NCCPR in Youth Today: Texas caseworkers give us a lesson in whose lives matter

Sixteen current and former employees of the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS) have filed an amicus brief as part of a lawsuit trying to stop Gov. Greg Abbott from using the family police – a more accurate term than child protective services – to persecute transgender children.  This is the money quote: 

“Professionals at DFPS did not enter the child protection profession to remove children from loving homes with parents or guardians merely because they follow medical advice and a doctor’s care, only to place them in a foster care system that is riddled with actual abuse, sexual assault, and even sex trafficking,” [Emphasis added.] 

Among them, the 16 workers spent 129 years at DFPS.  Most were there for at least five years.  Some were frontline caseworkers, some were supervisors, at least two were managers. Five are still on the job. 

Yes, they did the right thing in coming forward.  Yes, it took courage for those who left their jobs.  But consider what these workers are confessing: They freely admit that day after day, year, after year, they took children from their parents and consigned them to “a foster care system that is riddled with actual abuse, sexual assault, and even sex trafficking.” ...

Read the full column in Youth Today

Another journalist discovers the “secret bombing” of families by CPS – when the shrapnel reaches into the white middle-class

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, his wife, and some friends.

A Washington Post columnist is horrified – and rightly so. 

In what is, in many ways, a very good commentary, Post opinion columnist Alyssa Rosenberg pulled it all together: from Tucker Carlson’s suggestion that family policing agencies (aka “child protective services”) investigate parents who make their children wear masks (which never happened) to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott unleashing the family police against transgender kids and their parents (which did happen) to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ threat to unleash the family police on parents who take their kids to drag shows (which might happen). 

She ties all these examples together and, rightly, condemns how some on the far right are exploiting the vast power of the family police, doing enormous harm to children in the process. 

But two crucial pieces are missing.  One I’ve cited before: the fact that this vast powerful apparatus now exploited by the Right was largely created and remains largely supported by the Left. 

So Rosenberg warns that 

Even conservative parents who regard drag performers with horror should be wary of hurling themselves down this slickest of slippery slopes. 

But there is no comparable admonition to my fellow liberals – something about how when you build a system that runs roughshod over due process in the name of “child protection,” when you abandon everything you claim to believe in about civil liberties as soon as someone whispers the words “child abuse” in your ears, you’ve already hurled a whole lot of people – mostly poor and nonwhite – down “the slickest of slippery slopes.” 

And that brings me to the second problem with Rosenberg’s column: The tone of surprise; the idea that somehow these abuses are something new.  But, as I noted in this column for The Imprint, they’re only new if you’re white and middle-class. 

That’s why, as I’ve noted before on this blog, whenever I read columns like Rosenberg’s I think of some Doonesbury cartoons from 1973.  They concerned what Americans came to call the “secret bombing” of Cambodia.  But, as Garry Trudeau pointed out, it wasn’t a secret to the Cambodians.  

Now, white middle-class journalists are discovering the “secret” power of child protective services and how easily it is abused.  But if you’re not white and you’re not middle-class, there’s nothing secret about it at all. 

In fact Black and Native American advocates and scholars have been trying to tell white middle-class journalists about it for decades.  Prof. Dorothy Roberts of the University of Pennsylvania, a member of NCCPR’s Board of Directors, just wrote a book called Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families--and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World.  But that’s her second book on the topic.  The first, Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare was published 20 years ago.  Scholarly work documenting the class bias in “child welfare” and the confusion of poverty with “neglect” goes back at least to the 1970s. 

But until very recently, with rare exceptions, the response in American newsrooms has ranged from indifference to hostility.  Just last year Report for America fellows wrote more than 10,000 words about foster care in West Virginia, which tears apart families at one of the highest rates in America.  But not one of those words came from a birth parent whose child was torn from her or a lawyer for such a parent.  Such parents, overwhelmingly poor, were simply deemed too subhuman even to speak to. 

