The San Jose Mercury News is deep in denial about the foster-care panic it did so much to start

How Santa Clara County compares when entries into foster care are compared to the
impoverished child population in each jurisdiction. (Sources here.)

Julia Prodis Sulek is the reporter for the San Jose Mercury News who is one of the two people most responsible for setting off a foster-care panic in Santa Clara County that is among the worst anywhere in America. So it’s no surprise that in her latest story she seems desperate to pretend the panic doesn’t exist.

Granted, just writing a story with the words “foster care panic” in it is a big step up for Sulek, as is quoting people warning about such a panic and including actual comments from a parent whose child was wrongfully taken, and also from that family’s lawyer. She also quoted Prof. Kelley Fong when she cited the study she co-authored finding that increasing foster care does nothing to curb child abuse fatalities. 

That did not stop Sulek from writing the story in a way that implies children weren’t dying in the county before the child welfare agency started curbing needless entries into care. That is, of course, untrue. 

But that implication fits with what I think was the primary purpose of the story: to deny there’s a panic but still be able to say “we covered that” when the issue arises, and then return to fomenting more panic. Decades ago, in his groundbreaking work The Media Monopoly, former Washington Post editor Ben Bagdikian explained how journalists who have strong feelings about a story deal with the side of that story they don't like: They cover it. Prominently. Once. 

So, in her story about a presentation by several state and national experts to the county Board of Supervisors (a presentation that can be seen in full here, starting at about six hours and two minutes in), Sulek cited only part of a presentation by Dr Wendy Wiegmann, project director at UC Berkeley’s California Child Welfare Indicators Project. 

Weigman compared entries into foster care in Santa Clara County to entries in other counties and the state as a whole. But her graphs compared entries only to total child population.  She flagged this very point by also showing a separate table indicating that Santa Clara is, of course, one of the most affluent counties in California. This is crucial because poverty is both a risk factor for actual abuse and also a factor commonly confused with neglect. So the only true apples-to-apples comparison is one that compares entries into foster care to the impoverished child population in each county. 

When you do that, the result practically screams foster-care panic. 

In the index NCCPR publishes concerning America’s ten largest cities and their surrounding counties, we compare entries both to total child population and impoverished child population. Notice the huge change between them for Santa Clara. 

When you factor in poverty, Santa Clara recently has become very much an outlier. Santa Clara County takes away children at a rate 7% higher than Los Angeles, more than double the rate of New York City and nearly quadruple the rate of metropolitan Chicago. I wish Dr. Wiegmann had presented entries compared to impoverished child population for every California county. The Mercury News should have done just that. But that, of course, would have undermined Sulek’s thesis. 

Sulek also left out a supervisor’s suggestion that Santa Clara officials look at New Jersey, a state-run system with one of the lowest rates of child abuse deaths in the country. When you factor in poverty, the rate of removal in Santa Clara County is nearly triple the rate of New Jersey. 

Other problems with the story 

● Though the story does include that one example of wrongful removal, it leaves out crucial context. The case involved a mother whose two-year-old autistic son Nathan was taken after 

social workers determined that his mother failed to protect him from witnessing a domestic violence incident when his visiting father allegedly struck his mother — an experience the county said placed Nathan at substantial risk of physical harm. 

Despite the mother’s contention that she was protecting him from that violence and had agreed to a safety plan, her child was placed in foster care one day after Jaxon [Juarez’s] death. He was moved among four foster homes over four months as Jimenez complained about bite marks and other injuries she noticed during her weekly visits. 

What Sulek leaves out, and probably doesn’t know, is that taking away a child under these circumstances is even more traumatic than taking the child when the child has himself been victimized. In fact, it is so traumatic that, as a result of a class-action lawsuit, in one state, New York, it is illegal. The research underlying that decision is summarized here. 

In such cases, there is nothing to stop law enforcement from protecting the child by, say, arresting the abuser and removing him to jail. Instead, panic-motivated removals like this only discourage survivors of domestic violence from coming forward to seek help. 

● Sulek also writes that: 

Supervisor Sylvia Arenas expressed frustration with the recent tragedies, including Jaxon’s death that came after 18 months of state oversight and reforms. 

