This article was first published on November 27, 2019 by the Public Eye.
In the year since the Trump administration was ordered to stop family separations, 1,090 children have been separated from their families and detained.1 The detentions send a clear message: the administration will continue to remove children from their families as a threat to migrant families as well as non-White and Latinx communities living here in the United States.
Following the zero-tolerance immigration policy it adopted in April 2018, the administration has detained at least 12,000 children, including thousands separated from their parents by border officials.2 The barely-operational system of care the administration cobbled together to house those children relies on huge contracts with private child welfare agencies, including those with histories of coercive adoption practices, and with private defense contractors plagued by scandals.3-6 Though there’s little oversight of either category, they’re now charged with keeping children safe.7-8
Since their detention, these thousands of South- and Central-American Latinx and Indigenous children have faced poor health care, sexual abuse and assault, injury and death, and trauma that will likely last a lifetime, even for those who are reunited with their families—a likelihood that seems farther and farther away, as lawsuits and investigations reveal poor tracking mechanisms for separated children.9-13
The horrifying spectacle of mass detention, family separation, and the forced transfer of non-White children into White homes all recall important parts of U.S. history, from colonialism to expansionism and beyond, wherein racism and White supremacy guided policy for how the country treats families, parents, and children in need. Through the early 1800s, U.S. welfare policy on low-income children and children of color took the form of problem-solving; that is, that these children were a problem that had to be “solved” through removal, assimilation, or conversion.14 As formal child welfare policy came into being through the late 1800s and early 1900s, the form shifted subtly: while literal assimilation and conversion efforts continued through Indian boarding schools and adoption, child welfare advocates argued that children of color would benefit from proximity to White, middle- or upper-income homes, parented by a mother and father.15
The Explicit Racism of the 1800s and Early 1900s
There can be no discussion of U.S. child welfare without an acknowledgment of the destruction of families that began with colonialism and the slave trade. For hundreds of years, colonialists and their descendants relied on the labor of enslaved people, most kidnapped from West Africa, to exploit land stolen from Native Americans. Children born to enslaved people were often given away or sold, both as a way to threaten parents and to prevent strong familial bonds. Indigenous families were similarly broken up or killed as part of the country’s westward expansion. The impact of family destruction through slavery and genocide is still felt today, along with subtler destructive forces that arose in the development of modern child welfare policy.
The impact of family destruction through slavery and genocide is still felt today, along with subtler destructive forces that arose in the development of modern child welfare policy.
Indian Boarding Schools
In 1819, the United States Congress passed the Indian Civilization Act in order “to instruct [Indigenous people] in the mode of agriculture suited to their situation; and for teaching their children in reading, writing, and arithmetic.”16 The Act provided the impetus and initial funding for the boarding school program, through which hundreds of thousands of Indigenous youth and children were taken from their homes, sometimes with parental consent but often without, and housed in group homes with the express purpose of assimilating them into White society and culture. Amid the Indian Wars of the early- and mid-1800s, which decimated Native American populations and forced survivors onto reservations far from their ancestral lands, White Christian missionaries founded schools to educate and convert Indigenous youth to Christianity.17
In 1868, as American expansionism continued into the Midwest, President Ulysses Grant passed a “Peace Policy,” ostensibly to reform the corrupt BIA, but also to create a formal federal mandate to fund and expand these schools, working closely with churches on and near the new reservations.18 The reservations were parceled out to the various Protestant denominations participating in the program, leading overlooked Catholic missionaries to complain to the BIA that, “The Indians have a right, under the Constitution…to choose whatever Christian belief they wish, without interference from the Government.”19-20 (Emphasis added.)
In 1892, Captain Richard Pratt, founder of the first off-reservation boarding school, gave an impassioned speech about the system, declaring “all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”21 Pratt, a veteran of the Indian Wars, was not speaking entirely metaphorically. Over its 39-year tenure, nearly 200 children were buried at his Carlisle School in Pennsylvania, where, according to the Carlisle Indian School Project, “Pratt instituted a system of forced ‘Americanization,’ abandonment of Native languages, required conversion to Christianity, and harsh military discipline.”22-23 Pratt’s assimilationist philosophy was widely adopted, and over the next 100 years, the federal government and religious missionaries operated hundreds of schools for Indigenous youth.
