example. 

But did CYFD even try? 

It doesn’t look that way. And no wonder: CYFD is deluged by false reports, trivial cases, and cases in which poverty is confused with neglect, so the agency lurches from crisis to crisis. That, in turn, is caused by advocates of a take-the-child-and-run approach who use Trump-style smear tactics to encourage the needless separation of more and more families. 

In other words, by so deluging the agency, some of the very people screaming most loudly about what happened to this 15-year-old, such as the state Attorney General, may have worsened the conditions that set this latest crisis in motion in the first place. 

But the Attorney General’s Complaint offers a different version. In this version, the godparents themselves sent the boy to live with relatives in Mexico, but he ran away, back to New Mexico.

That’s when he was hospitalized. When he was ready for discharge the godparents did want him – but, according to the Attorney General’s Complaint, the hospital refused to discharge him because the godparents weren’t his formal legal custodians. Even after the godmother got a signed letter from the mother authorizing her to take the child, the hospital allegedly refused.

Then, the Attorney General says, the hospital filed a child abuse report – claiming there was no one legally allowed to take him!

So what did CYFD do? They, too, apparently wouldn’t give him back to his godparents, and placed him with strangers in foster care instead.

So not only is there no indication CYFD helped the godparents, if this version is correct (and again, we have only the Attorney General’s word for it) they actively thwarted the godparents.

The only thing we know CYFD actually did was to ship the boy off to a foster home, after which the mother expressed interest in custody, after which CYFD got a court to award custody, after which they dumped the child at the border. 

Should the child live with his mother? 

Most New Mexico media certainly don’t seem to think so. They point out that the mother had two “substantiated” allegations of child abuse against her, most recently in 2021. But substantiated means only that a caseworker checked a box on a form. There were many more allegations, but those were unfounded, meaning they couldn’t even meet that minimal standard. So, what did the mother allegedly do in those two “substantiated” cases? Did the mother allegedly beat and torture her children? Was her poverty confused with neglect? Or did her behavior fall somewhere in between? 

It’s easy to miss in the news accounts, but the mother actually was living in the United States until June, when she was deported to Mexico on “drug-related charges.” What charges? Was she convicted? Did she have a meth lab in the basement? Was she dealing fentanyl? Or was she smoking pot – which, though legal in New Mexico, is still grounds for deportation. Or, again, was it something in between? 

The one thing we do know is that CYFD is guilty of at least one unconscionable failure – abandoning a child at the border. It may be guilty of much more. And some of those pointing their fingers at CYFD may share responsibility.

Foster care in California: Your tax dollars at work

 

Private foster care agencies in California want nearly total immunity from 
lawsuits by survivors of abuse in placements they oversee. But they'll settle
for a taxpayer bailout.

Private foster care agencies in California and elsewhere have been trying to get near-total immunity from lawsuits by survivors of abuse in homes or institutions they oversee – or at least a taxpayer bailout for their insurance costs. Here’s an example of who could be shut out. 

This is what allegedly happened to six children in a foster home in San Bernardino County, California, according to a story in the San Bernardino Sun: 

The children, according to the lawsuit, were routinely beaten with belts, cords, wooden sticks and other objects; bound with duct tape; and punched, kicked and choked until the point of unconsciousness. Socks were stuffed into their mouths to prevent anyone from hearing their screams, the suit alleged. And the children were deprived of food and water, forced to stand for hours holding books or lie in dark rooms, and sexually abused and coerced into sexual acts under threats of violence, it further alleged. 

The suit also alleges that county social workers, the foster family agency and school district employees repeatedly missed or ignored warning signs, including visible injuries, disclosures of abuse, missed welfare visits and complaints from the children. [Emphasis added for reasons discussed below.] 

This is what allegedly happened in another San Bernardino County home where a four-year-old autistic child died: 

The lawsuit filed July 7 by the family of 4-year-old Avery Habelitz alleges San Bernardino County Children and Family Services, two foster family agencies and multiple social workers ignored repeated warnings that Avery, who was autistic and nonverbal, required specialized care unavailable in her foster placements. 

The lawsuit alleges Avery was removed from her parents’ home and placed in foster care in Apple Valley, despite an individualized behavioral treatment plan calling for 32 hours a month of one-on-one behavioral therapy, 50 hours of social skills training, 20 hours of supervision and 15 hours of oversight by a board certified behavior analyst. 