“We can’t keep up this rate of death in our county,” Arenas said. “I’m not saying foster care is a solution. What I was hoping to hear from you is that there were other strategies that were being used … somewhere where we might be able to mitigate for those deaths. …” 

She didn’t get easy answers. 

But she did get answers; they just weren’t the answers that Arenas, the other prime instigator of the foster-care panic, wanted to hear. 

In fact, many ideas were presented by the panel of experts, but Arenas rushed to dismiss them as too expensive. On the contrary, they all cost less than foster care, and those expenses almost certainly are skyrocketing – due to the foster-care panic. 

It is particularly disturbing to hear Arenas make her claim in the context of the death of Jaxon Juarez – since, as is explained in detail here, the foster-care panic itself may have contributed to Jaxon’s death because, at a crucial turning point, the county didn’t opt for a simple, and very inexpensive, option. 

● That isn’t all that frustrated Arenas. Over and over she tried to get the panel to say one could draw conclusions about systemic failure based on child abuse deaths. But no matter how many ways she asked, and no matter how frustrated she got when she wasn’t told what she wanted to hear, the panel unanimously disagreed. While each is the worst imaginable tragedy, even the panelist most prone to defend foster care, UC Berkeley Prof. Jill Duerr-Berrick, said they also are “outlier events, that are unpredictable and rare.” 

Perhaps this frustrated Sulek, too, since she left it out of her story. 

● Sulek also left out what Supervisor Betty Duong actually said when she bravely discussed what happened to her own family, growing up poor in East San Jose. Sulek said only that Duong “grew up with interventions from social workers for most of her childhood.” 

What Supervisor Duong actually said was: “We were in an environment where poverty was equated with neglect.” 

A massive experiment without informed consent 

● The most unintentionally revealing quote in the story actually came from Prof. Berrick, again the panelist most eager to defend the take-the-child-and-run approach. But in the course of doing so, she said this: 

[W]e don’t know whether [foster care is] a powerful intervention toward the positive or a powerful intervention toward the negative. 

The first thing to note about this is that Berrick is mistaken. There is a mountain of evidence showing that, while foster care is the less detrimental alternative in the horror story cases, for the overwhelming majority of children, those in the typical cases, it is, indeed, “a powerful intervention toward the negative” both because of the high rate of abuse in foster care itself, and the enormous trauma of removal, trauma so great it can lead to early death. 

The evidence is so strong that researchers actually have been able to estimate how many more children will die and become ill because of the panic itself. 

But suppose, hypothetically, Berrick is right and we’re as ignorant as she says we are. 

That means that for decades, arguably centuries, we have been conducting a massive uncontrolled experiment on millions of test subjects without their informed consent – and we have no idea if we’ve actually been harming them. That would be bad enough if the test subjects were adults, but in this experiment, the unwitting, unconsenting test subjects are children. 

If a California pharmaceutical company tested a new drug that way, those performing such an experiment might well be arrested and jailed.

So without intending it, probably without realizing it, what Berrick really is telling us is that “child welfare” as currently practiced in the United States is a fundamentally immoral enterprise. 

Why would anyone want to encourage such an enterprise with a foster-care panic?

Bodycam video reveals the appalling behavior of Florida family police

Street art on a bridge in Pensacola, Florida. (Image from Freekenlee.com)

I don’t know if the underlying decision to remove the child in this case was right, though there is strong cause to doubt it. I do know that everything else the Florida Department of Children and Families did was wrong – and probably far more common than the agency will ever admit. 

Kenlee Zuraff was five years old when she was taken from her mother, Joy, on March 6, 2024. She reportedly was returned in June of this year, after the Florida Department of Children and Families failed in an attempt to take the child from her mother forever. 

I saw the video embedded below when it first was posted publicly last January. I did not write about it at the time because, though the behavior of caseworkers for DCF was atrocious, I could find no objective source of information about the underlying facts of the case. I hoped that a mainstream news outlet would dig into the story. That didn’t happen. 