Or consider the entire false narrative about how COVID would lead to a “pandemic of child abuse” – a narrative suggesting that as soon as overwhelmingly middle-class disproportionately white “mandated reporters” were forced to avert their eyes, overwhelmingly poor, disproportionately nonwhite parents would unleash terror against their own children.  That narrative spread right in the middle of what was supposed to be a racial justice reckoning.  As the authors of a study debunking that narrative point out, one of the worst offenders was The New York Times.  The Washington Post was no better (though in fairness, if there’s one thing we’ve learned about the Post newsroom lately, it’s that it’s not a monolith :-)) 

And now we have Rosenberg’s column.  Consider the examples she cites concerning other family police excesses: 

People have called CPS on parents for letting children play alone in the backyard, for the sin of being a recovering addict whose child was born with a rare medical condition, even for urging a hungry child to learn how to use a can opener. 

All of these are among those very rare cases in which the long arm of CPS reached into the white middle-class or, at the least, cases with which white middle-class reporters, and their readers, easily can identify. (And, even in these kinds of cases, the white middle-class families almost always get far more benevolent treatment than their nonwhite counterparts.) 

Like so many other reporters before her, there is no indication that, as she condemned the abuses of Abbott and DeSantis, Rosenberg stopped to think: “If this is how they can treat white, middle-class families …” 

Rosenberg concludes that 

to whip up false moral panics over drag queens or covid caution — to subject parents and children to investigation as a form of gleeful political point-scoring — is outrageous. 

She’s right.  But here’s what else is outrageous: to not even mention that these same agencies of unchecked government power have been turned against poor and nonwhite families in the same way pretty much forever.

Is even a moment of self-reflection too much to ask? In child welfare – and journalism – apparently, yes.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (Photo by Gage Skidmore)

Contrary to one caseworker’s claim, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s war against transgender children isn’t revealing what one family policing agency has become. It reveals what all family policing agencies have been all along. 

Last week, The Imprint published a column I wrote called “Affluent America Gets a Wake-up Call on CPS Intrusion.”  It’s about how Greg Abbott’s war against transgender children is catching in the “child protective services” net people who never thought they’d be there – white, affluent families.  

The column focused on an excellent Washington Post story about one such family – and how wrenching the trauma was, even though they were so well off they could hire two lawyers and a private social worker to fight off CPS; even though they had advance warning of the inspection of their home and even though they were able to limit that inspection. 

Poor families have none of these options. 

I ended the column with the hope that 

readers finding out for the first time what a child abuse investigation is really like, and those who are writing stories about it for the first time, will remember something. While it is new to them, poor parents, especially poor parents of color, have known it all along, just as they know they will have to give their children “the talk” and fear that their children will be stopped and frisked. For more than half of all Black children, a child abuse investigation will be part of their childhoods. 

I also expressed the hope that we would see more stories about such families and more self-reflection within the system and in journalism. 

So far, it’s not looking good.  In fact, another story, even as it shows enormous sensitivity to these affluent white families, includes a sentence reinforcing the false “health terrorism” master narrative about the overwhelmingly poor, disproportionately nonwhite families who dominate worker caseloads. 

This time the story, in the Texas Tribune, focused on workers who, finding themselves intruding needlessly on families with whom they could identify, are quitting. 

The story focuses on a transgender caseworker, Morgan Davis, who said he was glad that if anyone was going to have to investigate a family persecuted by Gov. Abbott at least he might be able to cushion the blow. 

But, according to the story: “The family’s lawyer didn’t see it that way.”  Yes, once again the family had a lawyer ready and waiting.  In fact, in an interview with Vice News about the same case, Davis said: “I was very grateful that they had attorneys.” 

In the 46 years I have been following these issues this is the first time I ever heard or read those words coming from a CPS worker. 

In fact, he goes further.  On the one hand, higher-ups at the Texas family policing agency have made it much harder to close these cases than others, leaving families in limbo.  On the other hand, this caseworker acknowledges that these families’ treatment during the investigations amounts to CPS lite, in part because he works out of an office in Austin. As he told Vice: 

But what if there's a county or a supervisor that [Agrees with Abbott]? And sends their caseworker in [and says] I want you to go to the school, I want you to record the child, show up unannounced to the home, all things that are normally done during the course of action of any investigation? [Emphasis added.]

