A class-action lawsuit against the City of New York alleging that the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) unconstitutionally abuses its “emergency removal” power to take children from their parents without a court order. ACS routinely misuses this power — meant only for rare, truly urgent situations when there is not enough time to get a court order — to separate families. ACS’s racially discriminatory Emergency Removal Policy, in which the agency regularly bypasses judicial review despite having time to seek court authorization, violates families’ fundamental right to remain together. This government overreach causes deep and lasting harm, especially to Black and Latino families who are disproportionately targeted.

For the first time, this class-action lawsuit seeks to affirmatively and proactively prevent the irreversible harm of unwarranted family separation from happening in the first place.

Background on “Emergency Removals”

The law requires that when ACS believes it necessary to remove a child from their parents, it must first seek a court order. ACS is only supposed to exercise its emergency removal power, where it extrajudicially takes a child from their parents, in rare, truly urgent circumstances–when a child is in danger so immediate that there is not enough time for ACS to seek judicial approval. However, ACS uses this extraordinary, extrajudicial emergency removal power in over 50 percent of removals.

ACS often violates families’ basic constitutional rights by conducting emergency removals in situations that are not true emergencies. ACS’s own data show that most child removals now happen without prior judicial authorization – almost 1,500 last year alone. And when these cases finally reach family court, at the very first hearing judges find no justification for children to remain in state custody nearly 30 percent of the time – indicating that many of these purportedly “emergency” removals never met the legal standard for a removal in the first place, yet the lasting harm has already been done. 

ACS’s routine overuse of its Emergency Removal Policy has not made children safer. For example, during the COVID pandemic, the agency effectively suspended the Emergency Removal Policy – and, according to the ACS commissioner at the time, children were no worse off. Yet despite this clear evidence, ACS has now returned to using emergency removals at nearly pre-pandemic levels. Countless studies show that separating children from their families – even briefly – causes lasting harm. The trauma of removal has deep and measurable effects: children taken from their parents fare worse than children who are involved with the system but allowed to stay safely at home, suggesting that it is the removal itself that causes these poor outcomes.

The evidence of ACS’s discriminatory use of emergency removals is overwhelming. The practice is used almost exclusively against Black and Latino families, who make up 90 percent of all emergency removals in New York City. Meanwhile, white families make up roughly 3 percent of these removals. ACS’s own staff described the agency as “predatory” and one that “specifically targets Black and Brown parents” and subjects them to “a different level of scrutiny.”