But in the months since, some state legislators have taken an interest – one of them, State Sen. Jason Pizzo, is even defending the mother in court, pro-bono. That has prompted some good ideas for legislation and some news coverage, though still not enough to get at the underlying facts of the case. 

As you’ll see on the website created by the family’s supporters, the case has gotten a lot of attention on various far-right sites. For someone like me, who comes from what I like to call the “Family Values Left,” that can be a problem. What does one do when the only national news story about the case comes from One America News? (In fact, in this case, their story met all normal journalistic standards.) But I’ll bet that’s made other reporters hesitant. Of course, this may only illustrate a point I’ve made often before: Nothing will get some of my fellow liberals to renounce everything they claim to believe in about due process and civil liberties more quickly than whispering the words “child abuse” in their ears. 

There is analogous hypocrisy among some on the right. This issue creates divisions within both Left and Right, but where some of us have common ground, we’ve come together in a group called Untied Family Advocates. And some of the legislative proposals on the FreeKenlee.com website are similar to some of NCCPR’s own recommendations. 

One thing I do know: After more than two years in foster care, Kenlee finally was returned to her mother. I believe that, had there been no video, that wouldn’t have happened. I believe that, had there been no video, the child’s right to live with her mother would have been taken away forever. 

What we know about the case 

Kenlee has Cystic Fibrosis. According to her mother, Joy, a doctor prescribed a medication that comes with a “black box warning” from the Food and Drug Administration. According to the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health, “Black box warnings are added only when substantial clinical data shows the drug can cause severe harm, hospitalization, or death.” Kenlee had had a bad reaction to a similar drug. So Joy said she wanted a second opinion. That, she says, prompted the doctor, a mandated reporter, to call DCF. 

The most detailed account of these underlying events comes from a letter that an adult with Cystic Fibrosis wrote to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, seeking their involvement. (I don’t know if they ever replied.) The letter also describes how often the mere fact that a child has CF puts a family on the family police radar. So add such families to the long list of people who are inherently more vulnerable to having the family police in their lives because of a disability. 

There are elements in the video which I think support this account. On the other hand, Joy’s brother and mother in South Dakota reportedly have defended DCF’s decision. 

What we know for sure 

Kenlee was torn from her mother and sister and placed in a stranger-care home in Jacksonville – six hours away. The distance, of course, made visiting extremely difficult, compounding the trauma of removal. 

When Joy dared to speak out, a judge imposed a gag order. Although court hearings themselves are supposed to be public in Florida, termination of parental rights hearings are an exception. So no reporters could see what was going on, and Joy herself couldn’t tell anyone. That’s just the way family police agencies like it. 

But most damning of all is this video, showing what happened when DCF and Sheriff’s deputies came to take Kenlee. It runs nearly 45 minutes, and it’s hard to watch, so let me call attention to some key moments: 

● The behavior of the DCF workers starting just before five minutes in.

 

● The look on one DCF worker’s face at 11:54 in.

 

● Then watch as the DCF workers rely on the same mother who allegedly is mis-medicating her daughter to explain to them what medications the child is taking and how they should be administered.

 

● See also the DCF employees’ behavior toward Kenlee’s older sister toward the very end of the video.

 

Throughout, they refer to the mother only as “mama,” denying her even the dignity of being called by her own name.

 

As I said, this all took place on March 6, 2024.  Only after the video became public did DCF issue a statement justifying the removal, but adding that 

“the conduct displayed by the Department employees in the video was inappropriate. It failed to demonstrate the level of professionalism and compassion expected in such circumstances, and the Department is addressing this.”  

According to one news account, shortly after the video became public, one of the DCF workers was fired.

 

But while the video only became public in January 2026, surely DCF should have had it for nearly two years. So why did DCF wait until the video became public to address the “inappropriate” behavior? (Yeah, that’s a rhetorical question.) If a worker was fired, was it for the behavior or for forgetting she was on camera?

 

How common is such behavior when no one is recording it? I’m sure most DCF workers don’t behave this way. There are stories from all over the country, equally well-documented, of caseworkers going above and beyond to help keep families together. But this was no aberration either.