The boarding schools were a failure and a national disgrace, predicated upon wide-scale forced removal—effectively, the state-sponsored abduction of thousands of children from their homes.24 In 1928, an independent study published by the Institute for Government Research, the Meriam Report, declared, “The survey staff finds itself obliged to say frankly and unequivocally that the provisions for the care of the Indian children in boarding schools are grossly inadequate,” and that “Nearly every boarding school visited furnished disquieting illustrations of failure to understand the underlying principles of human behavior.”25
The boarding schools were a failure and a national disgrace, predicated upon wide-scale forced removal—effectively, the state-sponsored abduction of thousands of children from their homes.
Despite the findings of the report, the system continued in full operation for another 50 years after the Meriam Report, exposing students to extreme discipline; verbal, physical, and sexual abuse; and erasure of their names, heritage, and language.26 In 1969, a second study resulted in the “Kennedy Report,” which declared the schools a “national tragedy.”27 As Tsianina Lomawaima, head of the American Indian Studies program at the University of Arizona, told NPR in 2008, the intent of the schools was to completely transform people—“Language, religion, family structure, economics, the way you make a living, the way you express emotion, everything.”28
In all, the federal government opened more than 90 schools, and there were far more missionary-operated schools, housing tens of thousands of children.29-30 Although the number is impossible to know with certainty, it’s estimated that the majority of Indigenous youth in the first half of the 20th Century attended boarding schools.31 A handful continue to operate today, though federal support has plummeted since the 1970s when federal legislation was passed outlawing the separation of Indigenous children from their families.32
At the height of the off-reservation boarding school era, in the mid-20th Century, the Children’s Bureau and the Bureau of Indian Affairs jointly funded a project administered by the Child Welfare League of America to place Indigenous children and youth into mainly White homes across the country, with the twin goals of saving state and federal dollars by farming out child care to private families, and, as author Margaret Jacobs writes, “assimilating them once and for all.”33
Reconstruction
At the same time that President Grant’s Peace Policy authorized an increase in the development of off-reservation boarding schools in the late 1800s, reconstructionists and abolitionists were struggling with how to care for the thousands of parentless and homeless free Black children in the wake of the Civil War. There were very few orphanages for Black children in the post-Civil War era—only three per state, according to Dr. Laura Briggs, Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts.34 Some Black philanthropists founded orphanages, and many Black families adopted children who needed a home.35 Many other children found a place with extended family.36 But the Freedmen’s Bureau, established by Congress in 1865 to provide aid to freed slaves, discouraged grandparents’ adopting their grandchildren or mothers deciding whom to raise their children with, citing specious concerns about abuse and exploitation.37 (Of course, many families were deliberately separated from one another during slavery, making reunification impossible.) The children in families of these and other non-father-mother configurations were, therefore, unable to access aid from the Freedmen’s Bureau, contributing to poverty among Black families that persists today. And children who were barred from orphanages or extended or adoptive families could be rounded up into chain gangs, effectively re-enslaved by the plantations from which they’d just been freed.38
Orphan Trains
In 1853, Charles Loring Brace founded the Children’s Aid Society of New York to assist the children of poor immigrants, largely low-income Catholics—a demographic Loring Brace called the “dangerous classes” of the city.39 Such immigrants were not yet viewed as White, compared to English-descended Protestants, who comprised the majority of New York’s rich philanthropists.40
The Children’s Aid Society (CAS) is often considered the genesis of modern foster care. Begun by establishing the first lodging houses for boys experiencing homelessness in the 1850s, the CAS went on to develop industrial and vocational schools for low-income children, schools for children with disabilities, nutritional programs for New York City youth, and, from 1853 to 1929, the orphan train program, which transported poor, immigrant children from crowded cities, out to the expanding frontier, and into the homes of people who’d answered newspaper ads and flyers.41 Here is Brace, talking about the Emigration Program of the Children’s Aid Society:
The United States have the enormous advantage over all other countries, in the treatment of difficult questions of pauperism and reform, that they possess a practically unlimited area of arable land. The demand for labor on this land is beyond any present supply. Moreover, the cultivators of the soil are in America our most solid and intelligent class. From the nature of their circumstances, their laborers, or “help,” must be members of their families, and share in their social tone. It is, accordingly, of the utmost importance to them to train up children who shall aid in their work, and be associates of their own children. A servant who is nothing but a servant, would be, with them, disagreeable and inconvenient. They like to educate their own “help.”42
