Can Family Member Who Doeant Have Custody Place Your Child in Foster Care
Annotation: This article has been republished as part of The Imprint's Hidden Foster Care drove with permission from The Entreatment.
In August 2018, Laura* got a call from Kid Protective Services. The agency asked if she could pick up 1-twelvemonth-sometime Sophie in a small Texas boondocks several hours abroad from Laura's home in Houston.
Laura wasn't related to Sophie, but she was in the room when she was built-in. Laura had been in Sophie's female parent Ashley'southward life since Ashley was a teenager, when Laura dated Ashley's stepfather. During that fourth dimension, Ashley's female parent died past suicide. Since and then, and long afterwards Ashley'south father and Laura had cleaved upward, Ashley would call Laura when she needed help.
And she did need help. In 2005, Laura enrolled Ashley in rehab for substance use disorder. In the decade later that, Laura just heard from Ashley a few times, until 2016, when Ashley called over again. She was pregnant, had gotten kicked out of rehab, and was in a bad relationship.
Laura and her hubby built a room onto their Houston abode and moved Ashley in. Sophie was born that fall, and the unlikely family began settling into a rhythm. Only stability didn't last. When Sophie was about five months old, Ashley over again began to struggle, and Laura suspected that Ashley was using drugs again.
When she constitute proof, Laura kicked Ashley out. She told her Sophie could stay, but Ashley took her daughter with her out of town. For about a year, Laura kept tabs on them as best she could, with Ashley even bringing Sophie to visit once. But in summer 2018, CPS called Laura with an ultimatum: If she wanted to care for Sophie, she needed to immediately choice her up. If not, she'd enter foster care.
Laura and her hubby decided to have Sophie in while Ashley entered rehab again. The hope was that Ashley would get back on her feet, and that Sophie would be rubber with people who loved her. "We never agreed to have the kid for the long term, simply were more than happy for her to stay in a loving, supportive home, and the only home she has always truly known," Laura told The Appeal.
But Ashley hasn't been able to get dorsum on her feet since then, and the understanding CPS initiated with Ashley, a temporary custody club, has expired. Laura and her husband have incurred tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees trying to attain stability for Sophie, by placing her with either the couple or another loving family unit. Simply Laura and her husband, who had plans to retire, are instead caring for a 4-year-old child—without whatsoever legal rights, monetary support, or state services for the girl. (*Laura, Ashley, and Sophie's names have been changed to protect the kid's identity.)
Removing children from their parents and placing them with relatives is a common occurrence in Texas, and effectually the country, as child welfare authorities intervene in situations similar Sophie's. But unlike the traditional foster care system, no court example is initiated, and no lawyers are nowadays to suggest either parents or caregivers of their rights. Legal advocates say these arrangements pb to confusion around custody rights, are ripe for compulsion of the parent, and leave caregivers without any back up in caring for children.
The phenomenon has been termed "shadow foster care" or "hidden foster care" past legal researchers, who gauge that these informal arrangements are made at a rate on par with the traditional foster care arrangement. In fiscal year 2014 in Texas, there were only over 30,000 children placed in the foster care system, with CPS cases in the courts overseen past judges; that year, the state fabricated 34,000 breezy placements of children with relatives as a issue of a CPS investigation, which had no court cases attached. That number seems to be declining, according to recent data caused from the Texas Section of Family and Protective Services. This year, DFPS reported about 12,000 children currently in such placements; more than 1,000 of these arrangements have been airtight each year for the last v years with the child's relatives still caring for them, without a custody order in place.
"There's a lot of pressure to intervene relatively less and keep kids out of foster intendance," Josh Gupta-Kagan, an associate police professor at the University of Due south Carolina, told The Appeal. Last year, Gupta-Kagan wrote a Stanford Police force Review article nigh the legal problems with hidden foster care. "Besides, foster care is really expensive, so if you can place kids with—or induce parents to voluntarily transfer custody to—someone else who doesn't get paid, this can brand your numbers look not bad, and saves everyone money."
Laura and her husband spent more than a twelvemonth parenting Sophie while in legal limbo, and when their temporary custody understanding with Sophie's female parent expired, they decided they needed help. Laura tried to initiate a instance with CPS and get certified every bit a foster parent so that Sophie would authorize for services. Just later on CPS spoke with the family, the agency closed their instance. "CPS threatened that she had already been with the states for two years and was basically our responsibility now, fifty-fifty though nosotros had no legal rights. [The caseworker] said this was a individual matter and we would have to deal with it," Laura said. "Otherwise, we would have to call CPS and say nosotros could no longer intendance for her—and they would come and take her, and we would never see her again."