In other words: OMG! What if we have to treat these white, affluent families the way we routinely treat poor families and nonwhite families? 

And speaking of things I’ve never read or heard before, consider this from the Texas Tribune story: 

Even the person who made the child abuse report didn’t seem to agree with the directive: Davis said they were sobbing on the phone, distraught that they were reporting the family, but the person was mandated by law to report child abuse and feared the consequences of not making a report. 

“[They] said to me, ‘Just promise me you’ll be kind,’” Davis remembered. 

Now consider how the caseworker made his judgment about the family he was forced to investigate.  According to the story: 

When he visited the family, the house was clean, the pantry was well stocked and the kids were healthy, happy and well loved. 

Now, let’s break that down: 

When he visited the family, the house was clean … 

To which the only reasonable response is: SO WHAT???? 

Why are caseworkers obsessed with equating cleanliness with love? Do only neat-freaks love their children? 

In no field I know of is the phrase “cleanliness is next to godliness” taken more literally than family policing – and none where the consequences are worse. 

A dirty home means you’re neglecting your children – so they wind up in foster care. 

Conversely, after reading thousands of news stories about family policing over the past 46 years I’ve seen it over and over again: fatal neatness - caseworkers declaring they never suspected anything was wrong in the home where a child died “because it was always so neat and clean.”  

I know of no study of how often caseworkers are blinded by what might be called Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Home syndrome, but it happens often enough that one former state “Child Advocate,” Kevin Ryan, made this recommendation to the New Jersey child welfare agency in 2005: 

Until someone demonstrates a correlation between cleanliness and child safety, [the state child welfare agency] should instruct employees that this factor is, at best, hardly relevant unless the filth is severe enough to cause a real and immediate risk to the child. This both will reduce needless removals from dirty homes, and encourage workers not to write off the potential for risk in homes that happen to be spotless. 

Another observation from the caseworker: 

…the pantry was well stocked … 

Well of course it was! It’s not as if this family had to worry about the SNAP benefits running out at the end of the month. Again, what does that have to do with love? 

Not only does the Texas Tribune story show no understanding of the irony in all this, there are dark hints throughout that with all the resignations at the Texas family policing agency there won’t be enough people to go after the real abusers – and we all know who they are, right?  After all, as the story says, caseworkers are dealing with a crisis of children pouring into the system with no placement for them.  And, the story says: 

that’s in addition to their existing, often overwhelming job duties investigating some of the most heartbreaking, challenging cases of abuse and neglect.

Such cases are serious, real – and very rare.  Mostly family police are dealing with the confusion of poverty with neglect.  The reporter here has simply bought into the whole narrative of “health terrorism” that family policing agencies have sold for decades – that the extreme horror stories are the norm and family policing agencies are a “thin blue line” protecting helpless children from their (overwhelmingly poor disproportionately nonwhite) parents who are sadists at worst and sick, sick sick! at best. 

At the very moment that this reporter is eyewitness to the abuse of power of family policing, she rushes to draw a distinction between people like us and people like them. 

The workers interviewed seem anxious to do the same; the story is filled with their proclamations of moral superiority. 

None of this is meant to diminish the trauma endured by transgender children and their families in Texas – and elsewhere, or the trauma for caseworkers.  But as soon as the crisis hit, those who already know what family policing is like responded with empathy.  Within days, NCCPR Board Member Prof, Dorothy Roberts, America’s leading scholar of racism in family policing, had a column in The Washington Post condemning Abbott and emphasizing that, bad as foster care is for other children, it’s even worse for LGBTQ children. 

I have not yet seen evidence that such empathy is a two-way street, either within family policing or within journalism. 

At the top of the Texas Tribune story, the reporter notes that she and a colleague are working on several more stories and they’d like caseworkers to please reach out to them.  There is no similar request to poor, nonwhite families.  