Those services ceased after she entered foster care and were never resumed despite repeated warnings that interrupting treatment could worsen her self-injurious behaviors and other developmental challenges, according to the lawsuit. [Emphasis added.] 

Why the emphasis on the fact that those sued include a total of three “Foster Family Agencies” (FFAs)? Because these private agencies, which oversee many group homes and institutions and some family foster homes, have been waging a campaign to slam the courthouse door in the faces of survivors of abuse and their families. The same is true in several other states. Too many news organizations have bought the snake oil that the FFAs have been selling. 

At the heart of the issue is the fact that insurance companies have realized there is so much abuse in foster care that it’s a high risk – for them. So they’ve raised premiums. 

So the FFAs went running to the California Legislature seeking either or both of two things: near-total immunity from lawsuits by those who say they were victimized on their watch or a bailout in which taxpayers would chip in a whole lot of money to help them pay their insurance premiums. 

They did not get the immunity. They did get a bailout – to the tune of $31 million that could have been spent actually helping families. And now they’re after another. Private foster care agencies are seeking much the same in New York, Illinois and elsewhere. 

What is most shameful in all this is the credulous complicity of many news organizations. In story after story, private foster care agencies have been portrayed as God’s gift to children, and their closing supposedly would be some sort of catastrophe. That’s the agencies’ party line. One expects them to make such claims. But one news organization after another has accepted those claims without question. 

But, for reasons discussed in detail in the columns to which I’ve linked above, none of it is true. On the contrary, the closing of such agencies should be seen as an opportunity to rethink a system over reliant on their group homes and institutions and the foster families they supervise. 

So please, California journalists, and those dealing with this issue in other states: Before you write your next OMG-the-sky-will-fall-if-the-FFAs-don’t-get-relief story, take a moment to think about those six former foster youth who survived and the family of Avery Habelitz who did not. Then think about the thousands of others across the country who have been abused while under the “care” of FFAs and their counterparts in other states. Who really deserves our attention, our sympathy and our compensation, the children or the agencies?

Illustration by ChatGPT

NCCPR in Bridge Michigan: Can Michigan learn the right lessons from two child welfare cases?

Two cases involving Michigan’s child welfare system have been in the news lately. So far, Michigan lawmakers are ignoring one and learning the wrong lessons from the other.

Read the full commentary in Bridge Michigan.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending July 21, 2026

● The child welfare establishment loves to tell us that there is no racial bias in the system and children are never taken because of poverty alone – they claim there must have been something like drug abuse. This story from The Marshall Project exposes both those lies. And see also their story about one state – New Jersey – that has reformed its practices. 

● NCCPR’s commentary in Bridge Michigan: Two cases involving Michigan’s child welfare system have been in the news lately. (You’ve heard about one of them.) So far, Michigan lawmakers are ignoring one and learning the wrong lessons from the other. 

● In Arizona, where foster children are institutionalized at a rate more than quadruple the national average, there’s been another expose of widespread problems at two of the institutions. But the only solutions authorities can think of are to blame the kids and make the places more like jails. I have a blog post about it. 

● Meanwhile, The Imprint reports that Utah finally is shutting down one of the state’s notorious “troubled teen industry” institutions. 

● There’s still another study out showing the transformative power of cash. This one concludes: 

We find that a $1000 annual increase in total expected state safety net support is associated with a 4% decline in state-year CPS investigations among children of all ages and those under age 5, with similar associations for neglect and physical abuse investigations.

● And ABC News reports that 

A new bill in Washington, D.C., would allow foster youth to help define their own families — and it's crafted by the very young people it seeks to serve. 

Former and current foster youth helped create the Support, Opportunity, Unity and Legal Relationships Act, known as the SOUL Act. It's a Washington, D.C., bill that would allow teens -- ages 16 and up -- to legally enlist multiple guardians, blood relatives or other trusted adults for support without having to completely cut legal ties to their birth parents. …

Trouble at an Arizona residential treatment center? It must be the kids’ fault! Send in the drone!

Between January 2022 and September 2025, youth institutionalized at Canyon State Academy for boys or Desert Lily Academy for girls, adjoining residential treatment centers in Queen Creek, Arizona, ran away an average of at least once every two-and-a-half days – more than 600 runaway incidents in all, according to Phoenix television station KNXV. 

