A quick review of recent news bears that out, with stories of individuals arrested for using Kiks accounts to share CSAM and sexually exploit minors in Connecticut, Florida, Indiana, and Pennsylvania, among other places. Kik’s not alone as a site that predators use to seduce and exploit children. In Georgia, a defendant pled guilty in February to hacking the Snapchat accounts of minors, stealing their (sometimes inappropriate) personal photos, and threatening them with exposure if they didn’t provide him with sexually explicit photos of themselves.

Kik, in particular, seems to have ensnared a number of children and youth into viewing child pornography, as exemplified by cases in Florida, Maryland, and Indiana in which juveniles were accused of viewing CSAM on Kik accounts.

It’s a problem that law enforcement and state legislators have tried to address, often without success. A decade ago, experts were expressing serious concern about individuals using Kik to engage in exploiting children and sharing CSAM, and the app was supposed to be shut down in 2019 but was instead sold and continues to do business as usual. At least 19 states, including most recently Iowa, have passed legislation to limit minors’ use of social media apps by requiring age verification and/or parental consent for minors. While a number of courts have found these age-based restrictions unconstitutional, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals found this month that Texas’ restrictions “materially advance[] Texas’s substantial interest in protecting children’s data, safety, and privacy in a digital world.” Those opposing the law have asked the Supreme Court to take up review. In the meantime, there are reports that kids are doing all they can to fool the age verification technology that some apps have adopted, including by drawing fake mustaches on the pictures they must upload for the age check.

While the debate continues over the efficacy and legality of the tools needed to protect children from being lured into the dark corners of the internet, adults need to ensure they understand what the children in their care are consuming. Parents, teachers, foster caregivers, and others responsible for children should take steps to manage the apps that a young person can download — something easily achievable whether you’re working with a product from Apple, Android, or Microsoft. Adults should remind children and youth of the dangers that lurk on the internet, sharing not stories of the “boogeyman” but real-life examples such as those of the criminal gangs that have extorted teens online, of the dangers of nude photos being hacked, and of the severe and life-altering criminal penalties for possessing CSAM materials.

Twenty years ago, children had more freedom to make stupid mistakes without suffering lifelong consequences. Today, going down the rabbit holes of Tik-Tok, Instagram, Kik, and other social media apps may lead a teen to a tragic end.

First, a little background. Significant prenatal exposure to drugs and/or alcohol causes serious damage to the unborn child, and it’s a widespread problem. Moreover, drug and alcohol use during pregnancy is a signal of other dysfunction within the family that may threaten a newborn child’s safety. As one group of researchers noted, “Maternal substance use often occurs within a broader context of mental health challenges, trauma histories, violence, unstable housing and relationships, poverty, and limited access to supportive services.” Among newborns identified as victims of prenatal exposure between 2018-2022, approximately 15% later suffered a confirmed case of child maltreatment before reaching the age of three. Even less chronic exposure affects children: use of THC during pregnancy can result in low birth weight and respiratory distress issues, and alcohol exposure can lead to the long-term physical and cognitive damage associated with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder.

Over the past decade, we’ve had two separate tools for addressing the needs of drug- and alcohol-exposed newborns. The first approach is the child protective services response, generally reserved for situations in which heavy substance use during pregnancy results in demonstrated damage to the newborn. In states such as Georgia, such use may result in an allegation of “prenatal abuse.” Second, since passage in 2016 of the federal Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, we’ve had a “public health” option designed to steer new mothers whose babies are born substance-exposed to community-based recovery and support services.

In many jurisdictions, it is the child welfare agency that is charged with determining which of the two tracks to follow when a child is born substance-exposed. And as you can imagine, assessing the level of risk created by the substance-using parent and providing the right level of services to the family while keeping the newborn safe from harm is a difficult task. New Mexico has provided an unfortunate experiment in the obstacles child welfare agencies face in getting those calls right.

In 2019, New Mexico’s legislature passed its own state-level version of CARA, requiring diversion to “voluntary” support and recovery services in many cases involving families of substance-exposed newborns. A 2023 legislative audit demonstrated that, despite the high number of substance-exposed children born in New Mexico, many identified families were receiving no such services — in part due to bureaucratic red tape and lack of training or funding. In April of this year, a scathing report from the state’s Attorney General documented how the failed implementation of the state CARA law led to the deaths of numerous drug-exposed newborns. Amid growing concerns and legislative action to reform the law, the Governor mandated in 2025 that any newborn determined to have suffered prenatal exposure to methamphetamines, fentanyl, or multiple substances, or diagnosed with fetal alcohol syndrome, be taken into care and a dependency petition filed to determine the child’s proper care and placement.

The Governor’s action was a reasonable step, one would think, giving child protection priority to cases in which a mother was either drinking so heavily during pregnancy that her child suffered the significant diagnosis of fetal alcohol syndrome or was found to be using very hard and addictive drugs, indicating an inability to safely care for a very young child. Instead, dozens of medical and related professionals issued a letter decrying the new policy, and the ACLU filed a lawsuit to block it. This week, the New Mexico Supreme Court rightly rejected the ACLU’s claims.

The ACLU’s challenge, though, is part of a broader attack on child protection work in general, one that often treats any efforts to ensure the safety of substance-exposed infants as racially motivated attacks on oppressed parents. Legislators in New York and other states have pushed bills to limit testing for prenatal exposure in newborns without express parental consent. As we reported in 2024, the Attorney General of New Jersey filed an action to stop state hospitals from drug testing mothers despite the need to ensure child safety. Articles proliferate such as this one, painting a sympathetic portrait of a mother whose baby was removed “just because” she smoked “legal weed” while pregnant. Never mind that alcohol is also legal and its use in pregnancy can cause horrific, lifelong consequences for a child.

Lost in these battles are the interests of children who have suffered harm from their mother’s substance use during pregnancy. A young child whose mother is suffering a significant substance abuse disorder is extremely vulnerable to abuse and neglect. A newborn child whose respiratory and central nervous systems have suffered damage from prenatal exposure needs significant help. The 2016 CARA Act was designed to broaden our care for these little ones without making every case into a child protective services case, and the answer is not to stop that effort in its tracks but rather to put in place the policies, practices, and funding to make sure that (1) serious maternal substance use is treated as a safety threat to a young child and (2) that every mother who is struggling with both substance use and the challenges of caring for an infant receives the services, support, and monitoring necessary for her recovery and the child’s safety. Rather than ending testing, we should be testing all newborns for exposure. Rather than focusing on the parents, we should be focusing on the healthcare, safety, and developmental needs of the newborn infant.

All the rest is just ideological blustering.

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In other news:

• Alex Adams and his team at ACF are doing some impressive work lately, including (1) cutting back on unnecessary clutter, (2) promoting innovations in child welfare through the use of AI and predictive analytics, (3) adding services to the FFPSA clearinghouse, and (4) focusing on finding solutions for high-acuity youth in foster care. And pointing out real issues with our system, including major problems with data systems around the country.

• A class-action lawsuit over West Virginia’s foster care system has been revived by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.

• Oklahoma has expanded foster care to age 21.

• Governors in Oklahoma and Arkansas will be opening the “Trump” savings accounts for children to young people in foster care.

• As all of us who’ve worked in child welfare know too well, child abuse and neglect is often an intergenerational problem.

• Using its expanded powers recently granted by the North Carolina Legislature, NC DHHS is taking over some troubled county social services offices and currently looking at problems in Charlotte-Mecklenburg.

• We really, really need to look at how our schools systems are vetting and screening teachers. See here and here.

• Reporting suspected child abuse is mandatory, as this case and this case remind us.

• New York City’s ACS is cutting foster care prevention services.

• Iowa has a new law protecting the rights of foster parents who don’t agree with gender ideology.

  Child Protection & Well-being Trends is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The thrust of the Plaintiff’s complaint is that DCYF is not providing undocumented children in care and youth in extended foster care with information and services that will enable them to obtain Special Immigrant Juvenile Status. This humanitarian visa is available to alien children in foster care whom a court determines are dependent, cannot be returned to a parent due to “abuse, abandonment, or neglect” by at least one parent, or a similar state law reason, and whose best interests preclude a return to the youth’s country of origin. To apply to federal authorities for the status, a child or youth first has to obtain a “predicate order” from a court with jurisdiction over the juvenile with regard to custody or dependency issues. Deciding whether or not to grant an SIJS “predicate order” is discretionary with the juvenile or similar court, although it can be reversed if the court abuses that discretion. Because Washington is one of 13 states that don’t provide dependent children with attorneys who could have requested this relief from the juvenile court, the Plaintiffs argue that the burden was on DCYF to ensure the youths’ rights to pursue SIJS were protected.

I’m not sure this case has legs.

First, the Plaintiffs argue that “nearly all immigrant youth without legal status in DCYF’s custody are eligible” for SIJS. That can’t be right, as the vast majority of children in foster care, both in Washington and across the US, are reunited with parents or family. Sometimes those reunifications are made across international borders, as DCYF noted in a statement. One of the exemplar plaintiffs, now 18, came to the US unaccompanied in 2023, was placed by federal authorities with relatives, and didn’t enter Washington’s foster care system until she was removed from relatives in 2025. She has a three-year-old child in Guatemala who, presumably, is being cared for by her family there. The other proposed class representative came illegally to the United States in 2016 to live with her mother and was not removed from her mother until January, 2026, at the age of 17. Although Plaintiffs assert that each youth suffered “trauma” in Guatemala and would like to pursue a future in the United States, there are no allegations that they lack fit parents.

Second is the question of relief. Several years ago, I filed an action against Georgia’s child welfare agency on behalf of undocumented children and youth in foster care who were not being assisted in obtaining their SIJS status from the federal government, but all of our clients already had a predicate order from the juvenile court finding that returning them to their country of origin would be detrimental. Even then, the federal court denied our action in part on the basis that it couldn’t order the relief requested, as granting SIJS status was a discretionary act of federal immigration authorities.