As for those within the system, at one point David, the caseworker profiled in the story, says: 

“It was just heartbreaking to me, to everyone, to see what we were doing, to see what we had become.”

I’m sure Davis went into this work for all the right reasons.  He wanted to help children.  Now he sees how much harm a family policing agency with vast, unchecked power and no accountability can do.  But it’s not a matter of what one family policing agency has become.  In poor communities, especially poor communities of color they know: This crisis simply reveals what all family policing agencies have been all along. 

NCCPR in The Imprint: Affluent America Gets a Wake-up Call on CPS Intrusion

Ever since Texas Gov. Greg Abbott decided to wage war against transgender children there have been stories about the fear and anguish these children and their parents are enduring. For me, a front-page story in The Washington Post stood out. This excellent story ran under the headline “Dreading the knock at the door: Parents of trans kids in Texas are terrified for their families.” 

The story focused primarily on the family of Amber Briggle, an activist for the rights of trans kids. In 2016, the family even had Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton over for dinner. Briggle thought they’d changed Paxton’s mind. She was mistaken. 

The Post story stood out because, for me, that framing was so familiar. Indeed, the headline  echoed, almost word for word, an essay by a 14-year-old girl in New York City, written in 2006. ... 

Read the full column in The Imprint

Greg Abbott’s (and Ron DeSantis') liberal enablers

Greg Abbott (Photo by Gage Skidmore)

A giant vehicle with nearly unchecked power to destroy families was built largely by the Left.  Too bad it never occurred to a lot of my fellow liberals that, someday, someone like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott [or Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis] would get the keys. 

UPDATE, JUNE 12: NBC News reports that another right-wing governor, Florida’s Ron DeSantis also wants to exploit power handed to him both by liberal politicians and by liberal media, particularly the Miami Herald, which has campaigned for years to make the state’s family policing agency ever more oppressive and more powerful. 

My fellow liberals are very upset – as they should be. 

Everywhere you turn, it seems, the liberal child welfare establishment is churning out statements “blasting” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott for unleashing the state’s family policing agency (a more accurate term than “child welfare agency”) against transgender children and their families. 

The Children’s Defense Fund is doing what it does best, issuing a statement. Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago did the same and included endnotes. The American Civil Liberties Union is doing what it does best – suing.  The group that calls itself Children’s Rights is doing what it does best – exploiting the whole situation to collect email addresses for endless fundraising appeals. 

And it’s not just the usual suspects. The federal government’s Administration for Children and Families, which can take six months just to clear its throat, already has an entire “information memorandum” out.  Even President Biden weighed in, condemning Texas for “weaponizing child protective services against loving families.”  (Meanwhile, some of the same news organizations who are outraged by Abbott bought into the whole racist COVID “pandemic of child abuse” myth.) 

President Biden is right.  CDF is right. The ACLU is right. Chapin Hall is right. Even Children’s Rights is right.  Greg Abbott’s cynical, callous, breathtakingly cruel attack targeting transgender children deserves all the condemnation it is getting – and more.   (And while Abbott has systematized such attacks, they are not limited to Texas.  This case is from Michigan.) 

It’s just too bad all these groups didn’t think of consequences like this when, either by action or omission, they built the very system that Abbott is abusing.  Some of them continue to prop up that system.  It’s too bad all these groups and individuals didn’t notice that the family policing system has been “weaponizing child protective services against loving families” – in particular nonwhite families -- from its inception.  

As Prof. Shanta Trivedi of the University of Baltimore School of Law wrote in The Washington Post on Feb. 28: 

Though many are rightly outraged [by what Abbott has done], those familiar with the child welfare system are not surprised.  Vague definitions of abuse and neglect open the door to state-approved discrimination. These laws have historically been used to control Black and Native families, and these parents live in constant fear that their children could be removed. … Child welfare laws invite discrimination and have been used to regulate marginalized communities. 