Kid welfare advocates and researchers have long believed that when children cannot be with their parents, the next best thing for their well-beingness and development is to be placed in kinship homes, with biological relatives or with "fictive kin," like Laura, who have established relationships with the child. Sibling groups are more than likely to stay together in kinship homes, and children move effectually less and have fewer behavioral problems. They're also more often able to stay in the communities where they live and know people, giving them some sense of stability through the upheaval of family disruption.
But kinship placements are poorly compensated by the state compared to nonrelative foster homes. Currently in Texas, kinship caregivers are entitled to $11.55 a solar day per child, or well-nigh $345 a month—less than half of what a licensed nonrelative foster parent would bring in for each kid designated at a "basic" level of intendance. That aid lasts upward to a twelvemonth. Before 2017, when the Texas Legislature passed the neb to pay caregivers monthly, kinship families in Texas were only entitled to a one-fourth dimension $one,000 stipend, plus $500 each year. In a state where 75 percent of maltreatment findings are for neglect—which is often poverty-related—instead of abuse, family members who accept in children are also often struggling in poverty. And even that kinship charge per unit is reserved for caregivers of children in the formal foster care arrangement who run into all of the requirements; for those that took on children without CPS initiating a case, they receive null.
Many kinship placements happen organically, such every bit when a parent asks a relative to intendance temporarily or permanently for their child. Just when CPS is involved, the "voluntary" attribute of these placements has been called into question in legal challenges dating back to the 1990s. Because these agreements are ofttimes offered every bit an alternative to having a instance with CPS initiated—with an increased likelihood of the child ending up with a stranger—legal advocates like Gupta-Kagan say it's inherently coercive and could be used to restrict parents' rights when the agency might not have sufficient bear witness to remove a child if they took the case to court. This year, a federal appeals court ruled that a Kentucky couple could sue social workers who allegedly threatened to remove their children if the parents didn't concur to a "prevention plan" that didn't allow the mother to be unsupervised with her newborn after a false-positive drug test.
In a court, CPS needs "to bear witness abuse or fail, that the child is in significant imminent risk of harm from that abuse or neglect, and show that the removal is necessary to protect the child, not some other remedy," Gupta-Kagan said. "The question yous accept to enquire is how much do y'all really trust CPS agencies to get all of that right all of the fourth dimension, such that they should exist allowed to do this without whatever due procedure checks?"
In his Stanford Law Review article, he goes farther: "It is as if a police section investigated a criminal offense, concluded an individual was guilty, did non file charges or provide him with an attorney, and told him he had to hold to go to jail for several weeks or months, or else information technology would bring him to court and things could get fifty-fifty worse."
"When you look at information technology on paper, nosotros want to avoid CPS bringing court cases, that's the goal," Tiffany Cebrun, a staff chaser at the Foster Intendance Advancement Middle (FCAC) in Harris County, told The Entreatment. "In court you want permanency, in that location'due south a blitz to termination [of parental rights]. A lot of workers desire to close out cases quickly."
Still, she said, FCAC has several clients who "CPS kind of coerced" into taking relatives' children. "A lot of caregivers were told they would accept support," Cebrun said. And without a court case, parents, many of whom are struggling with substance use disorder, aren't given resources or handling, either.
Though a parent loses the ability to alive with and care for their child in these informal arrangements, they are not technically considered removals. So there's very little data most the arrangements, both in Texas and around the country, because the federal government doesn't ask states to report them.
There'southward aplenty evidence that this practice is widespread around the country. "The number of children who pass through hidden foster care each year is roughly comparable with the number of children removed from their families, brought to court, and placed in formal foster intendance," Gupta-Kagan notes in his article. A study of nearly 6,000 children in 83 counties nationwide estimated that when children were removed from dwelling house afterward a CPS investigation, nearly half of the fourth dimension they were placed with relatives informally, with no courtroom example initiated.
The lack of data has Gupta-Kagan and other legal advocates concerned that amid budget tightening due to economic effects of the coronavirus pandemic, the scope of these removals will increase, without any sense of how many children'due south lives are being affected this manner—or how much needed support these families will be going without.
Valerie Jackson is a psychologist who founded and runs Monarch Family unit Services, an agency that focuses on kinship placements. She'due south experienced many situations like Laura and Sophie's, where guardians are given intendance of a kid but no back up or sufficient documentation to proceed with it. DFPS calls these "parental child safety placements" temporary and says they "should concluding no longer than 60 days." Just Jackson says in that location are many families who are altered long-term as CPS instigates the move of children so exits the process. "If the state doesn't take conservatorship they say, 'God bless you and skilful luck'—they get nothing," Jackson told The Entreatment. "The majority of these families are low-income and with limited resource and express knowledge of how to access resources, which increases the probability of placement breakdown…Or, if they remain in the care of this relative, they're unable to survive comfortably."