Brace described orphan trains as a way to lessen the demand for resources in New York City, while simultaneously giving homeless and poor children a better life and their new parents a chance to build a family.43 Unfortunately for the children, many were not orphans, and the families to which they were sent were often looking not for a new child so much as free or cheap labor.44 As demand on the city’s resources increased after the Civil War, the orphan train system also increased, sending an estimated 100,000 children throughout the country in a diffuse network.45 As Nina Bernstein writes in The Lost Children of Wilder, “By 1893, even as Ohio continued to accept orphan-riders from New York City, orphanages in Ohio’s bigger cities were sending hundreds of children a year on trains to Indiana. And Indiana was dispatching its own indigent children to Nebraska… even though one thousand of Nebraska’s children were living in that state’s industrial school and ‘Home for the Friendless.’”46
The Establishment of Federal Child Welfare
Aid to Dependent Children
In the midst of the Great Depression, Congress passed the Social Security Act (SSA) in 1935.47 The SSA formalized many of the entitlement programs that we’ve come to think of as the social safety net: old-age pensions, unemployment insurance, grants to states to provide medical care, and Aid to Dependent Children (ADC).48 The last was designed as a substitute for a father’s income, authorizing grants to “suitable homes,” which effectively limited the benefit to mothers with children whose husband had died or left, not those who had never married.49 The Act also developed the Children’s Bureau, which oversaw maternal and child health, services for disabled children, and child welfare, including foster care.50
In practice, ADC was largely inaccessible to families of color, administered from its outset with racial bias. As Professor Joanne Goodwin found, in her 1995 paper “‘Employable Mothers’ and ‘Suitable Work,’”51-52 African American women in the South were usually considered “more employable,” and thus, paradoxically, less likely to be able to access benefits. Goodwin notes that an independent study into the underrepresentation of African American women on welfare in Southern states found that many local administrators “[saw] no reason why the employable Negro mother should not continue her usually sketchy seasonal labor or indefinite domestic service rather than receive a public assistance grant.”53
In practice, Aid to Dependent Children was largely inaccessible to families of color, administered from its outset with racial bias.
In 1960, Secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare Arthur Flemming ruled against a Louisiana state policy that blocked ADC benefits to children born out of wedlock, declaring that a state can’t deny benefits based on the “suitability” of a child’s home. Instead, he said, states must either provide appropriate care to make the home suitable or move the child to a suitable home. This marked a major change of policy, and the so-called Flemming Rule, along with the Children’s Bureau’s foster program, began the modern practice of family separation and foster care.54 Rather than focusing on providing resources to make the homes of lower-income people of color more “suitable” for raising their own children, states wielded the Flemming Rule as justification to remove children from the families under the guise of “child welfare.”
As Professor Eileen Boris, a feminist studies professor at the University of California Santa Barbara, has written, White women played a major role in the creation of the “suitable homes” standard.55 Boris found that as the U.S. began to discuss and debate the creation of a more formalized welfare state during the early 1900s, White women were cast as experts on child-rearing and housekeeping.56 Although there was much political support for a “mother’s pension” in the U.S., particularly among African Americans, pensions were tied to labor, rather than citizenship, excluding unpaid work at home or in parenting.57 This reliance on labor as the qualifier for public benefits was crucial to the growth (and eventual failure) of American welfare.
The Flemming Rule opened a new door in child welfare: the ability to remove children from parents deemed unfit. Newly sanctioned and regulated state foster systems allowed states and the federal government to save money by putting children in private homes and also to diffuse responsibility and accountability in a new way. While previous iterations of child welfare had relied on generous benefactors to facilitate placements (like the orphan trains) or housed children in large institutions (like boarding schools or orphanages), the modern foster-to-adopt system used social workers to assess individual homes, and place those children who were removed in more “suitable” foster homes. This transfer of responsibility allowed the individual racial and class biases of social workers and foster/adoptive families to infect the system, with predictable results that are still manifesting today.
