The Issues

The Family Justice Law Center (FJLC) challenges the practices of the child welfare system that routinely, even casually, inflict illegal and horrific abuse on families caught up in its web. Across a broad range of issues, FJLC seeks to hold those who violate families’ rights accountable. Below are just a few areas in which we litigate.

Family Separation

All families have the constitutional right to be safe and secure in their homes. Yet every day, police officers and caseworkers forcefully enter homes, wake children safely sleeping in their beds, and rip them from their parents’ care — all without a court order authorizing these interventions.

Home and Strip Searches

The Fourth Amendment of the Constitution prohibits unreasonable searches, yet child welfare investigators routinely conduct them. Rather than follow the legal process to obtain an order, the Administration for Children’s Services instead uses highly coercive tactics to illegally enter and search families’ homes.

Surveilling Survivors of Domestic Violence

Across New York City, parent-survivors of domestic violence often face systematic “double abuse”: having first experienced violence at home, they are then subjected to unnecessary state surveillance that only exacerbates their situation.

Removal Hearing Delays

When the government separates a child from his or her parent, the family has the constitutional right to promptly challenge that removal. In New York, the law requires that these hearings be concluded within hours or days of the removal. But judges routinely deny families prompt hearings and instead prolong hearings over many weeks and even months, while children languish in foster care.

Fair Hearing Delays

Individuals have the constitutional right to challenge their indicated reports through the Office of Children and Family Services (OCFS). Yet OCFS frequently delays the administrative process by 12 to 16 months (or longer). These delays are particularly egregious due to the fact that when individuals finally make it through the administrative process, they win approximately 75% of the time. 

School Retaliation

Rather than assisting parents and understanding that schools and parents may reasonably disagree over a child’s educational needs, DOE has enabled a pattern in which DOE staff regularly report parents to the Statewide Central Register of Child Abuse and Maltreatment (SCR) in retaliation for parents’ advocacy for their children.