Here, the Plaintiffs have a double hoop to jump through, as the burden would seemingly be on them to both show the juvenile court would grant the predicate order and then show the feds would grant SIJS status leading to a green card. Furthermore, I’m interested in their novel argument that a juvenile court would have authority to issue a predicate SIJS order in cases involving young adults over the age of 18 in extended foster care, which is available to age 21. Generally, while states including Washington define “child” to include young adults in extended foster care, those youth are not in the “custody” of the state or “wards” of the state. Rather, they are young adults who are voluntarily participating in services, and the court has some ongoing oversight over the services provided.

One interesting revelation from this lawsuit is that it provides an example of the problems with the Office of Refugee Resettlement’s unaccompanied minor program that were highlighted by the New York Times and this column last years. Plaintiffs allege that S.O.L, their 18-year old client, was released by ORR in 2023 to relatives in Pennsylvania, was abused there, moved to live with relatives in Washington State, and was again abused or neglected, prompting her removal to foster care. Since 2021, Plaintiffs state, the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement has released over 5,000 unaccompanied minors to sponsors in Washington State, and a significant number of them may have been removed from those sponsors and placed in state foster care. Since the federal government has responsibility for these children and youth, shouldn’t ORR be ensuring their safety and well-being?

This column often highlights the problems that occur at the intersection of child welfare and immigration, and this lawsuit is a good example of how the issues can be intertwined. These youth are hoping to use the state child welfare and foster care system to protect them from federal immigration officials. One has a US-born child she wants to stay with and doesn’t want to have to take back to Guatemala if she is deported. The other has a child she left in Guatemala and wants to bring here. Immigration advocates are claiming Washington’s DCYF has an obligation to assist them in avoiding deportation and the hard choices that it will entail for them and their young children. Is that really the role of a state child welfare agency?

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In other news:

• Jerry Bruce at the Georgia Office of the Child Advocate has a new newsletter!

• Rhode Island’s Child Advocate sued to prevent federal authorities from accessing state hospital records of children receiving puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries as treatment for gender identity issues. Her claim? That multiple children in the state’s foster care system were receiving this care. Given the evidence establishing links between severe childhood trauma and sexual or physical abuse and childhood gender identity disorders, it’s concerning that children in care would be undergoing such irreversible treatments. A federal court of appeals denied her efforts to protect release of the records.

• The US House of Representatives passed and sent on to the Senate the “Fostering the Future Act,” which if adopted would make welcome changes to the Chaffee Program for foster youth and young adults leaving the foster care system. Here’s a summary, but in general the bill seeks to improve the availability of housing assistance for foster alumni, expand supportive services related to housing (e.g., financial literacy courses and assistance with security deposits) up to age 26, and expand the types of educational programs funded by federal dollars to include GED completion and vocational training programs.

• State legislatures continue to struggle with balancing a parent’s right to homeschool their children against the need to protect children from abuse.

• Children in foster care continue to be stuck in hospitals due to medical fragility and behavioral health issues.

• Ohio’s legislature is attempting to improve information-sharing among agencies involved in child protection.

• More legislative developments and discussion of whether clergy should be required to report child abuse, this time in Missouri.

• HHS and Mississippi’s Attorney General are piloting a program to find and recover missing foster children.

  Child Protection & Well-being Trends is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

• In the wake of Congressional hearings on the needs of older foster youth and young adults aging out of care, a number of bills have been proposed in Congress that would improve the Chafee program’s services to these young people. They include:

  • HR 7432 (LaHood, IL), the Foster Youth Housing Opportunity Act.

  • HR 7343, (Miller, OH), the Foster Youth Workforce Opportunity Act.

  • HR 7463 (Chu, CA), the Foster Youth Postsecondary Education Access and Success Act.

  • HR 7529 (Davis, IL), the Fresh Starts for Foster Youth Act.

  In general, these bills recognize that youth aging out of foster care need a broader range of supports than currently available via the federal Chafee program. These measures would expand educational services to include apprenticeships and vocational training, would provide legal services to former foster youth, and would increase the amounts available for tuition.

• Following up on our last installment on problems in New Mexico’s child welfare agency: some political figures in the state have suggested putting CYFD under an “independent” board separate from the Governor’s authority. My friend Maralyn Beck at the New Mexico Child First Network says that’s a bad idea because the success of the child welfare agency depends on the success of the state’s child welfare system — Medicaid, childcare, education, and public health. I agree with her that you can’t separate child protection and child welfare from politics — on the contrary, politicians need to demonstrate how they’re going to address child abuse and should be held accountable when they fail to do so.

• Meanwhile, Searchlight New Mexico reports that despite the Governor’s declaration in February “ending the practice” of having foster youth sleeping in offices, the agency is now putting these youth in shelters at night and transporting them back to the office to spend the day. Of course, the idea that one can simply snap his or her fingers and solve the complex issues that lead to youth sleeping in offices is pretty naive.

• The Children’s Village, a nationwide provider of residential, foster care, and other services for children, is in hot water over its care of unaccompanied migrant youth at one of its facilities in New York. But it’s clear from the news coverage that the facility was handling older youth with documented behavioral issues and struggling to contain fights. So should these youth have been in a higher-level, more secure facility? Was that even allowed under HSS rules? Once again, it’s the recurring issue of how providers are expected to manage difficult and sometimes violent youth in a facility not equipped to serve those youth.

• If you’re feeling nerdy, the Congressional Research Service has a new publication out describing child welfare financing.

• In case you haven’t seen it, I’d recommend reviewing these recent HHS publications on predictive analytics in child welfare. As AI grows increasingly capable, I think child welfare agencies really need to see how they can use AI and predictive analytics to make better decisions not only at intake but throughout the investigation, foster care, and permanency planning processes.

• Maine’s legislature has created a new, independent office of the Child Advocate.

• Rhode Island is opening a new residential facility for girls with significant and complex behavioral issues.

• Meanwhile, here’s an article on child protection efforts in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan!

• LA’s child welfare director is stepping down, and NYC has a new head of ACS.

• Louisiana seems to be seriously considering whether to dismantle its stand-alone child welfare agency and reshuffle its functions among other agencies. “Sen. Patrick McMath, R-Covington, who chairs the Senate Committee on Health and Welfare, presented legislation Wednesday morning to move tasks the state Department of Child and Family Services handles to other state departments. Louisiana State Police would take over its child abuse hotline and intake center as well as respond immediately to urgent cases. Child support enforcement would become the responsibility of the state attorney general, while foster care and other family services would land with the state Department of Health,” the Louisiana Illuminator reported.

Thanks for reading!

The AG’s report highlights long-standing issues including (1) failure to properly investigate and take action to protect children from chronic and significant abuse, (2) failure to cooperate with law enforcement and other agencies to protect children and keep them safe, and (3) workforce shortages, and (4) a failure to train staff in assessing and addressing risk. But overall, what emerges from the report — and the Governor’s response to it — suggests the problems at CYFD are less technical than cultural. In fact, the report accuses the agency of a long history as a “toxic, punitive, and insular” organization.

The evidence? First, the report demonstrates a lack of transparency at CYFD. As the Attorney General states, his office’s efforts to investigate an agency subject to his oversight were stifled, stymied, delayed, and obfuscated. He’s since sued the agency over what he deems its cover-up of the facts. Second, the report repeatedly cites examples of prior leadership’s top-down culture, one in which questions and concerns from front line staff were either ignored or, in some cases, met with retaliation and discipline. Third, the report demonstrates this culture spread through the staff, who themselves retaliated against foster parents who tried to advocate for therapy, services, and support for the children in their care. “The dynamic between foster parents and CYFD is often marked by a stark power imbalance, persistent mistreatment, lack of support, and retaliation,” the report states. “Foster families routinely feel powerless and undervalued.” Finally, the Governor’s response to the AG’s report is a classic “nothing to see here, move on” response. There’s no way that a brand-new team of leaders can immediately change the described decades of toxicity, and a better response would have been to thank the AG for the report, acknowledge that changing course will take time, remind the public that balancing child safety and family integrity is a hard job, and commit to building a child protection system that keeps children safe and serves families.

While the AG’s report makes a number of recommendations, it is likely that nothing will improve for New Mexico’s abused children and vulnerable families unless and until the agency changes its culture. As this column has emphasized before, the secret to building an agency that adequately protects children from harm, serves those in foster care, and helps them find permanency is not policy: it’s organizational culture. I’d encourage the new leaders of NM’s CYFD to consider focusing on a few issues:

1. Listen to the front line. As the AG’s report states, CYFD has been a top-down organization that didn’t consider the views of its workers who were out there interacting with families each day. It retaliated against foster parents who spoke up. Leadership’s attitude, as the report notes, has likely led to its high turnover in case managers, because who wants to work for an organization that doesn’t value their input? New leadership must demonstrate to its frontline workers that they are free to speak up, are free to raise concerns about policies, and are free to raise questions when they have doubts about directives and processes.

2. Adopt Safety Culture. As folks like Michael Cull and more recently groups like Casey Family Programs have consistently preached, you don’t keep children safe by deciding at the leadership level what you’re going to do and then telling your staff to do it, or else. From the AG’s report, one of the problems at CYFD appears to have been leadership’s directive to prioritize keeping families together and reunifying children with their families over child safety — what the AG called an" “inversion” of the state’s legislative mandate. Implementing safety culture doesn’t mean you can’t emphasize the value of family integrity to your staff. What it does mean is that you continually ask your staff what they are seeing in the field, and you provide them the training to make hard decisions about whether or not to remove a child. It means you provide them the space to make judgment calls, and you support them in their efforts to make the right call. You recognize that your caseworkers who are working with the family are likely to know more about safety risks and family strengths than anyone else. And once they’ve made a judgment call, you support them.

3. Transparency and Humility. Our laws and our societal values don’t allow us, thankfully, to simply jerk children out of their homes if we feel the State can be a better parent. In fact, the State is never a better parent. At the same time, there are children out there who are facing significant abuse and neglect and need our intervention. Explaining the difficulty of this work to the public is critical, because it is the public that funds child welfare and that is entitled to expect results. Retaliating against staff and foster parents who speak up, shutting down an AG’s investigation, dismissing the results of that investigation as “old news,” and hiding behind “confidentiality” are losing strategies if we want to build a child protection and foster care system that has the support of policymakers and the public. We are always going to have tragedies in child welfare, because our child welfare system is build to deal with tragedy. Being humble in what we can do given our limits and being transparent in how we are going about this work are the keys to building a system that the public trusts, that can recruit good social workers, that encourages struggling parents to cooperate, and that can recruit and retain dedicated foster and adoptive parents.