Formalization of Foster Care
Throughout the second half of the 20th Century, federally-subsidized foster and adoption programs were formalized, largely through a series of amendments to the Social Security Act, including the Flemming Rule in the late 1960s. Under the new Foster Care component of Aid to Dependent Children (ADC-Foster Care), states received matching funds from the federal government for any children removed from “unsuitable” homes and placed into foster homes, incentivizing the removal of children over family preservation.58-59
In the late ‘60s, attorneys with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) challenged Georgia’s disproportionate distribution of benefits (by then renamed as Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or AFDC), arguing that the state’s “employable mother rule” intentionally cut Black families’ benefits when agricultural work was available. The NAACP prevailed on several of their claims, helping overturn discriminatory AFDC practices, and enabling a 15 percent increase in Black enrollment in these programs by the end of the decade.60-61 But this belated availability of benefits to Black enrollees led directly to the racist narrative of “welfare mothers,” feeding attacks on AFDC from the ‘70s onward, ultimately resulting in the closure of the program in 1996.62
Another amendment in 1967 made foster care mandatory in all states.63 In 1972, in Compos v. McKeithen, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District Court of Louisiana struck down64 the last law in the United States banning interracial adoption.65 In reaction to the Compos case, and as foster care and family separation ramped up, it became obvious that Black and brown children were being removed at greater rates than White children, were able to access family reunification at lower rates than White children, and were often placed in White families more than in families that matched their own race or nationality. The National Association of Black Social Workers (NABSW) issued a statement calling for a ban on transracial adoption.66 Neoliberal child welfare advocates point to this declaration as exemplary of attitudes that keep Black children languishing in poverty and abuse.
The 1974 passage of the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA) required states to create and maintain child abuse reporting procedures and investigation systems, correlating to a further increase of child removals—increasingly of non-White children.67
Only six years later, Congress passed the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act because, while under CAPTA more children were being removed from homes due to alleged abuse and neglect, foster parents were reluctant to adopt children they were fostering because adoption would mean the end of federal (and state) subsidies they received for fostering.68-69 The 1980 legislation created Title IV-E of the Social Security Act, creating an adoption subsidy for states that yet again further incentivized removals over family preservation.
In 1994, Congress passed the Multiethnic Placement Act (MEPA) to prohibit the delay or denial of adoption or foster care placements on the basis of race but affirmatively allowing the consideration of race when determining the appropriateness of a foster care or adoption placement. The passage of MEPA was framed as a way to protect Black children specifically, despite Black social workers’ opposition to the bill.70-72 “If this act doesn’t work,” then-Senator Howard Metzenbaum (D-OH) said during debate over the bill, “I tell you as a private citizen, I will raise unshirted blank [sic]… Just because some social workers think that Black children should only be adopted by Black parents, I don’t, and I’m a very happy man.”73 “Denying adoption of Black children by White families,” agreed then-Rep. Harris Fawell (R-IL) during the House debate, “effectively sentences these children to unnecessary years of going from one home to another without having a chance to emotionally bond with permanent adoptive parents. This is tragic and avoidable.”74
In a 2007 report on how to reduce the disproportionate representation of African American children in foster care, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that MEPA had less effect than other policies, partially due to the erroneous belief of some child welfare workers that “the law prohibits or discourages same-race adoptions”—a misperception that had led some to avoid placing Black children with relatives or in Black adoptive homes.75-77 The GAO concluded that Congress should provide financial subsidies for legal guardianships, noting that African American children, in particular, would benefit from access to guardianships with known relatives.78
Adoption as Paternalism
As the system became more bureaucratic and diffuse, and as individual workers became overloaded with cases, racism continued to permeate.
In 1997, the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) was passed, giving states and agencies heavy financial incentives for placing children in adoptive homes. Professor Catherine Rymph, chair of the history department at the University of Missouri, wrote at the time that, “the pendulum had firmly swung away from family rehabilitation and reunification as paths to permanency.”79 ASFA emphasized children’s “safety” and “permanency,” but did so at the expense of finding or creating that stability within a child’s original family. Under ASFA, if a child spent a set number of months in foster care, a child welfare agency is required to shift their goal from reunification to adoption, beginning the process to terminate parental rights. Crucially, federal subsidies were offered for finalizing adoptions, but none for reunification.80-81 “Congress seemed to have given up on birth families,” Rymph observed.82
Speaking on the House floor in 1997, former Rep. Dan Burton (R-IN), summed up the arguments of ASFA proponents:
In the last decade child welfare has grown into an enormous bureaucratic system that is biased toward preserving the family at any cost. … This bill represents an important philosophical shift from the federal policy that makes every effort to reunite children with their biological families to one that defines when reasonable efforts shall not be made and determines when those children shall be placed in permanent loving adoptive homes. 83
Christine Gottlieb, co-director of the NYU Family Defense Clinic, points out that the United States is one of the only countries in the world that allows a parent’s right to be terminated against that parent’s wishes.84
The modern framework of serving the “best interest” of the child has even further distributed the governance of child welfare policy into the hands of individual states, agencies, and social workers, each of whom carry their own biases. That bias is evident in the data on children who interact with the child welfare system.