How bad is this system that runs roughshod over families and was largely built by my fellow liberals? 

NCCPR’s Due Process Agenda, called Civil Liberties Without Exception, begins with this hypothetical: 

Suppose, when he was attorney general, William Barr had proposed anti-terrorism legislation with the following provisions: 

Special anti-terrorism police could search any home without a warrant – and stripsearch any occupant — based solely on an anonymous telephone tip.  Any occupant of the home could be detained for 24 hours to two weeks without so much as a hearing – and they’ll probably be detained far longer because, in the special anti-terrorism court set up by this legislation, all the judges are afraid to look soft on “terrorists.” 

At that first hearing the detainees may – or may not – get a lawyer just before the hearing begins, and they almost never get effective counsel. 

At almost every stage, the standard of proof is not “beyond a reasonable doubt” or even “clear and convincing” but merely “preponderance of the evidence,” the lowest standard in American jurisprudence, the same one used to determine which insurance company pays for a fender-bender. 

And in most states, all the hearings and all the records are secret. 

Had Barr proposed such legislation, it’s reasonable to expect that civil libertarians would have responded with fury. 

Yet this hypothetical anti-terrorism law already is the law governing the system we call “child welfare.”  And sadly, many who in other circumstances are quick to defend civil liberties either stand silent or support it. 

Now Greg Abbott has driven home the consequences of liberal silence and liberal support for a child welfare surveillance state that tramples on civil liberties. 

The Right bears responsibility, too 

The Right should not be let off the hook here.  This is an issue that creates unusual divisions and unusual alliances.  It was, after all, Newt Gingrich who called for putting poor people’s children into orphanages.  It was the Right that watered down the Family First Prevention Services Act to eliminate the kinds of help families need most – concrete help to ameliorate the worst effects of poverty.  (They’re still at it, blocking President Biden’s anti-poverty agenda – which is the ultimate anti-child abuse agenda.) And much of the backlash against racial justice in child welfare comes from right-wing ideologues, including one who proudly analogizes her work to that of Charles Murray. 

There also are groups, on the Left and the Right who do understand this and have worked together to curb the family policing system. 

But when you look at the lawmakers who lead efforts to make state and local family policing systems even bigger and more powerful, they tend to come from the Left.  At the federal level, while right-wing Republican Tom DeLay was a prime mover behind the odious, racist Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997, a law that passed almost unanimously, it had an even more powerful backer: Hillary Clinton. She was still bragging about it when she ran for president in 2016. 

So now, thanks to ASFA, if Greg Abbott’s family police take away transgender children and stall the process for 15 months, federal law actually requires the family police to seek termination of those children’s rights to their parents (a more accurate term than termination of parental rights). Because under ASFA it doesn’t matter why a child was taken in the first place.  

Enablers in Texas 

It is much the same in Texas. 

For decades Texas media fawned over Scott McCown, first when he was a judge in Austin and then when he ran a liberal think tank, the Center for Public Policy Priorities.  For at least a decade McCown was the Godsource for Texas media – no story about Texas child welfare was complete without an obligatory Scott McCown quote.  His skill at portraying himself as the lone Voice of the Left fighting for children against the right-wing Texas political establishment enhanced his appeal. 

McCown was the personification of everything wrong with the liberal child welfare establishment.  He said there was no problem with wrongful removal, that families had all the due process they needed and he was explicit in demanding that Texas take away more children.  You can read all about him in NCCPR’s 2005 report on Texas child welfare. 

McCown’s legacy lives on.  Even as they write story after story about the hellscape that is Texas foster care, with rare exceptions, Texas media won’t even consider that the problem involves taking away too many children and the widespread confusion of poverty with neglect. 

Last year, the Texas legislature considered a bill to modestly narrow the grounds for coercive intervention into families and make it harder to confuse poverty with neglect. In a "news story" dripping with sarcasm, Dallas Morning News Austin Bureau Chief Robert T. Garrett almost brags about refusing to report himself on issues of wrongful removal and due process. He writes: 

GOP leaders want to put a tighter leash on [child protective services]; make it harder to remove children from their birth families … Some staunchly conservative Republican lawmakers have helped make individual families’ fights with CPS, covered by right-leaning news outlets, into causes célèbres.