 

A grand jury in the same region where this case took place found 12 instances in which DCF workers or subcontractors doing case management were accused by law enforcement of falsifying records. And, of course, there’s no reason to believe DCF workers are better behaved than their private “lead agency” counterparts in Tampa, whose behavior was just exposed by the Tampa Bay Times.

 

Solutions

 

As I noted, the group supporting Kenlee has some good ideas. For starters: require DCF workers to wear body cameras (to which I would add the equivalent of an “exclusionary rule”: if they forget to turn the camera on, or the cameras malfunction, then no information obtained during the unrecorded interviews/inspections could be used in court or in DCF records.)

 

For decades, NCCPR has advocated requiring all interviews to be recorded – with a similar
exclusionary rule. The recommendation goes back so far that originally we spoke of how easy it would be to do this on microcassette tape recorders. Now that bodycams are available, should we take that leap? There are concerns this might intimidate families. But Kenlee’s case illustrates how sometimes recording interviews alone would not be enough. I don’t think DCF ever would have taken action concerning its caseworkers in this case, and chances are, Kenlee still would be in foster care, if not for that bodycam video.

 

They also recommend, as do we, explicitly giving families the right to make recordings of their own, and informing families that they have that right.

 

Kenlee’s supporters also put a lot of emphasis on providing high-quality legal representation for families, something we have long advocated and consider one of the most important ways to curb needless removal of children and other family police abuses.

 

One of the lawmakers supporting Kenlee and her mother, State Sen Don Gaetz, has another excellent idea. As the Tampa Bay Times reports: 

One of Gaetz’s proposed changes would be to have the department secretary, who is appointed by the governor and confirmed by the Florida Senate, review all cases where there is a proposed termination of parental rights. 

In other words, Ms. or Mr. Secretary of DCF: If your agency is going to impose child welfare’s equivalent of the death penalty, you must personally sign off on the execution request. 

Also from the story: 

[Gaetz] also said parents must have due process, and should be able to dispute inaccurate information from the agency without fear of being retaliated against. Gaetz also said the department should not unnecessarily move children hundreds of miles from home. 

Concerning the retaliation issue, the story mentions no specifics. 

But it’s good to see lawmakers begin to make efforts to curb family policing.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending September 1, 2026

● The big news this week includes publication of an outstanding new book. In Making Families, Breaking Families, child welfare’s foremost academic historian, Dr. Mical Raz, brings a scholar’s perspective to the story of the fearmongering and smears that ultimately led Congress to pass the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act. Although the print edition won’t be out until later this month, the electronic edition is available now from Amazon or Barnes and Noble. 

I’m proud that NCCPR and the work of several NCCPR Board Members are cited in discussing the efforts to fight back and set the record straight. The lessons from that time are urgent; there is much to be learned. And while it’s not pleasant to be reminded of how bad things got, it’s encouraging to see how far we’ve come. 

● Reporters for the Tampa Bay Times spent more than a year digging into “hidden foster care” in Florida. Even if you think you know what that term means, and even why it’s so harmful, I guarantee you’ll still be shocked by some of what you’ll read. It is the best – and most horrifying  -- story I’ve seen anywhere in the country on the topic. 

● The Baltimore Banner has a column, and Investigate West has a story that have something in common: Each illustrates the confusion of poverty with neglect. I have a blog post about it with links to both stories. 

● And while both Maryland and Oregon are throwing away money on makeshift placements and/or institutions, The Imprint reports that California is moving in a better direction: bolstering “wraparound” services. The story does an excellent job of answering a question I get all the time: Yes, but what is wraparound anyway? 

● You’d think it’s kind of obvious, but, The Imprint reports, the federal government has sent out guidance to the states reminding them that, when an adoption fails, they are not supposed to keep paying subsidies to adoptive parents who aren’t adoptive parents anymore. And states can require paperwork from those parents documenting that they are, in fact, still the adoptive parents.

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

● From The Marshall Project: 

The chief executive of one of Ohio’s largest residential treatment centers for youth is accused of driving nearly three hours to meet someone for sex whom he believed was a 14-year-old girl. Instead, he met a police officer, according to police and court documents.