And runaways aren’t the only reason police keep showing up. In 2022 another Phoenix television station, KSAZ reported that police were at Canyon State Academy almost daily: 

From Jan. 12 to Oct. 4, officers responded to CSA 239 times. The leading type of call is a missing person, making up about 22% of the calls.  

18% of calls went for unknown trouble. 10% for follow-ups and 9% for assaults. 

The rest of the calls are scattered among several categories, including welfare checks, sexual assault and molesting. 

They were at Desert Lily Academy another 118 times. 

But the only things the state of Arizona and local authorities can think of to do about it are: 

● Blame the kids.

● Make the places more like jails. 

At no point, it seems, has anyone in power asked the obvious question: Why are so many children so desperate to leave these places? But then, given Arizona’s fondness for tearing apart families in general and institutionalizing children in particular, those are questions no one in power in the state seems to want to face. 

The two institutions are run by a nationwide chain known as “Rite of Passage.” They run an assortment of services including residential treatment facilities and juvenile prisons. In addition to Arizona, news accounts over many years have raised questions about Rite of Passage facilities in Nevada, Florida, Colorado, Arkansas and Maryland. 

Yet when asked about all those runaways, the Arizona family police agency, the Department of Child Safety, said, in effect: Well, what do you expect from such troubled kids? Or as the agency put it: 

Call-for-service data does not necessarily indicate wrongdoing by the facility or staff. Many reported incidents reflect the significant behavioral and emotional challenges presented by the population the facility serves. 

That echoes the standard party line of the residential treatment industry: These kids are sooooo difficult that there is simply no alternative except to institutionalize them. As we have documented repeatedly, that’s BS. There’s nothing residential treatment can do that can’t be done better, and at lower cost, with Wraparound programs. And the residential treatment model itself is inherently harmful to children. 

The two Rite of Passage facilities said that the high number of runaway reports is because they are such careful, responsible facilities that they make sure to report any incident that even might involve running away immediately! They said much the same in response to the 2022 story. 

They also brag about being a so-called Qualified Residential Treatment Program. That is a new category of institution created by the federal Family First Prevention Services Act.  That law was supposed to strictly limit federal reimbursement for institutionalizing children. But the institutions lobby carved out a great big loophole: so-called QRTPs are exempt from the limits. Supposedly, that’s because they have to meet rigorous standards. But the standards are a joke. 

And, of course, all this evades the question: Why do all those young people keep running? 

That 2022 story offers some clues: 

"I remember, like the staff saying, ‘It's our goal to like, make you hate it here, so you never want to come back,'" former student, Christopher Nixon, said. … "It's just not a safe environment, and they're just tired of being there. At that point, they want to go home." 

Keith Plummer was in ... Desert Lily Academy. … Plummer says the students just wanted their independence. "They want their freedom. We’re kids. I want to go ride my bike around the neighborhood, I want to take my scooter and just go to a park," she said. 

Ignoring those answers, or not even posing the question, allows one to view solutions only in terms of making the facilities more like jails. The local police chief, Randy Brice, sure sounds like he’s talking about escaped prisoners. According to KNXV: 

Brice said there are still ways to improve security, including expanding camera coverage and better tracking kids as they move from place to place. 

Brice says he’s also worked to speed up response times to missing child calls. 

“As soon as a call comes out there, the drone is en route. We have cameras all around the facility on our street cameras,” Brice said. “We're seeing about 90% of the runaways -- we're catching within minutes to maybe an hour or two.” 

If it never occurs to anyone to ask if residential treatment is necessary, and if you stigmatize and stereotype all the institutionalized kids, no wonder the only solutions you can think of are cameras and drones. 

And sadly, that kind of thinking is deeply embedded in the culture of Arizona family policing – the kind of culture in which some workers thought it would be funny to come to work wearing  t-shirts that said “professional kidnapper.” 

● Though Arizona has improved, it still tears apart families at a rate 15% above the national average, even when rates of child poverty are factored in.

● Maricopa County (metropolitan Phoenix) tears apart families at the highest rate among America’s ten largest cities and their surrounding counties.

● Arizona takes a huge proportion of its federal funds under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program (TANF) money that is supposed to help poor families become self-sufficient and diverts it to running the family policing system. Some of the money went to a huge rate increase for foster parents.

● Arizona institutionalizes 45% of the children it takes – a rate more than quadruple the national average.

● The state gave a 30% rate increase to a group home operator that donated generously to the campaign of Gov. Katie Hobbs.