A modern example of the diffusion of child welfare leading to the proliferation of White supremacy can be found in the work of Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA). Nearly every state funds the CASA program, through which the state’s family courts appoint an advocate for each child involved in the foster system. A CASA’s goal is to represent the best interests of the child throughout the child welfare process. As Amy Mulzer and Tara Urs found in their analysis of CASAs across the country, that delegation of duty to the advocates often results in individual CASAs representing their own ideas of a child’s best interest, instead of reflecting what a child may truly want, through the tumultuous process of deciding a permanency goal.85 The vast majority of CASAs are middle-class White women who volunteer for their positions.86 As Mulzer and Urs noted, “When that power—not just the power to determine a child’s fate, but the power to even speak one’s own opinion on the matter—is distributed away from poor families and children of color and given to a group of middle-class white volunteers, the racial bias in the system—the structural racism—is not just clearly visible, but is actually given a seat at the table in court for all to see.”87
Mulzer and Urs found that CASAs spend, on average, less time on cases involving Black children than those involving White children.88 More importantly, simply having a CASA increases a child’s chance that their parental rights will be terminated.89
State and local CASA associations across the country have responded to criticism with trainings on “cultural competence.” According to a 2017 training manual and presentation, CASAs should “use the resources in your community,” including “Community groups focusing on the cultural traditions and norms of specific cultural or language groups” and “Community groups providing health services to specific cultural or language groups.”90
Social critic and author Dorothy Roberts, discussing the modern focus on cultural competence as a way to mitigate the impacts that racism and White supremacy have had on Black children in child welfare, reminds us that “cultural competence” is just another manifestation of the problems it is attempting to remedy.91 In her law review article, “The Community Dimension of State Child Protection,” Roberts elaborates: “Social work scholars have noted that cultural sensitivity ‘increases client receptiveness to intervention.’92 Whether this is a good thing depends on the nature of the intervention. This remedy might also convince caseworkers, administrators, and judges that they are acting fairly while the system they are administering continues to have negative consequences for the communities in which it is concentrated.”93
Modern Child Welfare Trends
Evangelical Adoptions
In her book The Child Catchers, Kathryn Joyce closely tracks the boom in adoptions among evangelicals that occurred in the early 21st Century.94 Briefly, the coinciding of many political and social threads came together to provide U.S. evangelical Christians with the opportunity to step into the international adoption sphere: the interest of the Southern Baptist Convention to move beyond its explicitly racist past tied in nicely with evangelicals’ desire to perform charitable acts and convert followers.95 Many evangelicals flocked around the Bible verse James 1.27: “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.”
International adoptions reached a height in 2004 when nearly 23,000 children were adopted to the U.S. from other countries.96 In 2010, multiple Baptist missionaries were arrested or charged with kidnapping upon being discovered taking children out of earthquake-torn Haiti without documentation, at a time when many evangelical (and non-evangelical) agencies were benefiting from expedited removal of Haitian children for adoption in the U.S.97-98 Some agencies’ convictions were built on racist views of Haitian people and religion: one parachurch organization declared that Haiti was a country “dedicated to Satan in a contractual form.”99 Another adoption agency leader said of the children he worked with, “We want our children to be adopted by Christian families because we want them to be God’s servants.”100
Neoliberal and Libertarian Advocacy
Regarding race and child welfare, neoliberals and libertarians have found themselves in the same ship, steaming towards “color-blind” placements with the goal of ensuring that children don’t linger in foster homes while waiting for adoption.101-102 Elizabeth Bartholet, law professor and director of the Child Advocacy Program at Harvard University, is a leader in this field, writing frequently about the differential approach (current child-welfare speak for taking a multitude of factors into consideration when planning outcomes for children), the “Liberal Dilemma in Child Welfare Reform,” and where “black children belong.”103-105
In July 2018, Bartholet was the keynote speaker at a conference convened at the Cato Institute on “conflicts in adoption and child placement policy.”106 During her address, Bartholet said that the central problem in child welfare policy is the philosophy that “children belong where they came from.”107 Through her scholarship and her keynote at Cato, it is clear that Bartholet sees children in the child welfare program as parentless—as orphans who need homes as soon as possible, preferably homes where their outcomes would be better (by Bartholet’s standards) than if they had remained in their country or family of origin.108
Re-Weaponization of Family Separation
The Trump Administration’s acceptance of White nationalism and neoliberal support for strict immigration and drug policies have paved the way for a re-weaponization of family separation.109-110 The Muslim travel ban and the family separations at the U.S. Southern border are egregious examples of executive overreach, but the criminal justice system has long been used as a tool of White supremacy, emboldened by neoliberal support for mandatory minimums and prosecutorial discretion.