   Child Protection & Well-being Trends is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

• First up, I’m excited that a bill I’ve been working on for a couple of years to bolster support for Georgia’s foster parents gained final passage. HB 256 strengthens the Foster Parent Bill of Rights by creating “certified volunteer advocates” who will be authorized to assist foster parents as they work through issues with DFCS, ensures they have the ability to seek independent legal advice, and bolsters due process for them during investigations. The unfortunate truth is that, over the many years I’ve worked in this field, I’ve seen foster parents often sidelined by the agency and, at times, actively retaliated against when they speak up on behalf of a child in their care. This new legislation reinforces their ability to seek outside advice and assistance without being accused of “violating confidentiality,” and it will enable groups such as Fostering Impact to ramp up their support for foster parents. An add-on to the bill also allows parties access to the full and complete record of their juvenile court case.

• Second up is more on an issue this column has been harping on for years: the problem of youth with significant behavioral health challenges who end up in foster care or, worse, in hotels, juvenile detention centers, and offices. Sen. Jon Ossoff’s Office has been looking into the issue, and this past week The Imprint released a nationwide survey on children abandoned to foster care due to their complex behavioral needs. Georgia’s legislature has passed a bill supporting a pilot program to screen children in foster care for autism. Under pressure, Maryland is increasing its residential and foster care services for children with these needs, and a bipartisan bill in Congress would ensure that residential treatment facilities for children can be paid for by Medicaid and not considered IMDs.

• Following Congressional hearings, a number of bills at the federal level have been introduced to improve on services to older foster youth and those aging out of care. In related news, here’s a new brief from Child Trends on ways to improve programs for older youth.

• The Administration for Children and Families recently added new programs to the Families First Clearinghouse and sent a letter to child protective services agencies across the nation warning them that removing children from parents “solely because parents decline to support a child’s self-identification as the opposite sex” violates the First Amendment and fundamental parental rights.

• The U.S. Supreme Court this past week issued a ruling that frees therapists to speak freely with young clients who are struggling with their identity as it relates to gender and sexuality. Colorado, along with other states, had chilled such discussion, and therapists working with a minor who believed their gender didn’t align with their sex had no choice but to encourage the young person to transition.

• Hawaii is one of many jurisdictions seeking answers to the insurance liability crisis that foster care providers face. Then you have folks like Richard Wexler who are happy the liability crisis is destroying the foster care system.

• A bill in Louisiana would dissolve the State’s separate child welfare agency and place those functions under other agencies.

• My friends at Wellroot continue to make strides in expanding community-based care, this time with a new Family Resiliency Center serving the Gainesville, Georgia area.

• A judge in Dallas, Texas, has appointed a receiver to oversee the operations of a failed foster care provider.

• Here’s a recap of child welfare developments from Utah’s latest legislative session.

• Citing expenses, West Virginia’s governor vetoed a number of child welfare reforms.

• Oregon passed a new bill of rights for children and youth in care. But despite losing a significant federal lawsuit over the issue and being warned that the federal government may withhold funds, the State appears intent on discriminating against foster parents who do not believe in medically transitioning children in care who suffer from gender identity issues.

• The Bipartisan Policy Center continues to roll out its efforts to reform the way the federal government finances child welfare.

• Following a landmark ruling against Meta (Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) finding its platforms are harmful to children’s mental health, more countries are moving to limit children’s access to social media.

• Will this Texas case upend child protection efforts?

Thanks for reading! Send your news and suggestions!

• In early February, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons came out with a policy statement recommending against surgery as a treatment for gender incongruence for anyone under 19. The surgeons found that “the natural course of pediatric gender dysphoria remains poorly understood” and cited both issues of capacity to consent and treatment efficacy. The American Medical Association quickly followed suit, stating that mastectomies and other surgeries intended to alter gender presentation should be delayed until adulthood.

• In an emergency order last week, the Supreme Court found California parents likely to succeed in their case against California school policies and laws requiring schools to hide a child’s “sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression” from parents. A majority of the Court found that the policies violated the parents’ fundamental rights to raise their children and “cut out the primary protectors of children’s best interests,” whether the parents’ objections were based in religious belief or in a more general fundamental parental rights claim. Even Justice Kagan’s dissent, focused on what she saw as an unnecessary rush to judgment by the High Court, noted that “California’s policy, in depriving all parents of information critical to their children’s health and well-being, could have crossed the constitutional line.”

• In his State of the Union Address, President Trump specifically addressed the problem of children being removed to foster care based on a parent’s refusal to affirm a child’s newly-found gender identity. In the gallery was Sage Blair, now 19, and her family. At 14, Sage was secretly transitioned at school, sexually assaulted in the boys’ bathroom, trafficked when she ran away, and placed in foster care because her adoptive mother/biological grandmother would not “affirm” her gender identity. The young woman’s tragic suffering at the hands of Virginia school officials, juvenile court judges, and human traffickers is recounted in a recent Wall Street Journal article.

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In other news:

• This seems like a good idea: in Texas, there’s a new hotline rolling out that allows parents who are under CPS investigation to seek early legal assistance.

• West Virginia is considering legislation to privatize its foster care system.

• The federal auditor, GAO, is pointing out the need for HHS to provide clarity for states regarding when federal dollars will pay for congregate care.

• A federal bill would prohibit nondisclosure agreements in civil child abuse settlements.

• Joining some other states, Florida’s House of Representatives has passed a bill that would allow parents accused of child abuse by a physician to obtain a second opinion.

• This column has addressed previously the problem of many children who came across the border, were placed with unvetted sponsors, were “lost” to the system, and were trafficked. While this recent article tries to debunk the idea that thousands of these children were in fact missing, it seems to acknowledge that there were, in fact, serious gaps in the federal government’s efforts to ensure these children were accounted for and receiving proper care.

• Are Tennessee’s efforts to recruit faith-based foster families working? This article raises questions.

• Idaho’s Senate has strengthened protections around visitation with parents for children who have suffered significant physical or sexual abuse.

• New Mexico’s State Auditor has accused the state’s child welfare agency with misusing millions of dollars intended to address children’s mental health needs. In perhaps better news, the Governor announced that no foster children are being housed in DCYF offices.

• The Associated Press continues to explore how Georgia’s DFCS fell into an $85mm budget hole.

• HHS is promoting predictive risk modeling to improve child welfare outcomes and safety.

• Bills in the Tennessee House and Senate would authorize judges to detain children with certain violent behaviors even if they have been ruled incompetent to face a delinquency charge.

• More on the lack of mental health services for children in Connecticut.

Thanks for reading!

So in 2015, it was really exciting for me to join a cohort of students at Oxford University to dig into these issues deeply as part of the International Human Rights Law Master’s degree program. There were students from all over the world, many of them having already gained deep experience working with children, refugees, and victims of human rights violations. Folks from Afghanistan and Sudan and Mauritius, all thrown together. I was among the oldest students (to say the least) and excited to see a younger group of advocates working on these issues. At graduation in 2017, I felt confident that the basic values of human rights — the dignity and worth of each individual, the requirement that government respect and uphold individual rights, and the duty of nations to condemn widespread human rights abuses — were secure and solid.

Ten years later, my faith in the triumph of human rights has been shattered. Increasingly, speech is being suppressed in Europe and autocracies such as China and Qatar are being praised. Exemplary of the problem is the case of a young woman who was my Oxford classmate, Caylan Ford. We sat together on summer afternoons on the lawns at New College, drinking wine and talking about, among other things, the power of documentary film to expose injustice. And just a few years later, amidst the rise of cancel culture, she found herself the victim of those who reject the values of Western liberal democracy. She’s written a powerful essay on her experience that I’d recommend to you.

For raising questions in a private conversation about the differences in how the media handles “domestic” vs. “foreign” terrorists, Ford was in 2019 labeled a “racist” and driven from a promising career in politics. The spurious allegations, reported extensively in the Canadian media, stymied her career. A significant lawsuit against those who cancelled her goes to trial next month.

Whatever the outcome of that case, here’s what concerns me. A decade ago, I felt free saying whatever I wanted to say among a diverse group of professionals dedicated to human rights and children’s rights. They believed in free speech. If we disagreed, they’d tell me and argue their points. Disagreements didn’t become a reason for character assassination.

In recent years, however, mob justice condemns any departure from current progressive groupthink. I could cite examples, but I think any of you who work in that field know that if you were applying to a job in the human rights, you’d be judged on your political views and know that only progressives are welcome. When significant numbers of our United Nations staffers back Francesca Albanese and her vocal support for Hamas and her justification of its violent October 7, 2023, attacks, it’s indicative of a system that has rejected the equal dignity of humans in favor of a Marxist hierarchy of oppressors and victims. We are increasingly abandoning the ideals of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for a scheme in which only certain viewpoints are authorized and others are suppressed.

Whether Caylan Ford wins her case or not, here’s my concern. When I went to Oxford, I did so knowing that I’d meet a lot of different people from different cultures with different opinions about how best to improve society. While there, I relished our discussions, knowing that each person’s viewpoint was considered valuable and that we all shared some basic principles across cultures and nations. The experience really reinforced my belief in the equal worth of every single person.

But to see someone whom I know to share my belief in the principles of human rights, who shared in that Oxford experience with me, be condemned by radical partisans and the Canadian media, and to see more broadly so-called human rights professionals actively reject the concept of equal dignity of all humans in pursuit of their own selfish political ends, is disappointing.

We can do better than this.

In the ensuing years, the political shift to treating substance abuse as “no big deal” has resulted in such horrors as children left to live in homeless encampments with fentanyl-addicted parents and state officials suing hospitals who report to authorities cases of newborns whose mothers test positive for drugs — the allegation being that hospitals are “discriminating” against these mothers, the interests and protection of the newborn be damned. As part of ideological efforts to “abolish family policing,” t’s become politically popular in recent years to minimize concern over parental substance abuse as a danger to children.

