By Connie Reguli
Thank you Civil Beat in Hawaii for pulling g together a great series on how abusive and corrupt the child welfare system operates. I am sharing snippets and the link to each story. For more stories like this John Hill is the Investigations Editor at Civil Beat. You can reach him by email at jhill@civilbeat.org or follow him on Twitter at @johncornellhill.
Nov 7, 2022. Court appointed attorneys don’t do enough to defend parents. The frustration with family representation by court appointed attorneys is not unique to Hawaii. A Mother Jones article also exposed how the lack of parent representation in western Massachusetts is delaying cases for months.
In Hawaii, a Civil Beat investigation found that the overall system often falls short of the rigorous defense that experts nationally consider the most effective in preserving those rights. In some jurisdictions, those principles form the basis for court-appointed defense in child welfare cases using a much different model than Hawaii’s.
Mother Jones exposed several stories of parents who had lost parental rights due to delays and ineffective court appointed counsel. This problem is not. New one. MJ said: The problem goes back decades: A state-commissioned report in 2003 found a “critical shortage of attorneys available to handle the ever-increasing volume of child welfare cases in the juvenile courts,” and that the issue had reached “crisis proportions” in western Massachusetts. Yet, of all the courts that the authors visited, the Springfield Juvenile Court stood out. “One person we spoke with described the Springfield Juvenile Court system as a fiefdom, with each judge poorly managing his or her own docket,” it reads.
Oct 3 2022 Civil Beat published that State Senator seeks to limit power to remove kids without court order. n. Joy San Buenaventura said the bill would address the findings of a Civil Beat investigation published in September. The story found that in more than 90% of cases of children being taken from their parents after abuse or neglect allegations, police and social workers act on their own without first getting an order from a judge.
“I am alarmed that children are being taken away without a court order,” said San Buenaventura, chair of the Senate Human Services Committee.
Her proposal Was to introduce a measure similar to one passed in 2017 by the Arizona Legislature. In that state, child welfare workers had not been getting court orders before removing children. The new law made it clear that court orders should be the norm, and narrowly defined the circumstances that could lead to an emergency removal absent a warrant.
However her belief may have been misguided.
On July 27, 2022 Arizona’s Channel 12 news reported that – According to DCS reports, bed space in licensed foster homes is at a five-year low. The latest data shows only about 6,329 beds are available. While the number of kids in out-of-home care is also at the lowest in at least five years, DCS records show there are still 11,722 kids in out-of-home care. “When we don’t have enough foster caregivers, we utilize congregate care group home settings,” Mesaros said.
And March 2022 azfamily.com reported – There are more than 14,000 children in foster care across Arizona right now. The Arizona Department of Child Safety says there are only 4,500 licensed foster families.
And horror stories like the 2020 house fire that killed a foster-to-adopt ten year old (and her death was never reported) continue to poor out of AZ. After a fire that her adoptive father confessed to setting at the family home in January 2020, a shocking discovery emerged: The child had died in 2017 at age 10. For more than two years, her remains had been concealed in the family’s attic.
When police investigating the fire discovered the child’s bones, Rafael Loera told them he and his wife Maribel did not disclose the death to officials for fear that the Department of Child Safety would remove their three other children. And of course it is likely that they continue yes to receive the adoption stipend even after her death. As reported by maryjo.pitzl@arizonarepublic.com and follow her on Twitter @maryjpitzl.
And four-month-old Samora who was left in a hot car by her foster father in 2019 as reported by Azcentral.com. Her family had adopted 15 kids from foster care. The article does not disclose the perverted financial incentive with foster to adopt. The truth is that this family was making about $1,000 per month per child in tax free cash along with free medical care for the kids. And oh yeah don’t forget child tax credit which is “cash back” on your kids from other tax paying citizens.
The infant was in the care of her foster father, Roger Ham, at the time of her death Tuesday, The Arizona Republic has confirmed. Phoenix police officials said they aren’t releasing the identity of the foster father because he hasn’t been arrested.