● The first person Hobbs named to run the family police agency opposed the rate increase. He was fired after only weeks on the job. 

No wonder the Arizona family police agency doesn’t seem to want to even look into whether there might be problems at the two residential treatment centers from which all those children keep running away. 

And no wonder the only answer from local authorities is: Send in the drone!

Illustration by ChatGPT

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending July 14, 2026

There’s more about the trauma inflicted on the children of former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg as a result of a malicious, false anonymous child abuse report:

● In Medium, Kristen Weber, senior director of child welfare at the National Center for Youth Law, writes:

Pete Buttigieg’s story captured national attention because it happened to someone many Americans know. Our response should be to remember the millions of families whose stories never make the news. 

● On LinkedIn, Shereen A. White, director of advocacy & policy at Children’s Rights, and Kelley Fong, assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine, and author of Investigating Families, write: 

If we take the rights and dignity of children seriously, then we must examine not only whether suspicions of harm are addressed, but how our response itself affects the very children we are trying to protect. … A child welfare system worthy of its name should be just as careful about the harms it creates as the harms it seeks to prevent. 

● The problems with reporting laws extend beyond the need to replace anonymous reporting with confidential reporting. Mandatory reporting also is a huge problem. Also from Children’s Rights, in the New York Daily News:

One solution before the [New York] State Legislature is the Supporting Families Together Act. Today, mandated reporters can face criminal and civil penalties for not reporting — a threat that drives over-reporting. Professionals across the state have told us that fear of penalties compels them to report even when a child’s safety isn’t at stake. This bill would remove those penalties, letting professionals use their judgment to connect families with help while still allowing any genuine safety concerns to be reported.

In this week’s reminder that the horror stories go in all directions: 

From WSB-TV, Atlanta:

Law enforcement officials have arrested a former Ridgeview Institute employee accused of sexually assaulting a 15-year-old girl while she was receiving treatment at the facility. … Records obtained by Channel 2 Action News from the Smyrna Police Department show detectives have investigated 40 alleged sex crime cases since 2021. Six of those investigations were opened this year. Three remain active, and four have been cleared by arrests.

NCCPR in the Washington State Standard: How curbing foster care has saved children’s lives

How many times have you heard it? A child “known to the system” dies, and someone says: “See? Because you’re not taking away as many children, and throwing them into foster care, it’s causing children to die!” 

We’ve known all along it’s not true. And now, thanks to new research from Washington State, we know something else: Washington State’s limited efforts to stop tearing apart so many families have saved children’s lives – anywhere from six to 22 per year. At the same time, by increasing the proportion of foster children placed with relatives instead of strangers, the state has saved another 10 to 30 children’s lives per year. ... 

Read the full column – with a link to the research – in the Washington State Standard 

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending July 7, 2026

● The New York Sun cuts to the heart of the issue at the heart of the harassment of the family of former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg: 

At first glance, it looks like political theater, the kind of thing that happens to a man with a national profile and enemies who know how to use it. Yet the story is really about a system that runs on unverified tips every day, grinding through false or unproven allegations for families who have no public profile and no press corps to speak up for them. 

● In Slate, Chris Gottlieb, director of the Family Defense Clinic at New York University School of Law writes: 

People of all political persuasions should be outraged that this happened—and plenty were—but they should not be surprised. Weaponizing CPS by making false allegations is all too common. And that’s because CPS enables harassment by throwing common sense—and the law—out the window when someone makes accusations involving a child. Current CPS practices allow specious accusations to hurt not only parents, but the children they are meant to protect. … 

● In The Wall Street Journal’s Free Expression newsletter, Emma Camp reminds us what can happen when “forensic interviews” go wrong, and how Buttigieg is not the only public figure to face this kind of harassment. 

● And in her response to what happened to the Buttigieg family, the head of New York City’s Family Police Agency, Rebecca Jones Gaston, demonstrated her political savvy in a column for the New York Daily News. She came out for the New York law replacing anonymous reporting with confidential reporting at a point when it took no courage – the law was passed before she got the job. Then she used the all-purpose bromide of “training” as the way to curb other needless reports. She made no mention of a more effective solution: seeking the power to screen out reports sent down to her agency by the state’s child abuse hotline. And she touted a version of “differential response” that’s so undifferentiated that some New York families find it more oppressive than a full-scale investigation. 