Twenty-first Century child welfare policy will be known for the weaponization of calls to Child Protective Services, for using foster care as a threat to low-income parents who lack access to safety nets and social services, and for state and federal policies that permit private child welfare organizations to discriminate against parents and children with impunity, while receiving state and federal funds.111-114 But these modern manifestations are merely the logical continuations of centuries of White Supremacist policymaking.
The policies of the last 300 years have led to this moment, in which asylum seekers are automatically deemed “unfit parents,” and their children removed with the intention of placing them into more “suitable homes.”
The policies of the last 300 years have led to this moment, in which asylum seekers are automatically deemed “unfit parents,” and their children removed with the intention of placing them into more “suitable homes.”115-116 Unsurprisingly, these children are being funneled into the foster system by evangelical-funded child-welfare agencies with ties to the greater anti-choice network and to the Trump Administration itself.117 These ties are not accidental. Just as child separations were used to terrorize enslaved African people, Indigenous people, low-income Catholic families, freed enslaved people, African Americans, and others, child welfare policy is now being weaponized to terrorize migrant families seeking safety in the United States. Once again, we see child welfare being used as a weapon of White supremacy.
Endnotes
[1] Miriam Jordan, “No More Family Separations, Except These 900,” The New York Times, July 30, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/us/migrant-family-separations.html; “More than 5,400 children split at border, according to new count,” NBC News, October 25, 2019, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/more-5-400-children-split-border-according-new-count-n1071791.
[2] Ginger Thompson, “Families Are Still Being Separated at the Border, Months After ‘Zero Tolerance’ Was Reversed,” ProPublica, March 9, 2019, https://www.propublica.org/article/border-patrol-families-still-being-separated-at-border-after-zero-tolerance-immigration-policy-reversed; Grace Segers, “Feds Holding 12,800 Migrant Children in Detention Centers, Report Says,” CBS News, September 13, 2018, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/feds-holding-12800-migrant-children-in-detention-centers-report-says/; Aaron Hegarty, “Timeline: Immigrant Children Separated from Families at the Border,” USA Today, July 25, 2018, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/06/27/immigrant-children-family-separation-border-timeline/734014002/.
[3] Jennifer Kang, “DHS Had No Database to Track Migrant Children Separated From Their Families,” Slate, October 2, 2018, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/10/dhs-database-separated-children-zero-tolerance-policy-immigration.html.
[4] Zusha Elinson and Ian Lovett, “Ahead of Border Policy, Trump Administration Awarded Contracts to Help Run Facilities for Migrant Children,” The Wall Street Journal, June 21, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/nonprofits-other-businesses-getting-millions-in-federal-contracts-to-care-for-migrant-children-1529596377.
[5] Regina Mahone, “Bethany Christian Services Is Fostering Migrant Kids. It Also Has a History of Coercive Adoptions,” Rewire.News, July 18, 2018, https://rewire.news/article/2018/06/27/christian-group-fostering-migrant-kids-history-coercive-adoptions/; Amy Littlefield and Tina Vasquez, “Amid Chaos, Bethany Christian Services Raises Money Off Child Separations,” Rewire.News, July 18, 2018, https://rewire.news/article/2018/07/06/amid-chaos-bethany-christian-services-raises-money-off-child-separations/.
[6] Spencer Ackerman and Betsy Woodruff, “Defense Contractors Cashing In On Immigrant Kids’ Detention,” The Daily Beast, June 14, 2018, https://www.thedailybeast.com/defense-contractors-cashing-in-on-immigrant-kids-detention.
[7] Perla Trevizo, “Arizona Moves to Revoke Licenses from All Southwest Key Migrant-Children Shelters,” Arizona Daily Star, September 20, 2018, https://tucson.com/news/local/arizona-moves-to-revoke-licenses-from-all-southwest-key-migrant/article_2fea6c10-bc77-11e8-83cb-17461825a3f8.html; Allie Morris, “Texas Has Found 150 Health Violations at Migrant Children Shelters,” ExpressNews.com, June 8, 2018, https://www.expressnews.com/news/local/politics/article/Texas-has-found-150-health-violations-at-migrant-12979471.php.