So it was a surprise this week to hear that the Governor of New Mexico now regrets signing into law a 2019 state version of the federal CARA law. Like the federal law, the state law encouraged a softer approach to reports of mothers giving birth to children affected by prenatal substance use. “We were releasing . . . infants in the care of highly drug-addicted parents who were not required to take any service or get treatment for their addiction. Now I don’t know if there is any better recipe for a disaster in America than that one,” said Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham.

Perhaps she’s onto something. Meanwhile, across the country, we see report after report of children living in squalor and danger related to parental substance abuse, including most recently a child living in a NYC homeless shelter who was beaten almost to death by her drunk father.

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In other news:

• Reiterating the above point, in 2025 in Washington State, 22 children whose families were involved with the child welfare system died and 35 almost died, with half the cases attributed to opioid exposure.

• Following up on the liability insurance crisis in child welfare, a number of bills are circulating at the state level to make insurance affordable while improving child protection. One of those is Florida Senate Bill 1600, which would give insurance breaks to “accredited” child-serving organizations that demonstrate thorough implementation of child protection policies. Another is New York, where they are looking at managing the situation through an assigned-risk pool. Since I helped design the Florida approach, I’m a bit biased towards that model.

• Maryland still hasn’t solved its ongoing problems of children with complex needs staying in hospitals and hotels. West Virginia, likewise, is looking at spending millions to bring home children with complex needs who are currently placed out of state. Rhode Island still has 6% of its children placed out of state. Know what none of those states has? A coordinated system of care with a wide range of community and residential treatment options for children with complex needs.

• Which brings us to our home state of Georgia, where (as has been widely reported) the child welfare system has run over budget in significant part due to increased expenses related to managing cases of children with complex behavioral needs. This past week, the Chair of the House Appropriations Committee sponsored HB 1002, which would carve foster children out of managed care and back into fee-for-service Medicaid. It’s a good start, but I’d note:

  • It needs to include coverage for families of children on adoption assistance, as many of those families struggle to care for their child’s complex behavioral needs and, when they can’t get that care, may have to surrender the child to the state; and

  • It’s not managed care or FFS that’s the issue: rather, it’s ensuring that (1) Medicaid covers a broad range of intensive community-based and residential services, including therapeutic foster care; (2) that “medical necessity” decisions are made by professionals who take into account the fact that children live in families (biological, adoptive, and foster), and those families often can’t manage violent behaviors; and (3) without professionals to coordinate care and ensure the child is receiving the appropriate level of care, it matters not whether the child is in FFS or managed care.

• Kansas is looking at making clergy mandated reporters of child abuse.

• The issue of regulating homeschooling as part of child abuse monitoring and prevention is on the front burner again.

• Finally, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons has come out against surgically modifying secondary sex characteristics as medically appropriate treatment for minors. The policy also brings into question the basis of the pathway from puberty blockers to cross-sex hormones to surgery.

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Frequent readers may notice I took a bit of an extended vacation over the holidays, as we had a family trip abroad the first two weeks of January. So I’ve got a lot of work to do to catch you all up!

First up is the situation in my home state of Georgia, where the state child welfare agency is on track for a $48 million shortfall and has, since October, stopped funding for private agencies who do the necessary work of providing visitation services, behavioral aides, family assessments, and transportation. The agency has treated this situation as a nothingburger, blaming juvenile court judges who order unnecessary services and providers who aren’t doing their jobs. This column makes a strenuous effort to present child welfare news objectively, but let me depart from that for a moment. As I said in a letter that was delivered to the Governor last week, a child welfare agency that cuts off its private providers and drives some of them to close their doors its cutting off its nose to spite its face. While the legislature appears poised to reinstate and increase funding, the agency’s attitude toward its providers is, quite frankly, horrendous. In a Republican-led state that has always invited private-public partnerships, the DHS Commissioner suggested that they should be handing these services “in house.” Her testimony reminds me, unfortunately, of Hugo Chavez’ 2007 statement that the Venezuelan government could manage its oil reserves better than the private sector. If you’ve found a child welfare system that can accomplish its mission relying purely on government agencies, let me know. Otherwise, demonizing and defunding private, often nonprofit, providers is nothing less than … well, y’all, tell me.

In other news:

• Ryan Hanlon, whom I consider to be an excellent choice, has been tapped to lead the Children’s Bureau.

• I was at a meeting this week where we discussed the recent research questioning the effectiveness of politically-popular and often-funded home visiting programs. I’ve been an fan of those programs, the research gives me pause. As one of my colleagues at the meeting said, one’s gut feeling is that these programs ensure an outside professional is “laying eyes on” a vulnerable child. But if that’s not effective in reducing child maltreatment, what is?

• Also noted in that meeting, we are spending a ton of federal dollars on adoption subsidies but have little oversight of those funds. Once a child is adopted from foster care and a family starts receiving adoption assistance, current guidance restricts the state from asking basic questions: How is the child doing? Is the child still living with you? Are you still caring for this child? It seems that in a reasonable system, we’d be asking those questions on behalf of adoptees on a regular basis.

• Tell me again why states like Texas and New York prohibiting folks from calling in a child abuse report and remaining anonymous?

• New Jersey has abolished illegitimacy.

• Averhealth, which was in the news in Georgia regarding questions about its drug testing for parents involved with DFCS, is back in the news.

• In Massachusetts, advocates don’t want a child to go live with her father in Guatemala, presumably because they believe it’s a crappy place to live.

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How we define a problem determines our response. Sometimes under-defining a problem causes us to overlook serious issues, such as the dangers of children living in homeless camps. Other times over-defining a problem causes us to overreact, as when parents are arrested, and children placed in foster care, simply because the parent allowed the child to walk to town “unsupervised.”

In recent weeks, I’ve been following a number of developments that raise an important related question: who, exactly, is a “victim,” and what is “abuse”?

In a world of limited resources, providing an answer to those questions is critical to society’s ability to protect children and vulnerable adults from harm and exploitation. If everyone’s a victim, resources are diluted to the point that those most in danger are left undefended. If no one’s a victim, there’s no reason to provide protection, and those affected are left to suffer. Labeling something “Abuse” demands that society punish the abuser and prevent future abuse. Defining an act as not abusive means it’s allowed regardless of the negative consequences.

On the first issue, I’ve been following renewed fallout from the sex abuse issues at the Southern Baptist Convention. In 2022, the denomination undertook an extensive investigation of its historical approach to sex abuse allegations, leading to a report that excoriated many church leaders and named some of them as “abusers” or as those who had tolerated or covered up abuse. Some of the male pastors and church leaders singled out in the report as “abusers” were found to have engaged in extramarital or morally inappropriate relationships with named adult victims. In response, a number of those leaders filed lawsuits in which they have argued that while their actions were immoral, to label them as abusers and the women involved as victims is improperly inflammatory and defamatory.

Without going into the details, suffice to say there’s currently a battle on X/Twitter following materials produced in the litigation that question whether one prominent church leader’s ongoing, long-distance relationship with a woman not his wife represents a case where an abuser exploited a victim or, instead, a case of a consensual inappropriate relationship.

On the second issue, the British Journal of Medical Ethics recently published an article by 25 academics questioning whether female genital mutilation is actually a problem. Remember that FGM, the forceful, painful, and damaging removal of a girl’s clitoris against her will, has been long deemed a harmful practice by the UN and is outlawed in many countries, including the UK and US. According to the article’s authors, labeling FGM as abuse promotes racial stereotypes, marginalizes certain cultures, and “objectifies women and girls as passive victims.”

In both scenarios, we’re challenged with defining a problem: what is abuse? Who’s a victim?

In the first scenario, if a religious leader in a position of authority seduces an adult into an affair, do we characterize that as abuse the same way we do when a youth pastor molests a child in his congregation? If so, do church leaders have the same safeguarding responsibilities to otherwise independent adults that they have to children? What effect does such a rule have on how we treat each other in a religious organization? Must we view every pastor as a potential abuser and every member of a congregation as a potential victim? What does such a broad definition of abuse and vulnerability have on the organization’s ability to protect those with known vulnerabilities, such as children or adults with disabilities?

In the second scenario, how does redefining FGM as merely a diverse expression of cultural values help those who have involuntarily undergone it, many of whom are the leading advocates against it? Is society now barred from determining what constitutes abuse if doing so renders a cultural judgment, and are vulnerable individuals now protected by those determinations simply left to the wolves? Are we required now to tolerate slavery, pedophilia, female infanticide, and child marriage, practices once valued by certain historical cultures and still done in some places?

Language matters, but context matters even more. In his masterpiece about the brain, The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist describes how the “right” hemisphere of our brain is the source of our empathy, our relationships, and our context. The right brain is focused on values: goodness, beauty, truth, and the divine. The left brain, on the other hand, gives us language and our ability to categorize things, but it does so out of context and without regard to the value of relationships and other people. Unfortunately, says McGilchrist, we often consider the self-centered left hemisphere the superior, “civilized” part of the brain.

McGilchrist’s work may present a good explanation for the problems we as humans have in defining what is right and what is wrong. Do we use our right hemispheres, taking context into consideration, considering the needs of individuals and our responsibilities to them, putting ourselves in the shoes of the vulnerable, and making value judgments? Or do we take a left hemisphere approach, manipulating language for our own ends, categorizing human actions out of context, and labeling them without thought of the impact? Maybe better, let’s use both sides!

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In other news:

• The Bipartisan Policy Center’s Child Welfare Finance and Accountability Workgroup has an important new publication outlining needed improvements to federal child welfare policy. Some really smart people used both sides of their brains in writing it :)

• The international surrogacy industry really needs regulation, as evidenced by two different horrific stories this week from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal (paywalled, but read the NY Post version).

• The Imprint has an interview with ACF Secretary Alex Adams.

• It appears a decision will soon be made over Georgia’s managed care contract for children in foster care, as an administrative proceeding is in progress.

• Child safety issues in Massachusetts?

• In Virginia, departing Governor Glenn Youngkin is proposing reforms to the state’s county-based child welfare system that would centralize some functions, such as intake.

