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.

Texas Hide ‘em: Nearly Two-thirds of state’s foster care placements are “off the books”

The repeated claims that Texas takes proportionately few children are false.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott

The claim has been made over and over by Texans who want the state to take away more children: Texas, it is claimed, takes away children at a much lower rate than other states.

That claim always hid more than it revealed.  But now it turns out that the claim is flat-out false in every respect.  Because now we know that when Texas tells the federal government, and the public, how many children it placed in foster care in a given year, Texas simply leaves out nearly two-thirds of the placements.

Texas does this by slapping a different label onto these placements.  They’re called “parental child safety placements.”  They are a form of kinship care – that is, placement with extended family or friends of the family instead of with total strangers.  Kinship care almost always is a  better,  safer option than stranger care. But it is still foster care.

Here’s how it works. The state Department of Family and Protective Services decides to remove a child from the home.  In order to make the process easier – for the agency, not the family – they essentially blackmail the parent: Give us the child and let us place him “informally” with a relative, without involving the court, or we’ll go to court and your child might wind up with a stranger – or worse, in one of our wonderful Texas institutions.

And make no mistake – once the child is gone, the child welfare agency and maybe, at some point, a court, but not the parent decides when or if that child will ever come back. It is a foster-care placement in everything but name.

The federal government understands that these placements are, in fact, foster care and should be counted as such.  As we noted in a previous post to this blog:

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.”

What we did not know when we put up that previous post, and the real shocker in all this, is how widespread the practice is. 

Officially, Texas took away children 17,357 times in 2014 – at least that’s what Texas reported to the federal government.  But according to a December,2015 report from a  “roundtable” of “stakeholders” convened by the Texas Supreme court Children’s Commission there also were 34,000 so-called parental child safety placements. 

According to the report, about 4,000 of those PCSPs later became officially-counted foster care placements, so counting those 4,000 would be double counting. But that still leaves 30,000 foster care placements in 2014 that Texas simply chose to call something else.

Or to put it another way, Texas has been hiding more than 63 percent of its foster care placements from the federal government – and from anyone else trying to compare the rate at which states take away children.

Put back those off-the-books placements and Texas is apparently taking away children at a rate more than 60 percent above the national average – even when rates of child poverty are factored in. 

Of course, that assumes Texas is the only state that cheats this way.  That’s almost certainly not the case.  We’ve known for nearly a decade that Kansas has its own way of cheating.  And kinship care is particularly vulnerable to this kind of cheating. But I doubt that there are many states that cheat to the extent of hiding nearly two-thirds of their entries into foster care.  Maybe everything really is bigger than Texas.

The reason all this is coming out in the open is that PCSPs now are under attack by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who wants to crack down on these kinship care placements, not because they’re off-the-books, but because two of them were the scenes of headline-grabbing horror stories.  (And, of course, nothing ever goes wrong in other Texas placements.)

So now, caseworkers are afraid to use PCSPs, and traditional foster-care placements are skyrocketing.  Soon, we may finally see an official figure on entries into foster care that is closer to reality – but thousands of children will pay the price, by losing out on the chance to stay with relatives.

There are other revelations in the “roundtable” report:

The report notes that “PCSPs are not really voluntary when the alternative is removal of the child.”  The roundtable participants also noted that, since the state doesn’t have to go to court first, “the parent does not have a lawyer or understand the child welfare or legal system.”

There’s also a truly Orwellian twist:

In theory, federal law requires states to make “reasonable efforts” to keep families together before resorting to foster care. In fact, this has never been enforced and the law is full of loopholes. But Texas actually claims that, if they put a child in foster care and call it a “parental child safety placement” they’ve met the “reasonable efforts” requirement – because, supposedly, that’s not foster care.

One other point about the Roundtable and its December, 2015 report: Scott McCown, the state’s leading champion of a take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare, served on the roundtable.  So I don’t understand why, one month after the report came out, McCown, still was repeating his claim about Texas having an unusually low rate of removal.

REPOSTING: Family preservation and foster care: What does, and does NOT curb child abuse deaths

NEW STUDY BY TEXAS CHILD SAVERS FINDS THAT NOTHING CPS DOES HAS AN EFFECT ON RATE OF CHILD ABUSE DEATHS – AND THEIR ANALYSIS APPLIES IN EVERY OTHER STATE, TOO

I'm reposting this one because the study it discusses is so important, and many people may have missed it over the holidays.

In Texas there is no one more fanatical about demanding that more children be taken from their parents than Scott McCown, executive director of the Center for Public Policy Priorities. CPPP is a group of my fellow liberals, often described as "advocating on behalf of low-income Texans" (which would be true if the one thing low income Texans crave above all else is to have their children taken away).

Like most child savers, the term McCown's 19^th Century counterparts gave themselves, McCown has the best of intentions. But his advocacy has had a lot to do with two foster care panics in Texas, and the diversion of huge amounts of money (in a very stingy state) that could have been used for prevention and family preservation into more child abuse investigations and more foster care instead.

