Family Justice Law Center

Fighting for families harmed by the child welfare system

The Family Justice Law Center, a part of the Urban Justice Center’s Social Justice Accelerator program, will use affirmative litigation to seek justice for families mistreated by the child welfare system. It will challenge systemic abuses of government power that lead to the illegal separation of children from their families. It will seek redress for harms, while promoting change that would help families survive and thrive.

Some Of The Numbers

In The News And Research

“Even if you are innocent and can prove it, it could be more than a year before you get a hearing, and during those crucial months your compliance and deference are the currency that buys you visits with your children.”

The New Yorker

 

“One hundred years from now, today’s child welfare system will surely be condemned as a racist institution—one that compounded the effects of discrimination on Black families by taking children from their parents, allowing them to languish in a damaging foster care system or to be adopted by more privileged people. School children will marvel that so many scholars and politicians defended this devastation of Black families in the name of protecting Black children. The color of child welfare system is the reason Americans have tolerated its destructiveness.

Dorothy Roberts, Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare

 

“[R]esearch shows separating a child from her parent(s) has detrimental, long-term emotional and psychological consequences that may be worse than leaving the child at home. This is due to the trauma of removal itself, as well as the unstable nature of, and high rates of abuse in, foster care.”

New York University Review of Law & Social Change

 

"One A.C.S. worker in the survey compared the experience to being stopped and frisked for 60 days." 

The New York Times

 

"Research has shown that ACS investigations primarily involve low-income New Yorkers, and disproportionately target those who are Black or Latino.

The Appeal

 

“New York City’s child welfare agency has a reputation for unjustly targeting low-income families of color.”

The New Republic

 

“This is what happens inside children when they are forcibly separated from their parents. Their heart rate goes up. Their body releases a flood of stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline. Those stress hormones can start killing off dendrites — the little branches in brain cells that transmit messages. In time, the stress can start killing off neurons and — especially in young children — wreaking dramatic and long-term damage, both psychologically and to the physical structure of the brain. ‘The effect is catastrophic,’ said Charles Nelson, a pediatrics professor at Harvard Medical School. ‘There’s so much research on this that if people paid attention at all to the science, they would never do this.’”

The Washington Post

 

Gaps in Family Court Compromise Justice for New York Families and Children, City Bar Report Finds . . . often at critical points for the safety and security of families and children.”

New York Law Journal

 

“One of the most devastating collateral consequences for someone involved in the criminal justice system is the potential destruction of their family — most commonly parents losing custody of kids and children being forced into foster care. On this episode of Justice in America, [we] look at the relationship between the criminal justice system and family court, and examine how together they can wreak havoc on American families.”

Justice In America

 

“The court had denied a final visit — despite the children continually saying they missed their mother — so the parents never got to say goodbye to them in person. NBC News

 

“No probable cause existed. No exigent circumstances were present. And the parents certainly did not consent to the search. None of us would want a social worker to be able to search our home based on such flimsy evidence provided by an anonymous report.” 

The Imprint

 

“NYC child welfare workers can remove children from their parents in emergencies. But they’ve wielded this power with growing frequency, and in cases that don’t seem like emergencies.

WNYC

 

“New York City Court Dysfunction Found to Have ‘Caused Harm to Thousands of Families’”

The Imprint

“Foster Care as Punishment: The New Reality of ‘Jane Crow’

The New York Times

 

“Virtually everyone familiar with current child welfare practice in the United States agrees it is in crisis.

Harvard Law Review

 

“Separating children from their parents contradicts everything we stand for as pediatricians — protecting and promoting children’s health. In fact, highly stressful experiences, like family separation, can cause irreparable harm, disrupting a child’s brain architecture and affecting his or her short- and long-term health. This type of prolonged exposure to serious stress - known as toxic stress - can carry lifelong consequences for children.”

American Academy of Pediatrics

 

“The harms of the child welfare system are unconscionably and disproportionately imposed on families of color, particularly Black families, and these family separation practices have demonstrably bad outcomes for the children.”

Time

 

“Police feed the foster care-to-prison pipeline by reporting on Black parents: Common behaviors in white communities can lead to removal in minority neighborhoods, often because police are more likely to patrol there.”

NBC

 

“Every year, thousands of children are removed from their homes by officials who fear for their safety—only to be returned within days. It ‘felt like being kidnapped,’ one said.”

The Marshall Project

 

“Family Defense work, politically, belongs next to the fight against police brutality and criminal justice reform.

— City University of New York Law Review

 

“Poverty, and the maldistribution of wealth in the United States, are not random features of American life; nor are the politics of poverty an accident. They are inextricably bound up with race and racial politics. Poverty is what the family regulation system is really all about.

— Columbia Journal of Race and Law

 

“[T]he influx of cases has overwhelmed Family Courts throughout New York City, exacerbating chronic delays and deferrals that impact every family in the system. . . . The result, attorneys say, is a new level of dysfunction across Family Court—a place where it was already common for a single judge to schedule two or three hearings for the same half-hour timeslot.”

Center For New York City Affairs

 

“Even under the best of conditions with support before, during, and following, separation is costly to families and children. . . . [B]eing separated from caregivers at an early age can alter development of fear systems in the brain. . . . There is a misconception that young children will be ‘fine’ if they are removed, because they ‘won’t remember’ what’s happened.”

University of Michigan Center for Human Growth & Development

 

“In most states, child protection agencies induce parents to transfer physical custody of their children to kinship caregivers by threatening to place the children in foster care and bring them to family court. . . . State agencies infringe on parents’ and children’s fundamental right to family integrity with few meaningful due process checks.”

Stanford Law Review

 

“Around the country, communities that are targeted by child protective services are saying enough.”

Time

 

“New York families have been caught in a web of child protective services that disproportionately affects poor families of color.

The Guardian

 

“[A] constitutional deficit in our child welfare system: the unnecessary removal of children from their parents’ custody and their short-term placement in foster care. . . . Each year, child protection agencies, sanctioned by juvenile courts, remove around twenty-five thousand children from their homes who spend less than thirty days in foster care.”

University of Pennsylvania Journal of Law and Social Change

“City Council Asks Why NYC Is ‘Tearing Families Apart’ For Marijuana Use

Gothamist

 

“The child welfare and foster system holds perhaps the greatest power a state can exercise over its people: the power to forcibly take children away from parents and permanently sever parent-child relationships.”

Movement for Family Power

 

“And research shows that many children who experience termination of their parents’ rights will suffer what is known as ambiguous loss, similar to grieving after a death but without the closure of knowing a loved one is gone forever.” 

NBC News

“Family Separations Happen Within Our Borders, Too

Slate

 

“The child welfare system is plagued by racism, with children and families receiving vastly different treatment depending on the color of their skin” 

New York State Bar Association News Center

 

“[The father] had stumbled into the heart of a dysfunctional system — the slow rolling of the process through inertia both intentional and not.”

New York Magazine - Intelligencer