• Minnesota’s rollout of a new child welfare law that would apply “active efforts” requirements to cases involving children of groups overrepresented in “race, culture, ethnicity, disability status, or low-income socioeconomic status” has been halted by a court. The court found the “phase-in” process of applying the law, through which only certain children received its protections, rendered its application a violation of the right to equal protection of the laws.

• A federal audit has faulted West Virginia’s handling of child welfare cases.

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In the US, Europe, and other developed countries with significant and reliable databases and common rules for checking references, the screening and vetting process may be more standardized. But what does a child-serving organization do to vet prospective staff or volunteers in a developing country with a fragile criminal justice system or one that has recently gone through a civil war?

What’s reasonable in such a situation depends on what’s practical and customary. Unfortunately, there is no easily accessible list of standard practice showing how screenings are done by country. So I’m trying to create at least a semblance of one by sending out this survey:

• https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/LHSRNWK

If you work with an organization that serves children, youth, and other vulnerable populations, what procedures do you apply in screening staff and volunteers? Does your organization conduct these types of screenings in less developed areas of the world? If you can help by filling out and/or circulating the survey, I’d be grateful!

In the news:

• Through the President’s “Fostering the Future” Executive Order, the Trump Administration has called for improvements in foster parent recruitment and retention, services for youth aging out of care, and better use of technology to track child welfare outcomes. Here are a few pieces reflecting on the EO, one from Naomi Schaefer Riley, one from Pennsylvania, and a third from The New Yorker.

• In Georgia, services for children and youth in care are being curtailed due to budget overruns, according to The Imprint and the AJC. Reasons given have ranged from the federal shutdown to cost overruns in certain programs. It appears one of the hardest-hit areas will be services to children and youth with significant behavioral health needs, an area in which the state is already struggling, as demonstrated by testimony in an ongoing House Study Committee.

• Georgia, already a leader in creating incentives to assist youth aging out of care, is looking at what else can be done.

• Do home visiting programs for young children reduce child maltreatment? Despite the popularity of the federal Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Intervention Program, these researchers argue the evidence of improved outcomes is lacking.

• Highlighting the conflicts that can arise when advocates for medically transitioning children’s gender are advising child protection agencies, the Arkansas Legislature recently questioned the state DCFS’ agreement with a longtime consultant, Evident Change. That organization’s work has included recommending improvements to the state child abuse hotline. Legislators pointed out that Evident Change had “publicly posted articles and argued that in Texas, gender transition surgeries, hormone therapies, et cetera for minors should not be treated or investigated as child abuse.” Arkansas has banned such medical treatments for minors.

• Arizona’s DCS is under fire following the agency’s failure to prevent a number of children killed even though they were known to the system.

• I missed this earlier, but last month a Florida appellate court reversed the $208 million verdict in favor of the Kowalski family against a hospital that suspected the parents of abusing their child, Maya. The case was featured in the Netflix documentary “Take Care of Maya.” The appellate court’s opinion emphasized the hospital’s immunity for making good-faith reports of suspected “Munchausen by Proxy” abuse and its ongoing responsibility to abide by the court orders that resulted from those reports.

• The New York Times has a new podcast out highlighting the debate over the field of child abuse pediatrics.

• In New Mexico, the Legislature is upset that CYFD, the child welfare agency, has used funds meant to improve behavioral health services on shelters and group homes. But given allegations that these placements were needed for children with severe behavioral challenges that couldn’t be handled within the regular foster care system, it seems the agency was in a no-win situation.

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Official statistics state that in 2023, 655 children in foster care “exited” to “runaway.” That number likely pales in comparison to reality, as state child welfare agencies are regularly dinged for failing to report elopements from care. A federal HHS audit in 2023 found over 38,000 incidents of unreported runaway incidents between 2018 and 2020, and more recent news reports from Connecticut, Illinois, and Massachusetts signal an ongoing problem of significant underreporting.

Those who work in child welfare and law enforcement all know that youth who run from foster and group homes are prime targets for traffickers. But state child welfare workers have, especially in past years, simply written off young people who run away from state custody. Despite federal laws requiring states to report missing foster youth, make diligent efforts to find them, and screen those they recover for any exploitation or abuse that may have occurred in the interim, too many case managers and courts continue to take the attitude that if the child doesn’t want the state’s help, the agency should just close the case.

The NYT article shows the horrific results of this bureaucratic attitude, telling the stories of young teens who ran from care and were ignored by case managers but welcomed into a life of torture by traffickers. Los Angeles County DCFS “estimates that three out of four rescued preteens and teenagers go back to their traffickers,” the NYT reports, and quotes DCFS Director Brian Nicholas: “Our social workers do everything possible, as many times as necessary, to help these young people safely leave their captors and begin healing on their own terms.”

The LA situation reminds me of a case I handled a few years ago involving a teenager who was trafficked out of foster care. According to the official report, the teen slipped away from her placement one night and was picked up by her “boyfriend.” No one mentioned that the “boyfriend” was in his late 20s and had pending charges for pimping, and the agency closed its case on her. We eventually found her in a hotel room in another state being trafficked for sex.

I’m not sure why LA’s city, county, and state officials aren’t up in arms over this issue, especially given that many of these victims have been failed by the state’s child welfare system. But here are a few suggestions they may want to consider.

First, child welfare and law enforcement officials have to recognize that running away from foster care is a normal reaction for a child or youth who has suffered severe trauma and feels “trapped” in a situation where adults are telling them what to do, when to get up, and when to go to bed. Just about every teen wants to rebel against parental authority. For young people who have been let down by the adults in their lives and therefore may fear developing a close relationship with a foster parent, running away may seem like a reasonable thing to do. Professionals who label those youth as “problems” or as “not wanting help” are ignoring both human nature and their professional responsibilities to search for, find, and provide therapy and care for these children.

Second, policymakers and professionals need to understand that when a young person is “rescued” from trafficking, they aren’t going to see it that way. Traffickers have put them through such psychological manipulation and physical torture that their first reaction on being pulled from that situation is panic. Whether you label it "trauma bonding,” “Stockholm Syndrome,” or some other condition, you’re working with a victim who may not be capable of rational thought. That’s why it concerns me to read in the NYT article about rescued victims being picked up by DCFS case managers from police stations only to “jump from the car” and run away as soon as it pulled out. Until a victim can be calmed, feel that she is safe, and start the process of recovery, she needs to be protected from herself. That’s going to require that someone keep her from running away and that her first stop is not simply a foster home or group home but rather a staff-secure therapeutic facility.

Finally, policymakers really need to look at the unintended consequences of their decisions. As the NYT article notes, in 2023 California’s SB 357 repealed the law allowing the police to arrest women who loitered with the intent to engage in prostitution. While “intended to prevent profiling of Black, brown and trans women based on how they dressed,” the law meant that “uniformed officers could no longer apprehend groups of girls in lingerie on Figueroa, hoping to recover minors among them.” Over the past decade, many states have taken the admirable step of ensuring victims of trafficking are not treated as criminals. At the same time, those in the field need to have the legal, policy, and practice tools that will allow them to identify young victims, detain them for their own safety, and help them begin the long therapeutic road to recovery.

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In other news:

• The Iowa Supreme Court has addressed a battle that often arises in child dependency cases: what authority does a dependency court have to prohibit the child welfare agency from moving a child to a different placement? In most states, including Iowa, the law puts placement authority for a child in foster care in the hands of the child welfare agency but provides that a court can “disallow” a placement in certain situations. The question that follows is whether the court can prohibit a placement change pending a hearing on whether to disallow the change. Although the agency argued the court could only review the placement change after the fact, the Supreme Court held the trial judge had the authority to prevent the change from occurring and maintain the status quo until the matter could be considered.

• In the wake of a 2023 Texas law prohibiting anonymous reports of child abuse to child protective services, it appears anonymous reports are now going to law enforcement.

• Legislators in Maryland grilled the state’s human services director over reports of inadequate protections for children in care.

• In the UK, there are concerns that there’s been little attention given to child protection in schools in the past few years.

• We’ve highlighted the problem of migrant children in the US going “missing” and being trafficked for sex or labor, sometimes by their sponsors. It appears some asylum-seeking children in the UK are suffering the same fate, according to the Guardian.

• As has occurred in other church organizations, the Assemblies of God is facing scrutiny over allegations of past failures to protect children from abuse.

• Here’s an interesting article discussing issues related to managing inappropriate child-on-child sexual behavior.

• This update on child welfare issues from a Kansas legislator highlights two issues often raised in this column: the liability insurance crisis facing child services providers and the problem of children without placements sleeping in offices.

• Canada’s Supreme Court has held unconstitutional legislation imposing mandatory minimum sentences of one year for possession of child pornography.

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In the majority of states, parental authority is something that parents can delegate only via a notarized power of attorney and with conditions. State statutes tend to limit the time during which a parent may place his or her child with another person, often limiting the delegation of authority to six months or a year or during a period of military deployment. Some states limit parental ability to delegate to certain designated relative caregivers such as grandparents or to nonrelatives who have been vetted and approved by programs such as Safe Families for Children. These laws often limit the ability of the caregiver to agree to the child’s marriage or adoption or significant medical procedures. The provisions also generally authorize the parents to revoke the delegation of parental authority at any time.

Such a common-sense approach recognizes that sometimes parents need help in caring for a child, that there should be a way for them to authorize another person to care for the child, and that the process should ensure the child’s right to safety and family are protected. These laws reflect that when a parent is unable to provide the necessary support, children need a stable home with trustworthy adult, preferably someone close to them like a grandparent, who can care for them and their needs. And they also recognize that such an arrangement should be temporary, limited in time, and respectful of the parent-child relationship.

AB 495, on the other hand, seems to ignore these common-sense principles. It was specifically designed so that any “relative” — including distant relatives and ex- or step-relatives — can themselves claim the right to care for the child, including the right to provide medical treatment, without the approval of the child’s parents or legal guardian. It appears to be the first parental delegation of authority law in the United States that allows a “caregiver” to completely bypass parental authorization and claim control over and custody of a child. Lacking time limits or protections for the rights of parents and children, it ignores the guardrails one usually sees in these provisions.