In other news: 

● Every state seems to have its “Senator Soundbite,” that one demagogic pol (or, in some cases journalist, and occasionally both) who scapegoats family preservation for every child abuse tragedy. In Washington State, the pol, amplified by some local media, has been crusading against a law known as the Keeping Families Together Act. In the Washington State Standard, NCCPR documents how that law has helped save children’s lives – and it’s the campaign against the law that puts children in more danger. 

● Finally! From Source NM, a story about the New Mexico governor’s child-confiscation-at-birth edict that tells the part of the story every other New Mexico news organization has largely left out; the side in which we hear from actual families and actual experts.  

You can also see the governor’s flack go full Orwell when he says: 

In each of the cases where a child was placed in safe care, the determination to temporarily remove them from their parents was made by a judge, based on the state’s risk assessment. The important decision to remove substance exposed newborns from their families is never a unilateral one by the state.” 

That is a lie. The policy requires that children covered by the edict be kept away from their parents – confiscated at birth – until a judge decides. So the decision is precisely “a unilateral one by the state.” 

Source NM is the one news organization in the state that’s consistently tried to cover all sides of child welfare debates. Until they took this story, the only place the freelancer who wrote it has gotten anything like it published was in The Guardian. 

● On the NCCPR Blog: The obligatory child welfare “task force” is formed after a child abuse death in Toledo, Ohio. Recommendations include no scapegoating caseworkers, no slandering family preservation, no push to throw more kids into foster care and not one word about a swinging pendulum. Instead, there’s a bunch of good, smart recommendations that will make children safer.  What’s wrong with these people??? :-) 

●How much is an institutionalized child’s life worth? According to the State of Minnesota: $200. I have a blog post about it. 

● Update: Last week, we noted that when family police in Texas can’t even meet the absurdly low standard for “substantiating” an allegation – a finding that can be appealed – but they still want to keep a stigmatizing record on the family, they label the allegation “unable to determine” – which can’t be appealed. We noted that the Austin American-Statesman reported on a legal challenge to that category. It involves a case in which the family police say they’re “unable to determine” if it’s neglect for a parent to give birth at home with the help of a state-certified midwife. Now, KERA Public Radio reports, the court has ruled in favor of the family.

● The Imprint reports that Bethany Christian Services, a large private foster care and adoption agency, has shown its true colors – and it’s not a rainbow flag. From the story: 

Bethany will not license or re-license parents who do not agree to a “Statement of faith and belief” asserting that marriage is “a covenant between one man and one woman” and that “God creates human beings in His image as male and female, as determined by biological sex.” 

Within a year, all staff and board members must also sign a document stating that they “personally agree and adhere to” the new policy, according to a June 10 press announcement. … 

Danni Leader, an attorney who represents foster youth in Georgia, said they have heard from three teenagers who said they’d been moved from Bethany-licensed homes because their LGBTQ+ caregivers didn’t agree with the new statement of faith. 

“Not one of those children’s placements was going to be disrupted if the statement of faith had not happened,” said Leader, who uses they/them pronouns. 

A former Vice President of the agency says: 

“Children in foster care are already navigating a system most adults wouldn’t survive a year in: caseworkers who rotate, courts that move slowly, homes that may or may not last — the last thing any of them needs is a theology test they did not request and were never asked to agree to,” Williams said. “Bethany made its choice. I’m only asking that youth and families who didn’t choose Bethany get one, too.” 

Oh, and by the way: All the LGBTQ taxpayers who help subsidize Bethany through its contracts with governments will not be getting an exemption from having to help pay for this. 

In this week’s reminder that The Horror Stories Go in All Directions: 

● From Searchlight New Mexico: 

The New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department is facing accusations it refused to take responsibility for a runaway teenage boy despite officials knowing his location, including after he was shot and wounded while he and other unsupervised teenagers played with a firearm. 

The 16-year-old boy, identified in a lawsuit only by the initials N.H., was removed from his mother’s custody, but later ran away from foster care back to her home, putting his custody into a gray area the lawsuit alleges allowed CYFD to list him as a runaway and cut him off from resources his family said they needed. The lawsuit was filed in First Judicial District Court last week. …

From The Imprint:

 Youth are being moved from Provo Canyon School, the residential treatment facility that celebrity Paris Hilton centered in her yearslong campaign to shutter the “troubled teen industry.” 

“No child should be hurt in a program that is meant to protect them, particularly programs that require the authorization of the state to operate,” Shannon Thoman-Black, director of the state licensing division, said at a press conference Tuesday. ...