[8] Spencer Ackerman and Betsy Woodruff, “Defense Contractors Cashing In On Immigrant Kids’ Detention,” The Daily Beast, June 14, 2018, https://www.thedailybeast.com/defense-contractors-cashing-in-on-immigrant-kids-detention.
[9] Infectious Diseases in Children, August 2018, “Migrant Children’s Health Endangered by Family Separation at US Border,” Healio, https://www.healio.com/pediatrics/practice-management/news/print/infectious-diseases-in-children/{049f2cc9-420e-4787-b3ff-97fe5af6dc6b}/migrant-childrens-health-endangered-by-family-separation-at-us-border; “Whistleblowers Warn Of Harmful Conditions For Children In Migrant Detention Centers,” NPR, December 8, 2018, https://www.npr.org/2018/12/08/674327419/whistleblowers-warn-of-harmful-conditions-for-children-in-migrant-detention-cent.
[10] Matthew Haag, “Thousands of Immigrant Children Said They Were Sexually Abused in U.S. Detention Centers, Report Says,” The New York Times, February 27, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/27/us/immigrant-children-sexual-abuse.html.
[11] Levin and Perconti, “Migrant Children Ignored and Abused While Detained” Illinois Injury Lawyer Blog, January 8, 2019, https://www.illinoisinjurylawyerblog.com/migrant-children-ignored-abused-while-detained/; John Burnett, “Lawsuits Allege ‘Grave Harm’ To Immigrant Children In Detention,” NPR, January 24, 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/01/24/688068932/lawsuits-allege-grave-harm-to-immigrant-children-in-detention; Elizabeth Cohen, “After Children Die in US Custody, Authorities Turn to Nation’s Pediatricians for Guidance,” CNN, December 29, 2018, https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/29/health/migrant-child-deaths-pediatricians-call/index.html; Lindsay Schnell and Kevin McCoy, “DHS Chief Slams Immigration System in Wake of 2nd Migrant Child Death, Orders More Medical Exams of Kids in Custody,” USA Today, December 27, 2018, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2018/12/26/guatemalan-boy-death-medical-checks-immigrant-children-custody/2413058002/.
[12] “Migrant Family Separations Could Mean Lasting Trauma for Kids,” Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, July 2, 2018, https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/migrant-family-separations-trauma-kids/; Maressa Brown, “Separated Migrant Children’s Trauma Could Last a Lifetime,” Parents, accessed September 27, 2019, https://www.parents.com/health/parents-news-now/separated-migrant-childrens-trauma-could-last-a-lifetime/; Kathi Valeii, “What Viral Reunification Videos Reveal About the Trauma of Separated Immigrant Children,” Pacific Standard, August 28, 2018, https://psmag.com/social-justice/what-viral-reunification-videos-reveal-about-the-trauma-of-separated-immigrant-children.
[13] Jacob Soboroff and Dennis Romero, “Finding All Migrant Children Separated from Their Families May Be Impossible, Feds Say,” NBCNews.com, February 4, 2019, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/finding-all-migrant-children-separated-their-families-may-be-impossible-n966266.
[14] Catherine E. Rymph, Raising Government Children: a History of Foster Care and the American Welfare State. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017.
[15] Annette Ruth Appell, “Disposable Mothers, Deployable Children (Review Essay),” Michigan Journal of Race and the Law 9, no. 2 (2004): 421. https://repository.law.umich.edu/mjrl/vol9/iss2/4/; Mary Annette Pember, “Death by Civilization,” The Atlantic, March 8, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/traumatic-legacy-indian-boarding-schools/584293/.
[16] 2 U.S.C. 85, An Act making provision for the civilization of the Indian tribes adjoining the frontier settlements, (1819), https://www.loc.gov/law/help/statutes-at-large/15th-congress/session-2/c15s2ch85.pdf.
[17] Carol L. Higham, “Christian Missions to American Indians,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, September 2016, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.323.
[18] U.S. National Library of Medicine, “1868: President Grant advances ‘Peace Policy’ with tribes,” Native Voices: Timeline, https://www.nlm.nih.gov/nativevoices/timeline/342.html.
[19] Native American Rights Fund, “Legal Review,” Volume 38, No. 2, 2013, https://www.narf.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/nlr38-2.pdf.
[20] Native American Rights Fund, “Legal Review,” Volume 38, No. 2, 2013, https://www.narf.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/nlr38-2.pdf.
