“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

“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

“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

“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