Well, OK, Ms. Thoman-Black but that does raise an obvious question: Why did you allow it to go on for so long? 

Holy Toledo! Is a county learning the RIGHT lessons from a child abuse tragedy?

 

The Lucas County, Ohio, courthouse. (Photo by Joel Rossol)

In Lucas County, Ohio (metropolitan Toledo), a 13-year-old girl, Kei’Mani Latigue, apparentlty living with her grandmother, was kidnapped and murdered, allegedly by her father. There had been at least three reports to the county child welfare agency, but they never found cause to remove her from her home. In the furor that followed, the county created the usual OBRC (Obligatory Blue-Ribbon Commission). That group, the Lucas County Child Protection Task Force, just issued its report. 

So far this is a story you’ve heard over and over. And I was expecting nothing good from a county I’ve criticized for caving to the group home and institutions lobby. Looks like I was wrong. 

Because there’s something different this time: The recommendations from the Task Force are  -- good! They could have embraced the usual cheap-shot, easy recommendations that make the task force and the politicians feel good even as they would make the system worse (for classic examples, see Santa Clara County, California and the State of New Mexico). Instead, the task force opted for doing the hard work and finding real solutions that can make all of the county’s children safer. They've created a blueprint for child safety.

As the Task Force report explains, the members

recognized the complexity of the child protection system and the many partners that influence  child safety and family wellbeing. … Progress will not be defined by any single action, but by the County’s ability to align efforts, adapt over time, and remain focused on outcomes that matter most—family stability, child safety, and community trust.

The first bit of good news is what is not in the report. No cheap shots suggesting that the county was doing too much to keep families together. No scapegoating caseworkers. No drivel about swinging pendulums. No recommendations to make it harder to keep children in their own homes and harder to return them home – as they are pushing in North Carolina and Indiana. The Task Force understood that this is the approach that backfires, exposing many more children to the trauma and the danger of needless foster care and overloading systems, making it harder for workers to find children in real danger. 

Now consider what they did recommend. It’s nothing dramatic, but it’s constructive: 

● Expand community-based visitation, engagement and prevention spaces.

● Map services for child maltreatment prevention and improve family navigation and resource access.

● Implement coordinated prevention networks and post-reunification support.

● Deliver equity-centered workforce training and front-door practice reform.

● Embed lived experience leadership across governance, practice and accountability.

● Launch comprehensive equity-focused kinship and foster care recruitment.

● Increase coordination to reduce placement disruptions and promote stability of foster youth.

● Reestablish a Lucas County ombudsman with public reporting authority..

The full descriptions for each make clear that, while they’re certainly not revolutionary, and the last one could backfire, the recommendations are better than these bland literal “top-lines” suggest. 

Equally remarkable is what top officials are saying. 

Here’s Randy Muth, executive director of Lucas County Children Services: 

“Poverty does not equal child neglect. Poverty does not equal criminality,” Mr. Muth said. “Families can be supported before they’re reported.” 

And from Doris Tolliver, the Task Force facilitator: 

Child services frequently receives reports of families who struggle with parental distress and financial strain, diverting them from helping children who are actively harmed, Ms. Tolliver said. Streamlining support from community-based organizations would allow the agency to focus on families with the greatest needs, alleviating strain on the system. 

What the numbers tell us: 

Although it takes a lot more courage to utter these words than to vomit up the usual (see, again, certain public officials in Santa Clara County, California, and the State of New Mexico), words still are easier than action. What do we know from the numbers? 

I can find no data on entries into foster care in Lucas County, and only limited data on the number of children in foster care on any given day. The picture is mixed. 

The death of Kei’Mani Latigue was discovered in March 2025. But there does not seem to have been a foster-care panic – at least not immediately.  According to data compiled by the Public Children’s Services Association of Ohio, the number of children in foster care on the most recent date I can find,  July 1, 2025, was down slightly from the previous year. But the rate of placement in Lucas County is 36.8 children in foster care per thousand impoverished children, below the Ohio average of 41.6, but above the national average of 30.6. 

And of course, there will be ridicule. The take-the-child-and-run extremists will be out in force. They talk about child safety but advocate an approach that sacrifices safety, suggesting an agenda that’s really about racial and class bias; a desperate desire to see impoverished nonwhite children torn from their homes and placed with white middle-class families. 