Of course, McCown was the head cheerleader when Texas CPS took away hundreds of children from the FLDS ranch last year. (For details on McCown's role in Texas child welfare, see these previous Blog posts and take a look at NCCPR's 2005 report on Texas child welfare, (do a word search for McCown). An e-mail exchange I had with him, included as an appendix, is particularly revealing.)

One reason McCown and CPPP have so much influence, even in a conservative state, is that, when it comes to child welfare, McCown is the Godsource for Texas media – that one person or organization quoted in every story and for whom all normal journalistic rules of skepticism and verification are null and void.

So it was quite a shock to see the new report CPPP just issued on child abuse fatalities – the good kind of shock. Because this excellent report, with profound implications for every state, is still more evidence that much of the McCown/CPPP message about child protective services for the past decade has been wrong.

The report deals with what does – and what does not – contribute to what appears to be a relatively high rate of child abuse deaths in Texas. The findings, particularly in the "does not" category, are stunning.

By comparing a series of factors to child abuse death rates among the states, the report concludes:

● The rate at which people report child abuse, which is said to be below average in Texas, does not contribute to more child abuse deaths.

● The rate at which a state takes children from their parents, which is said to be below average in Texas, does not contribute to more deaths.

● The rate at which a state screens in reports for investigation, which is said to be above average in Texas, (and the hot issue in Florida right now) does not contribute to fewer deaths.

In short, none of the traditional investigative and "police" functions of child protective services contribute anything to raising or lowering the rate of child abuse fatalities.

I'll get to what does make a difference in a moment. First, though – why don't the traditional CPS functions make a difference? The CPPP report doesn't say. But it's not that hard to figure out.

A VERY LARGE HAYSTACK

The number of children who die of child abuse in Texas is horrifying: 228 in 2007. In fact, even if the number were 1 it would be horrifying, since the only acceptable goal for child abuse fatalities is zero. But there are nearly 6.8 million children in Texas. And of that total, more than 1.5 million are living below the poverty line. That is one gigantic haystack. Why in the world would anyone think that, say, doubling or tripling the number of families investigated or children removed would really help us find more of those 228 needles in time?

So everything we've ever heard from anyone, including CPPP, claiming or implying that hiring more investigators to take more children from more families will save children's lives – is flat wrong. So is every statement from a politician or a CPS agency chief urging us all to report our slightest, most absurd suspicions to a child protective hotline because "you just might save a life." And, of course, so is every Texas news story which starts with a heinous child abuse death and segues immediately to the OSMQ (Obligatory Scott McCown Quote) about the need to take away more children.

Yeah, I know. Some will say: But what about the needles CPS did find, in the sense that the children were "known to the system"? Although the CPPP analysis doesn't mention it, and there are no reliable systematic data, news accounts from around the country suggest that the percentage of child abuse deaths "known to the system" is pretty similar among states as well. So there is no evidence that any of the CPS-related factors contribute to an increase or decrease in those deaths either.

There is one exception: In the very few places large enough to detect a pattern, to the extent that there is any pattern at all, deaths tend to go up in the wake of a foster-care panic, a huge sudden surge in removals of children. And that, too, makes sense. When workers are inundated with a surge in false reports, trivial cases, and needless removals, they have less time to find any child in real danger – so more such cases are missed. When the haystack suddenly grows, it's even harder to find the needles.

REAL CAUSES, REAL SOLUTIONS

So if what CPS does or doesn't do has nothing to do with rates of child abuse fatalities, what does cause the higher rate in Texas?

This is where the CPPP report also is useful in another respect: It provides more evidence that it is impossible to do an accurate comparison of child abuse fatality rates among the states, in other words more evidence that the notorious report from the group calling itself Every Child Matters, which purports to make such a comparison, isn't worth the glossy paper it's printed on.

The CPPP report shows that the allegedly higher rate of such deaths in Texas is due in part to the simple fact that Texas has a broader definition of a child abuse fatality than most states and a more thorough process of child abuse death review than most states.

CPPP goes on to conclude this means other states are undercounting child abuse deaths. It also can mean Texas is overcounting them. For example, as is clear from the experience of Florida, determining when a drowning is an accident and when it is neglect can be highly subjective. But this is CPPP we're talking about; I'm not expecting miracles.

The report also says there are some factors which suggest that at least part of the higher rate in Texas is real. Texas has certain factors which have been shown to contribute to higher rates of child abuse fatalities:

● High rates of poverty

● High rates of teen pregnancy

● Low rates of services to prevent child maltreatment.

Which means, of course, had Texas taken some of the hundreds of millions of dollars it spent to hire more investigators and otherwise make the system bigger and spent it instead on proven prevention programs and help to ameliorate the worst effects of poverty, fewer Texas children might be dead today.

Of course, Scott McCown himself didn't actually write CPPP's report. But I sure hope he reads it.