Police said the foster father, an administrator at a Washington Elementary School District transportation facility, arrived at work at about 7 a.m. after dropping off several children at day care. He left work to pick up the infant girl for an appointment, then returned to work. When he returned to his vehicle again at about 3:30 p.m., he found the child still inside the vehicle.
You are not coming into my house,” she said, according to the police report. “You need a warrant!”
In March 2022 Civil Beat reported on the abusive tactics of taking children without a court order or warrant on anonymous tips which sometimes come from estranged partners.
One mom tried to stop the cps worker and cop from taking her child and as another officer approached the door, Chapman held out her arm to block him. The first officer grabbed her right arm and Chapman went to the ground, the report says. The officers took the baby and handed him over to CWS, which placed him in foster care.
Earlier that day, police — including an officer who a couple of hours later helped remove Chapman’s infant — had responded to her home after she reported that the husband had violated a restraining order. At that time, Chapman told one officer that she was afraid her husband would try to frame her for using drugs, according to Dara Carlin, a domestic violence counselor who was there for both incidents. That officer told Chapman he had no concerns about her sobriety, Carlin said.
When it decided to take Chapman’s baby, CWS failed to take into account that her accuser husband had recently burglarized her home, vandalized her car, stolen her telephone and hacked her email, her lawyer said in a later court filing.
In the nine Western states and two Pacific territories in its jurisdiction, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit has drawn very narrow criteria for taking children without a court order. The federal appellate court has found that the constitutional rights of parents and children require judicial review unless there’s reasonable cause to believe a child will be seriously injured in the time it would take to go before a judge, often just a matter of hours.
However snatching children without a warrant is nothing new.
ProPublica just published in October 2022 that police need warrants but child protective services rarely gets one.
Each year, child protective services agencies inspect the homes of roughly 3.5 million children, opening refrigerators and closets without a warrant. Only about 5% of these kids are ultimately found to have been physically or sexually abused.
By law, ACS caseworkers are not allowed to enter and search a home without either permission to enter or an entry order, which is the legal equivalent of a search warrant, unless a child is in imminent danger. But many parents don’t know that they have the right to deny these government agents or don’t push back for fear of losing their children, according to parents and their advocates. And caseworkers frequently say things that are coercive and manipulative in order to get inside homes without going to a judge, according to interviews with more than three dozen former ACS workers, New York City Family Court judges, parents, children and attorneys.
Reporter Eli Hagar exposed the abusive government practices of child protective services in New York.
The story in Civil Beat from July 7 2022 discusses qualified immunity granted to social workers when parents sue for civil rights violations.
This summer a mom and her daughter asked the question – can we sue cps for money damages. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals answered last week with an unequivocal “yes.”
It was the latest 9th Circuit decision addressing the question of “qualified immunity,” the principle that public officials generally cannot be held liable for official actions. The exception is when they violate clearly established rights that they ought to have known about.
The idea in recent years has come under attack by police reformers who argue that officers should not enjoy special protection when they cross the line, such as using excessive force.
But it often also plays out in child protection cases, when social workers remove children from their parents without a court order. That’s only supposed to happen when children are in so much danger that they could be injured in the short time it would take to get a judge to issue a warrant.
Lawsuits against child protective services rarely make it past the scrutiny. The courts have ways to nuance the facts of the case to shield social workers from liability even in the most egregious cases.
It took Sixth Circuit until 2018 to acknowledge that social workers should get liable for damages if they lid under oath to get a ex parte removal order.
And YouTube is full of videos showing removals in real time where there is no apparent immediate threat of harm.
Indiana. 👇👇👇
Ohio 👇👇👇👇
Tennessee 👇👇👇
And somewhere in America 👇👇👇
Be sure to watch for my follow up.
Radical Tennessee - Radically Accountable and Radically Free 