To do that, they’ll misrepresent the recommendations, claiming that the Task Force somehow thought they could persuade the killer of Kei’Mani Latigue not to kill. But that’s not what the Task Force is saying at all. Rather, these recommendations will get some of the cases that are nothing like the case of Kei’Mani Latigue out of the system, so workers will have more time to carefully assess every call – including the calls that come in about the next Kei’Mani Latigue. 

It won’t be easy to stand up to that. But at least, it appears, in Lucas County, Ohio, they’re giving it a try.

How much is an institutionalized child’s life worth? According to the State of Minnesota: $200

 

Photo by Doug Wallick

The child is identified only as C. We don’t know the child’s age or gender. We do know that C was institutionalized at a center in East Bethel, Minnesota, run by Nexus Family Healing. We also know that C was prone to self-harm. And, according to the child welfare trade journal The Imprint, the incidents occurred so often when C was in a bathroom that staff were supposed to have “near constant verbal checks” on the child whenever C was in a bathroom.

 

But on May 19, 2025, no one checked when C was in a bathroom for 45 minutes – enough time for C to wrap strips of cloth around her or his neck until C’s face turned blue.

 

The institution paid a price for this failure. The price was $200. That’s how much Nexus was fined.

 

In fairness, the fines weren’t always that low. For failing to maintain the required staff-to-resident ratio, Nexus was fined $1,200 – which, presumably, is less than it would cost to actually maintain the required staff-to-resident ratio.

 

Finally, the state suspended the facility’s license – after piling up violations and incurring piddling penalties almost from the day Nexus took the place over from a prior operator, which also “ran into regulatory troubles.” But then, the state restored the license.

 

At least three other similar Minnesota facilities have similarly ugly records, but none of them has been ordered to close either.

 

In news accounts, there seems to be far more handwringing about the prospect of not having enough places to institutionalize children than about the abuse that children suffer when institutionalized. And no one has confronted the most basic fact of all: Institutionalization doesn’t work, and the institutions aren’t needed.

 

Sometimes parents place their children in these places voluntarily; other times, the children are taken by county child welfare agencies. Either way, we’ve all heard the residential treatment industry’s sales pitch: These children have such severe behavioral problems that no family can possibly handle them. The only option supposedly is to institutionalize them.

 

So the Minnesota Star Tribune tells us that if institutions close 

That could mean more kids remain with family members who are unable to meet their serious needs, go to day treatment instead of the more-intensive residential services, or are stuck in emergency departments or juvenile detention. Others will be sent to out-of-state facilities. 

But none of that has to happen. Because, as a comprehensive report from the Senate Finance Committee and a mountain of research makes clear, the whole residential treatment model is a failure. There is nothing residential treatment supposedly does that can’t be done better and at lower cost with community-based alternatives, such as Wraparound programs. Such programs bring everything a family needs right into the family home or, when the children truly can’t live with their parents, into a foster home – so family members can “meet their serious needs.”

 

Think it can’t be done? If you haven’t already seen it the many other times it’s appeared on this blog, watch the late Karl Dennis, the father of Wraparound, describe how he did it for a youth so difficult the local jail couldn’t handle him.

 

The industry has a ready answer for that, too: They say there’s a shortage of foster homes, so there’s no place else to put the children except our institutions.

 

But the shortage is artificial.

 

Although the state has been making progress, Minnesota still tears apart families at a rate nearly double the national average, even when rates of child poverty are factored in. That’s not because Minnesota is a cesspool of depravity with double the child abuse of the nation as a whole. In 2025, of all the Minnesota children forced into foster care, 79% did not involve even an allegation of physical or sexual abuse. And 58% did not involve even an allegation of any form of drug abuse.  Far more common are cases in which family poverty is confused with “neglect.”

 

Get the children who don’t need to be in foster care back home, provide parents and foster parents with all the Wraparound services they need, and there will be plenty of room in good, safe foster homes for the children who really need to be there. And it all costs less than institutionalization, which, in addition to being the worst form of care, also is the most expensive.

 

Instead, this artificial “shortage” becomes a reason to keep shoveling children into institutions and allowing the abuses to pile up (with the occasional $200 fine and brief license suspension).

 

Break the cycle, confront Minnesota’s ugly history of needless family separation, and the system can be rebuilt to the point where the state won’t hesitate to shut down institutions and we can treat such closings for what they really are: cause for celebration.