In fact, in a legislature where Democrats are greatly outnumbered, they made up more than one-third of the bill’s sponsors and cosponsors.  The bill passed almost unanimously.  One of those apparently not too keen on it: Greg Abbott. He let it become law without his signature. 

So which is it, Dallas Morning News?  Is the vast right-wing conspiracy in Texas out to crush innocent families by misusing its vast power?  Or is the vast right-wing conspiracy in Texas tying the hands of noble caseworkers and turning a blind eye to child abuse by cutting back on that same power? 

It’s not just the Dallas Morning News.  On March 4, the Texas Tribune ran a very good story about parents of transgender children rushing to lawyer-up – as they should.  Because, as one expert said: “Once you're in the clutch of the child welfare system, you're very vulnerable.”   

But back when she was editor of the Tribune, and before that when she covered child welfare for that respected online news outlet, Emily Ramshaw (now CEO of The 19^th) wrote stories much like Garrett’s – and she, too, systematically shut out all dissent. 

Even now there’s a subtle bias.  Although the story about the rush to hire lawyers briefly mentions that some are working pro bono, it says no more about all the families who can’t afford to pay and aren't likely to find such a lawyer – which is most families “in the clutch of the child welfare system.”

UPDATE, MARCH 9: One Texas-based reporter does get it. In this excellent story for Slate, Roxanna Asgarian writes:

The child welfare system—decried as “family policing” by critics—is a particularly potent tool for transphobic politicians because it was set up to surveil families that fall outside of the white, middle class norm.

Not much of a learning curve 

Maybe all this would be excusable if these various organizations really learned anything.  We’ve seen that most Texas media have not.  At the national level, the ACLU has – they’re doing excellent work countering the use of predictive analytics (computerized racial profiling) in child welfare.  

But the Children’s Defense Fund, which has been fine with ASFA and opposed real child welfare finance reform is as regressive as ever.  Have you heard what they said about legislation to curb ASFA?  Neither have I. I haven't seen a word about it from Chapin Hall either.

And the award for chutzpah goes to Children’s Rights,  They have radically changed their rhetoric, especially their Twitter feed, but not their awful litigation – which repeatedly has made family policing systems bigger and more powerful.  CR even cites its own Texas McLawsuit – which does nothing to curb the power of the family policing system as somehow putting them “in a unique position” to recognize Greg Abbott’s hypocrisy!  (CR has an even worse settlement in Michigan, but they have leveraged none of their influence to do anything about what happened in the case cited above.) 

So here’s a test for any individual or organization who claims to oppose “weaponizing child protective services against loving families.” Are you ready to acknowledge your own complicity in building the weapon?  Are you ready to sue to stop wrongful removal? Are you ready to seek to reopen old settlements that fail to address the issue?  Are you ready to demand repeal of ASFA, or at least support significant reform?  What about it ACLU?  Where do you stand CDF?  Are you willing to do more than exploit the issue to raise money, Children’s Rights? 

And what about you, Mr. President?  Are you ready to support repealing a law that doesn’t just weaponize the family police – it gives them the equivalent of a nuclear arsenal? 

A teachable moment? 

Perhaps this is another teachable moment in child welfare.  Just as what Donald Trump did to children at the Mexican border brought home to millions of Americans the trauma of needless family separation, perhaps Gregg Abbott’s behavior will help my fellow liberals understand the need for civil liberties – without exception. 

It all boils down to this: A whole lot of people and organizations whose politics are a whole lot like mine decided that everything they professed to believe in about civil liberties did not apply as soon as someone whispered the words “child abuse” in their ears.  So they built a monstrous vehicle – like a giant tank - with the power to crush almost any family. 

But they never expected that, someday, someone like Greg Abbott would get the keys.