In San Antonio, Judge Peter Sakai, who has long presided over child welfare cases in Bexar County, said he often saw cases in his courtroom where placements had broken down later long stretches of time where families were subject to these informal agreements. "San Antonio is known and it'southward been documented that nosotros accept a lot of kids with their relatives—a lot. And a lot is through CPS intervention," Sakai told The Appeal.
Equally kid welfare cases increased in Bexar County in the early 2010s, the county considered adding another judge to oversee these cases. "We were reading the removals that were coming across the court'southward desk," said Sakai'south court ambassador, Barbara Schafer. "The kids have been placed with grandma for three years and at present information technology'due south time to remove. What?! Y'all had them there for three years on a condom program?"
"Safety plans," another term for these informal removals, are problematic for relatives who desire to enroll children in a new school or become insurance for them. Unlike custody orders, these plans are "merely a large onetime sign that says 'CPS is involved in my life.' It's not a legal bounden certificate, information technology'southward not filed into court. CPS uses it as leverage to say, 'If you violate information technology, we'll remove the kids,'" Schafer said.
Instead of hiring a new judge, Schafer had another idea: a separate "family preservation" docket, where appointed attorneys get a apartment $one,200 fee to file custody orders for relatives who are caring for children in identify of their parents. Since its inception in 2015, the docket has finalized about 300 cases involving nearly 400 children, Schafer said.
These families get a custody order and are linked to federally funded services similar Medicaid or Temporary Help for Needy Families, but they don't get the monthly stipend that would provide substantial monetary assistance. Nonetheless, "Kids deserve to be taken care of and go to the doctor," Schafer said, and "a lot of the grandparents are like, 'We don't want CPS in our home anymore.'"
That'southward a crucial signal: Many advocates whose goal is to limit the attain of the child welfare organisation say that informal, community-led arrangements that spring upwards in response to parents struggling with poverty or addiction can aid compress the scope of a family unit regulation system that violates parents' rights and traumatizes their children—peculiarly Black and Native children, who are disproportionately represented in foster care.
"Informal kinship care is the solution to a lot of this, but the state doesn't want it to happen because then they don't accept oversight," said Alan Dettlaff, the head of University of Houston's Graduate School of Social Work and a founder of the Upend Movement, a network of organizations that promotes abolishing the kid welfare arrangement. "When the child welfare organization showtime started, Black children were intentionally excluded. Black families and communities came together and adult their own ways to care for children—information technology's almost trusting Black families and communities to take care of their children."
However, Dettlaff advocates for more of these informal arrangements—with financial support. "We remove kids for fail and place them in strangers' homes, and give the stranger a monthly stipend to take care of the child," he told The Appeal. "What if we just gave that $1,000 a month to the mother who needed it?"
When CPS told Laura and her husband that their case was airtight in May, the couple didn't know what to do. They had a grown biological child and weren't sure if they were upwardly for parenting Sophie until machismo. Ashley, who hadn't been able to achieve sobriety, decided that she wasn't able to provide Sophie with the life she deserved. Only CPS refused to get involved, saying only that if Laura returned Sophie to Ashley, they'd initiate a instance against Laura and her hubby for endangerment.
"They convinced united states of america to take on the child, so they could wash their hands of yet another case, but offered no direction or services," Laura said. "The worst part is they did not speak to the long-term problems, effects, or needs the child might have."
Laura and her husband recognize that they are lucky enough to afford tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees related to Sophie's case, and put Sophie in a individual preschool. The bulk of kinship caregivers have incomes beneath 200 percent of the poverty line—and well-nigh 40 percent of these caregivers are below the poverty line—but Laura and her husband are notwithstanding stretched thin. They've decided to adopt Sophie. Their retirement plans are gone for at present; instead, they've moved to the suburbs then Sophie can nourish a more affordable preschool. "It was not in our m scheme of things, just the only manner for usa to go on consistency with this child is for u.s. to adopt her," she said. "Nosotros still remember it'south unfair for her to be with such one-time parents, but we still take life left in us."
Roxanna Asgarian reported this story with the support of the Fund for Journalism on Kid Well-Being, a program of the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism's 2020 National Fellowship.
The Appeal is a non-profit media organization that produces news and commentary on how policy, politics, and the legal system bear on America's most vulnerable people.
Source: https://imprintnews.org/hidden-foster-care/hidden-foster-care-all-of-the-responsibility-none-of-the-resources/57170
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