Our 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.
All families have the constitutional right to be safe and secure in their homes. Yet every day, police officers and caseworkers forcefully enter homes and rip children from their parents’ care—often without a court order authorizing these interventions. In New York City, once the courts scrutinize these extrajudicial removals, nearly a third of children are returned to their parents’ care, yet the damage has been done.
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.
Parent-survivors of domestic violence often face systematic “double abuse”: having first experienced violence at home, they are then subjected to state surveillance, including invasive searches of their home and strip searches of their children, despite having been accused of no wrongdoing.
When the government separates a child from their parents, 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 them over many weeks and even months, while children languish in foster care.
A parent who has an indicated report in the New York Statewide Central Register of Child Abuse and Maltreatment (SCR) has the right to challenge these reports; when they do, they win the vast majority of the time. Yet the administrative process can take many months and sometimes years, during which time parents suffer immense injury, including the stigma of alleged child abuse, loss of employment opportunities, and being precluded from caring for family members. These inordinate delays in SCR appeals violate the due process guarantees in the United States Constitution.
Children with disabilities make up a disproportionately large share of educators’ reports to the Statewide Central Register of Child Abuse and Maltreatment (SCR). Rather than assisting parents with their child’s educational needs, DOE has enabled a pattern in which DOE staff regularly report parents to the SCR in retaliation for parents’ advocacy for their children.
Termination of parental rights (TPR) is the permanent, irrevocable destruction of the legal parent-child relationship—a state intervention so serious that it is known as the “civil death penalty.” When parents’ rights are terminated, they lose not only the opportunity to regain custody, but also the right to contact with their child, and the chance to be involved in any part of their child’s life. Despite these extraordinary stakes, across the country parents’ rights to their children are severed under lax legal standards and without appropriate assistance of counsel.