And the law doesn’t even appear necessary. While pitched as a solution for those caring for children whose parents have been deported, the law would allow anyone who wanted to take over parenting of a barely-related child for any reason without the express permission of the parents. As for families subject to immigration separation, there are already programs in place that enable parents who fear deportation to make prior arrangements for children who may be left behind, including packages created by the American Immigration Lawyers’ Association. The solution is that if parents truly fear they may be separated from their children on short notice, they need to prepare. AB 495, like much that comes out of California these days, is unhinged from its stated purpose.

In other news:

• I’ve noted earlier (here and here) the tension that arises when undocumented parents of US Citizen children are deported and want the children to join them in their home country. There’s an interesting case developing in a Boston federal court in which foster parents are challenging the decision of a juvenile court judge to reunify a US citizen child with her father in Guatemala. The foster parents claim that the move violates the child’s rights as a US citizen by “exiling” her to Guatemala. I have to completely agree with the brief of the Children’s Law Center of Massachusetts, which makes the point that where such a child lives is a matter of parental rights:

  “All the federal Courts of Appeals to have addressed the issue, including the First Circuit, have held that a child’s constitutional rights are not violated by the deportation of her noncitizen parent because the parent may choose to have the child join him or her abroad. See, e.g., Payne v Barahona v. Gonzales, 474 F.3d 1, 2–3 (1st Cir. 2007) (“Nor does deportation necessarily mean separation since the children could be relocated during their minority.” (citation omitted)); Liu v. U.S. Dep’t of Just., 13 F.3d 1175, 1177 (8th Cir. 1994) (noting that a parent’s deportation does not mandate family separation because the parent may choose to have the child accompany them); Newton v. I.N.S., 736 F.2d 336, 342 (6th Cir. 1984) (holding that deportation of a parent does not violate a United States citizen child’s rights because the child’s accompaniment is a matter of parental choice, and the child may return to the United States to reside at a later time) (citing Ayala-Flores v. I.N.S., 662 F.2d 444 (6th Cir. 1981) (per curiam)); Acosta v. Gaffney, 558 F.2d 1153 (3d Cir. 1977); Gonzalez-Cuevas v. I.N.S., 515 F.2d 1222 (5th Cir. 1975); Encicso-Cardozo v. I.N.S., 504 F.2d 1252 (2d Cir. 1974); Mendez v. Major, 340 F.2d 128 (8th Cir. 1965)); Schleiffer v. Meyers, 644 F.2d 656, 663 (7th Cir. 1981) (noting that a child’s departure from the United States to join a deported parent “will merely postpone, but not bar, (his or) her residence in the United States if (he or) she should ultimately choose to live here.”) . . . . In sum, under United States immigration law, a fit, deported parent may choose to have their United States citizen child join them in their home country; our current laws do not recognize a right for a United States citizen child and their parent without immigration status to live together in the United States.”

• Social media is being used to destroy children’s lives. Stories and reports like this one and this one further convince me of the need to severely limit children’s access to it. But the latest horror story from The Washington Post is one of the most horrific examples I’ve seen and demonstrates how truly evil people use social media to manipulate children to do terrible things, including killing themselves on a livestream

• Timely visitation is key to reunifying children in foster care with their parents. A report out of Maine suggests the state’s major visitation services contractor is not doing its job.

• In my experience, public child welfare agencies nationwide have a terrible history of placing sexually reactive children in foster homes without fully disclosing those children’s histories to the foster families. Too often, the failure to disclose results in tragedy, as alleged in this lawsuit by a foster family in Pennsylvania whose children were victims of a youth placed in their care without proper disclosure of his history of behaviors.

• Voters in Texas will consider a constitutional amendment enshrining parental rights in the State’s fundamental charter. Opponents claim it will prevent children from accessing abortion and “gender-affirming care.”

• The issue of placing additional regulations on home-schooling often arises in state legislatures following the abuse-related death of a child who was removed from public school, as it has recently in Connecticut.

• Going through a child protection investigation may be traumatic for a family, but research demonstrates it is better to be safe than sorry.

• In a compromise to litigation over Washington State’s law requiring priests and pastors to reveal child abuse disclosed in the context of confession, it appears the State has agreed that the secrecy of the confessional (or its non-Catholic equivalent) will remain inviolable.

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While there’s universal agreement that children have the rights to be protected from harm and violence, to be raised in family, and to participate in proceedings involving their futures, the unfortunate truth is that these rights are often honored in the breach. In talking with professionals at the conference, it’s clear that although the vast majority of national laws are designed to guarantee these rights to children, they’re too often ignored in practice. Sometimes it’s a lack of resources. Many times, it seems, it’s a lack of will.

Still, it was interesting to see how countries are advancing. In Armenia, for example, they’ve put significant resources into improving child protection and have built multidisciplinary child protection teams that include lawyers, social workers, and psychologists. In Uganda, where there are few attorneys and mental health professionals, they are relying on trained lay volunteers to help child victims. Across the board, there’s a growing understanding of how severe trauma affects children and of the responsibility of governments and NGOs to help children recover from it.

One issue that I heard raised several times at the ISPCAN conference was the question of children’s “autonomy” — their right to make decisions for themselves without parental interference. The vast majority of professionals who work in child protection and child development would agree that children are not autonomous because their brains haven’t reached full maturity. Of course, the older they get, especially as they near adulthood, the more responsibility and independence we give them. As a result, we set legal limits on when a child can get a tattoo, buy cigarettes or alcohol, and vote.

One of the questions I was posed during the presentation I gave at ISPCAN deals directly with this issue of autonomy: should a child be able to declare themselves to be a different gender and receive services (socialization, therapy, medical intervention) designed to aid their desire to live as a different gender from their sex? The issue is, of course, a major one in both Europe and the US. Currently, the European Commission is considering a move that would allow a child of any age to change their “sex” or gender marker without parental consent. Ahead of a US Supreme Court case this week on whether states can prohibit therapists from questioning children about their gender identity, Colorado’s Attorney General argued that children have “autonomy” and that adults, including parents, must not question their gender identity choices. My response? Children aren’t autonomous. Frankly, none of us are, as we have commitments to, responsibilities for, and relationships with others around us. It’s our responsibility to help children grow into (somewhat) autonomous adults who can function independently but in relationship with the community they are part of. Children are constantly developing and changing, and it’s the role of parents and other adults to create healthy boundaries and limits, ask hard questions, and help children navigate the difficult path to adulthood.

In other news:

• Congratulations to Alex Adams, who was confirmed this week as the head of the federal government’s Administration for Children and Families.

• Veteran child welfare leader Brenda Donald has become the COO of New Mexico’s DCYF, where it looks as if significant changes are afoot.

• Following up on the work of the State’s Children’s Ombudsman, Virginia’s Governor is focused on addressing “gaps” in the state’s protection of children who have had system involvement.

• Foster care numbers are on the rise in Indiana.

• Following concerns of system failures involving a child’s death, it looks as if Kern County, CA’s human services agency has ordered an outside, independent review of its child protection practices.

• Georgia recently held a much-needed legislative hearing on complex-needs children who are being abandoned to foster care.

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Unless you’re Plato, Marx, or a celebrated communist academic, you probably agree with the above statements and subscribe to the principles, expressed by both the US Supreme Court and in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, that “those who nurture [a child] and direct his [or her] destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations. Pierce v. Soc'y of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510, 535, 45 S. Ct. 571, 573 (1925)

“Setting boundaries and expectations for children can assist in building life skills that include; patience, problem solving, resourcefulness, responsibility and self-discipline,” writes Stephen Bavolek. For children who struggle with understanding social norms, such as those on the autism spectrum, boundaries provide a sense of security and helps those who feel “different” better fit in to their community.

At the same time, allowing children to explore the world and take on independent responsibilities helps them build resilience and self-discipline. Parents can’t be and shouldn’t be directing every step of a child’s life, because doing so creates an adult who can’t independently navigate the world.

My concern in the modern world is that it’s becoming increasingly difficult for parents to provide that proper balance between providing freedom and creating guardrails. When I was growing up in the 1970s and early 1980s, it was easier. My parents might have been worried about peer influence, but at least they knew my peers and my peers’ parents. They had a pretty good idea of what I was being taught in school. Although I’m sure they worried about what I might see on TV or in magazines available at the local convenience store, they also knew that, as part of a community, most people with whom I’d come into contact shared their values.

Today’s parents don’t have that security of knowing what their children may be exposed to. Once a child is handed a smart phone, an iPad, or a computer, he or she has access to both positive sources of information as well as addictive social media accounts full of groomers, lurkers, and foul predators. When I was a child concerned about hitting puberty late and trying to figure out why I felt inadequate, I could sneak in my father’s office and read his medical books. Children today can go on social media and learn that their eating disorder is a wonderful thing; that if they feel uncomfortable with themselves, that they might be trapped in the wrong body. AI chatbots have been accused of sexualizing children and encouraging them to kill their parents. Studies have shown that, perhaps especially for more vulnerable children and adolescents, social media can serve as an incubator for mental illnesses such as dissociative personality disorder.

Before social media, most of a youth’s peers were too busy dealing with their own childhood and adolescent conflicts to be too much of an influence, and there were adults usually hanging around to intervene in case of bullying or behavioral concerns. Now, thanks to social media algorithms, an awkward young person can be dragged into a world in which she receives a constant, pathologically-reaffirming reminder that she is defective and the only solution is self-harm, violence against others, or withdrawal from friends and family into a nihilistic community.

What’s the appropriate response?

One option is legal action. A number of states have enacted age-verification laws to keep children off addictive social media sites without parental consent, but social media companies have won injunctions against many of those laws on the basis that they infringe on the First Amendment — either the child’s right to access information and/or the businesses’ rights to provide information. The Supreme Court recently upheld a Texas law requiring age verification for pornography sites, but it’s unclear whether that precedent will be applied to the social media cases currently winding through the courts.

Another option is parental action both at home and in the public sphere.