Governor of Texas doubles down on foster care tragedy

Gov. Abbott

The Texas Tribune has a story today about how Gov. Greg Abbott’s desperate effort to keep from being blamed for high-profile child abuse tragedies has led to thousands of low-profile child abuse tragedies.

That’s not how the story put it, but that’s what happened.

The Tribune obtained emails documenting how Abbott pressured the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS) to cut back drastically on a form of kinship care placement, called “Parental Child Safety Placements” after a child died in such a placement.  (Because, of course, children never die in any other kind of placement.)

Although Abbott’s office apparently cited three cases, one involved a four-year-old who fatally shot himself after finding a gun under a bed in the home of the relative with whom he was placed.  A horrible tragedy but, sadly, not something probably not unknown in all sorts of homes in Texas.  Another didn’t involve a child who was in a “Parental Child Safety Placement” at all.

In fact, study, after study has found that kinship care placements -- whether formal or informal, licensed or unlicensed -- are more stable, better for children’s well-being and, most important, safer than what should properly be called “stranger care.” 

But Gov. Abbott isn’t about to let research get in the way of saving his administration from questions about how his child welfare agency “allowed” a child to die.  So, ignoring the advice of his then child welfare agency chief, John Specia - one of the very few people in Texas child welfare who is almost universally admired - he pressured DFPS to drastically curb these placements.  Specia has since resigned.

The result: This type of placement has been cut in half, and, in 2015, the number of formal entries into foster care skyrocketed by 37 percent over the year before.  That means far more children are now consigned to the formal Texas foster care system.  And by now everyone knows that placing a child in foster care in Texas doesn’t simply put the child at risk of abuse – it almost guarantees it.

HOW TEXAS HIDES ITS TRUE RATE-OF-REMOVAL

The emails also tell us something else:

Some in Texas have claimed they don’t have a wrongful removal problem because the rate of removal supposedly is low.

That’s always been misleading:

● The number of children torn from their parents in Texas each year is escalating rapidly — it soared more than 40 percent from 2009 to 2014 – and that was before the 37 percent increase in 2015.

● The statewide figure hides as much as it reveals. The rate of removal in Dallas is more than 20 percent higher than New York City and more than 90 percent higher than Chicago.

● Among the nation’s biggest cities, children in San Antonio are taken from their homes at the third-highest rate, even when rates of child poverty are factored in.

But now we know something else: The official figures are 100 percent Grade A B------t.

Because Texas has been keeping all those “Parental Child Safety Placements” off the books – not counting them in the figures it reports to the federal government concerning entries into care.

But while kinship care is a better option than stranger care, it’s still foster care.  And a removal counts as a removal regardless of whether the agency goes to court or obtains formal custody.

Federal regulations define foster care as :

24 hour substitute care for all children placed away from their parents or guardians and for whom the State agency has placement and care responsibility. 

 The regulations go on to say that

the State is required to count a placement that lasts more than 24 hours while the child is in foster care under the placement, care or supervision responsibility of the State agency”

 Note that it does not say “custody” of the agency, only “placement, care or supervision responsibility.”

So yes, Texas is taking away too many children – but DFPS has been “hiding” many of them when it reports entries into care.

CASA’S IDEA OF A “CHAMPION”

One other item is noteworthy in the story.  It concerns the Texas chapter of Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA).

CASA is the most sacred cow in child welfare.  It is a program in which largely white, middle-class volunteers are, in effect, deputized by courts to poke their noses into the homes of people who are overwhelmingly poor and disproportionately people of color, and pass judgment on how they take care of their children.  (Some CASA chapters actually are projects of the local Junior League.)  As my organization documents here, the results for the children in these families have been predictably awful.

So perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that Texas CASA took a look at the record of Greg Abbott, a governor fully committed to the far-right agenda of undermining children’s health, safety and well-being – not just in child welfare, but in all facets of state governement - and declared him to be a “champion for children.”

Read more about how to fix Texas child welfare

Read NCCPR's 2005 report on Texas child welfare