In the public sphere. Whatever happens with the court cases, it’s important for parents to remember that even though elected officials in many states have responded to parental concern over social media by adopting laws regulating children’s access, companies that are part of NetChoice have filed litigation demanding continued access to children. Here’s a list (according to Wikipedia, as of January 2025) of the companies that are funding this consortium. Parents have in recent years become much more engaged in opposing indoctrination of their children in the educational setting, protesting the secret gender transition of students and public schools’ adoption of educational curricula that violates the family’s religious and moral values. Would the same kind of energized, grass-roots campaigns work here?

At home. Like a lot of parents, we got our children smartphones because every other child had one. Increasingly parents are saying “no.” But whether children and teens have social media access or not, parents should be talking to their children about the relationship between social media and depression, self-harm, loss of self-esteem, and even loss of identity. There are plenty of resources here, including movies such as “Can’t Look Away” and support groups such as The Parents’ Network.

This past week, amid the murder of Charlie Kirk, I couldn’t help but grieve a bit for his killer’s parents. News stories describe a younger version of the 22-year old assassin as a good kid from a good family whose parents, by all accounts, tried to instill good values. But parents can only do so much. He graduated from high school during the Covid pandemic and lasted only a semester at college. Described by peers as being “terminally online,” at some point he was sucked into in the darker corners of online video gaming and social media such as Discord — where, by the way, the teenaged perpetrator of the 2022 Buffalo mass shooting discussed his plans for the racist attack and where Trump’s would-be assassin had an account. One has to wonder whether the isolation and the algorithms so associated with the online world contributed to this horrific killing.

In the Lange case, a child with a long history of behavioral issues was kept for some time at a local hospital after trying to burn down his family’s home. Neither the child welfare agency nor the hospital ever provided inpatient treatment for the child, as they were apparently unable to find a suitable residential treatment facility; rather, after a period of time they “cleared” him to return home. Afraid for their own safety and his, the parents refused to come get him, and the child welfare agency began dependency proceedings based on parental neglect of the child’s needs.

The Supreme Court held that the parents’ refusal to bring home in such a situation did not constitute neglect because they were not able to do so without endangering themselves and others in the home. A concurring justice decried the fact that Michigan has no law allowing parents who are caught in such a situation to obtain residential care without being charged with abandoning their child.

As the Imprint story notes, the holding has spurred calls for such a law.

In other news:

• Japanese research suggests the ability to identify children who have suffered maltreatment by observing their behaviors.

• The recent federal budget bill appears to cut off Headstart participation for undocumented children. I wonder if this will end up being a Supreme Court case that tests the ongoing validity of Plyler v. Doe (1982), which prohibited states from refusing to educate undocumented children in public schools. Is the state vs. federal funding difference a reason to distinguish?

• In our work with mandated reporters, the question often arises as to whether it’s necessary to report historic child abuse by a victim who is now an adult. My gut feeling has always been that the reporting statute is designed to protect children from ongoing threats. As my law partner Debbie Ausburn recently discussed in her blog, the Minnesota Supreme Court says my gut is wrong. In that state, the Court held, a therapist is required to report that an adult disclosed to her that she had suffered sexual abuse as a minor.

• In Kansas, the defense attorney in a capital child murder case says the state’s child protection agency failed the victim.

• A UK Parliamentary committee worries that proposed legislation to mandate reporting of child abuse may be too weak.

• Boulder County, Colorado, is ending its “public” foster care program, noting a 47% decline since 2021 in the number of children in care. Foster services will continue to be provided by CPAs.

• Michigan continues to struggle with children sleeping in offices due to a lack of proper foster placements.

• As of this writing, it’s expected that a federal judge will enjoin enforcement of a new Washington law requiring clergy to divulge information about child abuse learned by the priest or pastor in the confessional or in the course of spiritual counseling.

• Advocates are concerned that federal officials who are doing “wellness checks” on unaccompanied minors released to sponsors are using it as a pretext for immigration enforcement. Before they start trying to shut these efforts down, they might consider the well-documented problem of these young people having been placed with unvetted sex and labor traffickers.

• NPR interviews an author who contends in a new book that the foster care system harms young people.

• Finally, a bizarre story out of California — 21 children from surrogate mothers, most of them under age 3, were removed from a couple that had apparently taken guardianship of them.

Thanks for reading! Please consider sharing and subscribing to support my work!

Tom

As the majority found, a group of Muslim and Christian parents objected to the use in their local public schools of books and materials that pushed beliefs on their children contrary to their core religious beliefs and their rights to raise the children in those religious traditions. The parents asked that their children be allowed to opt out from participating in those particular classes, but the public school authorities denied them that option. In keeping with precedents such as Wisconsin v. Yoder, the Court found that the parents and children cannot be forced to give up their family religious values and parental rights to obtain the governmental benefit of a free public education.

Given the Court’s free exercise and parental rights jurisprudence over the past 100 years or so, the outcome should never have been in question. What is surprising is the vehemence of the dissent, led by Justice Sotomayor, and its radical departure from the liberal body of jurisprudence that formed in the early 20th century. Over those many years, the Court’s majority saw itself as a defender of minority rights and as a bulwark against the abuses of majoritarian rule.

Sotomayor’s dissent in Mahmoud, joined by Justices Kagan and Jackson, would have rejected the rights of these parents and children as nothing deserving of protection. If the parents didn’t want to be told that children can change their gender and that same-sex marriage should be celebrated by all, she wrote, the parents could choose to homeschool their children or send them to private school. Government has the right to expose children to “ideas and concepts that may conflict with their parents’ religious beliefs,” Sotomayor wrote. And, most alarmingly, the dissenters argued that if the parents didn’t like the curriculum, they should vote out the school board — ignoring that these parents had protested at numerous school board meetings, only to have their elected representatives force this decision on them and their children with no option to skip the lessons.

In other words, “Let them eat cake.”

The dissent, and particularly its last point, is disturbing because it rejects a long-held value central to western democracy: majority rule with respect for and protection of minority rights. The Supreme Court has long recognized the need to strike this balance. Take, for instance, one of the most famous footnotes in Supreme Court history: footnote 4 to United States v. Carolene Products (1938), where the Court mentioned as an aside what has become a central principle of judicial interpretation that has ensured the protection of minorities in this nation:

“Nor need we enquire whether similar considerations enter into the review of statutes directed at particular religious, Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510, or national, Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390; Bartels v. Iowa, 262 U.S. 404; Farrington v. Tokushige, 273 U.S. 284, or racial minorities, Nixon v. Herndon, supra; Nixon v. Condon, supra: whether prejudice against discrete and insular minorities may be a special condition, which tends seriously to curtail the operation of those political processes ordinarily to be relied upon to protect minorities, and which may call for a correspondingly more searching judicial inquiry. Compare McCulloch v. Maryland, 4 Wheat. 316, 428; South Carolina v. Barnwell Bros., 303 U.S. 177, 184, n. 2, and cases cited.”

A long time ago when I was in law school, I had the opportunity to write a law review article on a new Supreme Court case that had just come out: Employment Division v. Smith (1990), involving Native Americans who were denied government benefits because they tested positive for the use of peyote — a drug central to their native religious practices. Justice Scalia opined for a divided court that the mere fact a general law prohibiting drug use impacted these individual’s religious practices gave them no basis for complaint. An appalled Congress, with a Democratic Majority in both houses and a Democratic President, quickly passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act to reverse the opinion’s effect and ensure courts would continue to closely scrutinize impacts on the rights of individuals to religious freedom.

Now, 35 years later, it’s the Court’s “progressives” who are taking the position that if those in government power who want something — in this case, to use the public schools to indoctrinate children in a preferred belief system — the rights of minorities who have principled reasons for opposing that power don’t matter.

My, how times have changed.

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In other news, briefly:

• TOP HEADLINE FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES’ ETHICIST COLUMN: The Ethicist: Do I need to subscribe to my friend’s Substack newsletter? The answer is yes!!

• Glad to see that North Carolina has recognized the need to exercise more control over its county child welfare agencies.

• Florida is piloting professional foster parenting, especially for children and youth with complex behavioral needs.

• I recommend this podcast about a Munchausen by Proxy (OK, Factitious Disorder Imposed On Another) case that originated here in Georgia.

• The Department of Justice has sued the State of Washington over its recent law requiring clergy to report child abuse.

• Looks like HHS has removed hundreds of unaccompanied minors who were placed with sponsors back to ORR custody.

• Ohio legislators are looking at requiring mandated reporters to contact both CPS and law enforcement.

• New York has banned anonymous child abuse reports.

• New Child-Friendly Justice Tool unveiled in Europe.

• CASA director in Los Angeles and her organization part ways.

  Child Protection & Well-being Trends is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I’m going to use today’s column, and these two developments in particular, to lament the fact that many legal and policy advocates too often try to push their own adult agendas at the expense of children’s rights, needs, and best interests.

Example 1: Transgender Rights vs. Child Protection.

In United States v. Skrmetti, the Supreme Court yesterday upheld the authority of the State of Tennessee to prohibit physicians from using puberty blockers, hormones, and other medical interventions to “treat” gender dysphoria in children. Article after article has decried the decision in terms such as “a devastating loss for trans rights supporters.” The American Academy of Pediatrics blasted the decision. The Center for American Progress said the Court “ruled against bodily autonomy, putting politics over science.”

A more appropriate observation is the 6-3 Supreme Court holding empowers state legislatures to protect children from life-altering, permanent decisions they can’t possibly understand.

In arguing that prohibiting these medical treatments for children violated their rights to “equal protection of the laws” under the 14th Amendment, the ACLU was really focused on the rights of transgender adults and paid no mind to the special protections afforded children. As the New York Times Magazine reported this morning, the National ACLU Director considered the case “the logical next step in his organization’s much longer battle to defend personal freedom.” It entrusted pursuit of the case to Chase Strangio, an attorney who “fundamentally doesn’t believe in the Constitution.” The NYT piece shows that, in their zeal to establish the rights of adults to use their bodies as “gendered art” (and require others to pay for these gender-modifying cosmetic treatments), trans rights advocates ignored the significant differences between adults and children and disregarded respected research questioning the entire premise of pediatric gender medicine and its impact on vulnerable, confused children including those with autism and mental health issues.

Although Srkmetti resulted in a “win” for state child protection efforts, it is troubling that so many influential groups and media outlets supported this years-long legal battle, treating it as an issue of transgender rights and ignoring the significant child protection issues. The Court itself also missed an opportunity in its majority opinion to focus on the rights of children to be protected from gender-shifting, permanent medical procedures, especially in light of the growing body of evidence questioning their effectiveness and propriety. (Even Sotomayor, in dissent, acknowledged that states can regulate the use of powerful, body-altering cross-sex hormones “more stringently”). Justice Thomas, at least, acknowledges in concurrence the dangers of pediatric gender medicine, reminds his colleagues that States have the right to regulate medical ethics, and correctly questions whether a child can even provide informed consent to these medical procedures that cause lifelong infertility, require ongoing medical treatment, and permanently prevent orgasm.

Although Skrmetti affirms the right of state legislatures to protect children from these unproven medical interventions, a question remains that our society will have to sort out: how did the professional classes in the United States come so close to sacrificing the protection of vulnerable children just to advance the rights of a small but vocal group of adults?

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Example 2: Immigration Advocates vs. the Rights of Parents and Children.

Now let’s discuss how children become fodder in the larger battle among adults over immigration policy. A quarter-century ago, the Elian Gonzalez case vividly demonstrated how a child can become a pawn in this political fight. The cause of the young Cuban refugee whose mother drowned trying to find freedom for him in America was fought among Cuban immigrants eager to give him a better life here and parental rights advocates who successfully challenged the right of outside interests to separate him from a fit father in Cuba.

Over the past two months, events show us that immigration advocates are again using children to support their cause, but in a way that I believe completely undermines respect for children’s rights, parental rights, and the proper use of child welfare law and immigration law. Here are two examples.

1. But They’re Deporting US Citizen Children!!

First up is the case of Jenny Lopez-Villela, a Honduran national, who was notified in late April that she would be deported along with her older, also undocumented, daughter. No one suggested those deportation orders were improper. At the time of her deportation, Ms. Lopez-Villela also had with her a younger daughter -- two-year-old “V.M.L,” a US citizen born in Louisiana. According to immigration authorities, the mother asked that the younger child remain with her. As a result, she and the two girls were sent to Honduras and are together there today.

The National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers’ Guild filed a habeas action claiming V.M.L. was wrongfully deported and seeking her return to the United States so she could be cared for by a “friend of the family.” That organization claims a mission “to ensure that those most impacted by the immigration and criminal systems are uplifted and supported.” Nothing in that mission statement suggests a focus on the rights and interests of the child whose future is the subject of their legal claim.

Although V.M.L’s father went to the immigration office with the mother when she was detained, upon learning she would be deported he refused to pick up his child. He, too, was undocumented and feared being sent back to Honduras with his family. Instead, he signed over custodial rights to a “friend of the family.” That explains why an unrelated “friend,” not the father, filed the federal action seeking to obtain custody of the citizen child.

Expressing a “strong suspicion that the Government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process,” a federal judge scheduled a hearing on the matter. But the federal court’s description of V.M.L. as having been “deported” had no basis in reality, and none of the issues in this case could be legitimately addressed by a federal habeas action. Maybe that’s why the advocates dropped the case prior to the scheduled hearing.

Over 18 million children in this country live with at least one immigrant parent. Citizen children of foreign nationals regularly travel across borders to live with a foreign national parent or to visit with family. The cases involving citizen children of deported parents are custody matters, not immigration cases. In each of the cases, the mothers were asked whether they preferred to take their children with them with them or leave them or leave them with a caregiver. Any dispute over whether these mothers should have been given that option was not for immigration authorities to decide. Where V.M.L and other children of deported parents should live are matters for a custody court to determine or may be decided via an international custody rights action under the Hague Convention.

And as a matter of child custody law, neither do any of these cases raise novel issues. Immigration advocates and unrelated “friends of the family” have no say in child custody, a decision that should be made between the child’s parents. Absent a showing of parental unfitness, parents have a fundamental right to the care, control, and custody of their children. In its Troxel v. Granville decision in 2000, the Supreme Court made clear that even well-meaning outsiders such as grandparents may not interfere with the rights of fit parents to care for and raise their own children.

Nor do deported parents lose their rights to custody of their children. During the 25 years I have worked in child welfare as a judge, attorney and agency official, I have helped return a number of US citizen children to their previously deported parents in Guatemala, Mexico, and Honduras. Your immigration status does not determine your parental fitness, and a US citizen child’s rights are not violated by a parent’s decision to live outside the United States.

Over those years, I have often seen advocates insist that a US citizen child of a deported but “fit” parent remain here, no matter how destructive that decision may be to the child’s bonds with his or her family. Living in those countries is dangerous, I’ve heard them say. These children’s “best interests,” they argue, would be served by a better life in the U.S. living with relatives, guardians, or with an adoptive family.

Deported parents have the right to take their US citizen children with them, and these young citizens retain their citizenship. We do need to make sure they are able to make a smooth transition and have the documents necessary to return to the US when they wish. But why should we be letting immigration attorneys interfere in parental custody decisions, especially when these advocates’ interests are not aligned with the parents or the children?

2. Hijacking Humanitarian Visas Meant for Foster Children?

The second recent case, from Kentucky, demonstrates how immigration advocates are misusing special humanitarian protections for undocumented children in foster care who cannot and should not be returned to their country of origin due to serious parental abuse.

Some background. In certain cases, a child who is undocumented but who is “dependent” on the court or in foster care due to having suffered significant abuse, neglect, or abandonment can obtain a juvenile court order that may lead to a Special Immigrant Juvenile Status (SIJS) visa and, eventually, a green card and citizenship. Congress created this humanitarian visa in 1990 with good intentions, and I’ve seen it used wisely in situations where undocumented parents severely abused or abandoned their undocumented child and were themselves deported. The juvenile court’s order provides no immigration status but allows the child to apply to USCIS for the SIJS visa. Unfortunately, the number of these visas available annually is pretty limited.

The ongoing Kentucky case of 18-year old Guatemalan Ernesto Manuel Andres shows how this humanitarian visa process can be abused. Manuel Andres, then around 15, entered the US illegally in December 2022 as an unaccompanied minor and was released to his (undocumented) father, with whom he was living when detained on June 4 by immigration authorities. After he was placed with his father, an immigration attorney hired by an immigrant rights organization went to the local juvenile court and obtained an SIJS order finding that Ernesto was abandoned, abused, or neglected by a parent or parents and therefore should not be returned to Guatemala. There is no indication in the media reports that Ernesto was ever removed from either parent for abuse or neglect, nor is there indication he was ever in foster care. Rather, he appears to be a young man who, like many others, illegally crossed the border to join his father in Kentucky.

Although advocates are holding rallies and Go Fund Me drives for Ernesto, his case actually undermines protection for the thousands of undocumented children in foster care as well as former foster youth who truly have no home to which they can return. As of 2023, there were over 120,000 SIJS visa applications backlogged due to limits on the number of available visas. Every case like that of Ernesto Manuel Andres delays stability for children who are actual victims of serious physical and sexual abuse at the hands of their parents.

The old joke that everything politicians do is “for the children,” even though we know it’s often for themselves. Whatever your views on immigration policy, transgender rights, and next year’s hot issue, please be cautious not to allow adult desires and goals to actually harm the rights and needs of the children who deserve our protection.

I just finished reading Philip Shenon’s 2025 recent history Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church. Shenon gives a fascinating history of the Church over the past 75 years, demonstrating both the good that Popes have accomplished and their failures. Among those failures were, unfortunately, multiple opportunities by multiple Popes and church officials to deal with widespread and ongoing cases of child sexual abuse by priests, bishops, and even cardinals.

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This column won’t delve into the particulars, as those have been covered extensively elsewhere. What I found most interesting in Shenon’s reporting is just how similar the Church’s child safeguarding failures have been to similar failures among Protestant denominations and secular organizations with missions to serve the poor and the vulnerable. What struck me most from Jesus Wept was how the failure of Popes, Cardinals, and Bishops to hold pedophile priests accountable can be attributed to three main factors: (1) misplaced mercy; (2) cognitive dissonance; and (3) hubris.

Shenon’s reporting demonstrates how successive Popes, from John Paul II through Pope Francis, justified not addressing rampant reports of child sexual abuse. In many situations, pedophile priests and other clerics were treated as “sick” and in need of spiritual healing, not prosecution. The Curia downplayed child abuse reports, suggesting that within such a large organization there were bound to be a few “bad apples” but no widespread problem. Pope John Paul II, in particular, seems to have believed that many abuse allegations against priests were simply false attempts to besmirch the Church by communists and other anti-clerical forces. That belief is not unusual given the many years he spent working under communism in his native Poland. Over and over, Shenon relates how Church officials feared these reports would harm the “great work” being done by the Church and clerics such as Mexico’s Father Marcial Maciel Degollado, who founded the Legion of Christ and — despite dozens of abuse allegations — was described as “a man who has done so much good for the Church.”

These failures to protect the vulnerable aren’t unique to the Catholic Church. In researching our book Protecting Other People’s Children, Debbie Ausburn and I reviewed the history of scandals at the Southern Baptist Convention, Oxfam, and many other organizations with missions of doing good for vulnerable people. The common themes were that (1) leaders often believed that people who did good work for the vulnerable must be good people, so there was no need to believe whispers and rumors they weren’t; and (2) leaders often ignored brewing scandals because they were afraid of derailing the organization’s ability to continue raising funds and doing good work.

Jesus told his disciples to be “as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves.” The dilemma that many leaders of “good works” organizations face is that they remember the second half of that directive and forget the first. As a result, those who “do good work” are often assumed to be themselves infallible. And the organizational need to preserve its reputation and the organizational culture that often puts the priority on “helping others” above the priority of “protecting others” doesn’t help.

Mercy and trust are good qualities to have, but in organizations that serve the vulnerable they have to be accompanied by vigilance and by a dedication to safeguarding those you serve. “Doing good works” is great. But “First, do no harm” should be focus.