[21] “Official Report of the Nineteenth Annual Conference of Charities and Correction (1892),” 46–59, Reprinted in Richard H. Pratt, “The Advantages of Mingling Indians with Whites,” Americanizing the American Indians: Writings by the “Friends of the Indian” 1880–1900, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, (1973), 260–271, accessed at: http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/4929/.
[22] Kyle Swenson, “’Long Time Coming’: Army Returns Remains of Arapaho Children Who Died at Assimilation School,” The Washington Post, April 29, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/08/09/a-long-time-coming-army-returns-remains-of-arapaho-children-who-died-at-assimilation-school-in-1800s/.
[23] “The History,” Carlisle Indian School Project, accessed September 27, 2019, http://www.carlisleindianschoolproject.com/history/.
[24] Colleen Zickler. “Profiting off Indigenous Children in South Dakota,” Commodities, Conflict, and Cooperation, Fall ’16 & Winter ’17, https://sites.evergreen.edu/ccc/carebodies/profiting-on-indigenous-children-in-south-dakota/.
[25] Lewis Meriam, “The Problem of Indian Administration,” Institute for Government Research, 1928, available through the National Indian Law Library at: https://narf.org/nill/resources/meriam.html.
[26] Charla Bear, “American Indian Boarding Schools Haunt Many,” NPR, May 12, 2008, https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16516865.
[27] Charla Bear, “American Indian Boarding Schools Haunt Many,” NPR, May 12, 2008, https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16516865.
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[29] “Navigating Record Group 75: BIA Schools,” National Archives and Records Administration, https://www.archives.gov/research/native-americans/bia-guide/schools.
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[31] See, e.g., “US Indian Boarding School History,” The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, https://boardingschoolhealing.org/education/us-indian-boarding-school-history/; Andrea Smith, “Soul Wound: The Legacy of Native American Schools,” Amnesty Magazine, 2003, archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20060208092347/http://www.amnestyusa.org/amnestynow/soulwound.html; and The Brown School, “The Challenges and Limitations of Assimilation Indian Boarding Schools,” The Brown Quarterly, 2001, http://brownvboard.org/sites/default/files/BQ_Vol4No3.pdf.
[32] Charla Bear, “American Indian Boarding Schools Haunt Many,” NPR, May 12, 2008, https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16516865; Alia Wong, “The Schools That Tried—But Failed—to Make Native Americans Obsolete,” The Atlantic, March 5, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/failed-assimilati….
[33] Margaret D. Jacobs, A Generation Removed: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Postwar World, University of Nebraska Press, 2014, 6.
[34] Laura Briggs, Somebody’s Children: The Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012.
[35] Troy Lee Kickler, “Black Children and Northern Missionaries, Freedmen’s Bureau Agents, and Southern Whites in Reconstruction Tennessee, 1865-1869,” doctoral dissertation, University of Tennessee–Knoxville, 2005, https://trace.tennessee.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=4098&context=utk_graddiss.
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[38] Laura Briggs, Somebody’s Children: the Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012, 50.
[39] Charles Loring Brace, The Dangerous Classes of New York And Twenty Years’ Work Among Them, New York, Wynkoop & Hallenbeck, 1872, available online via the Gutenberg Project at https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/33431/pg33431-images.html.
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[43] Nina Bernstein, The Lost Children of Wilder: The Epic Struggle to Change Foster Care, New York: Vintage Books, 2002.
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[47] 49 Stat. 620, the Social Security Act of 1935 (1935), https://www.loc.gov/item/uscode1934-005042007/.
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[58] Social Security Amendments of 1967, Public Law 90–248, Jan 2, 1968, available here: https://www.ssa.gov/history/pdf/Downey%20PDFs/Social%20Security%20Amendments%20of%201967%20Vol%201.pdf. .
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[61] Lucy Williams and Jean Hardisty, “The Right’s Campaign Against Welfare,” 1999, http://jeanhardisty.com/essay_therightscampaignagainstwelfare.html.
[62] Lucy Williams and Jean Hardisty, “The Right’s Campaign Against Welfare,” 1999, http://jeanhardisty.com/essay_therightscampaignagainstwelfare.html.
[63] Social Security Amendments of 1967, Public Law 90–248, Jan 2, 1968, available here: https://www.ssa.gov/history/pdf/Downey%20PDFs/Social%20Security%20Amendments%20of%201967%20Vol%201.pdf.
[64] Compos v. McKeithen, 341 F. Supp. 264 (E.D. La. 1972), available at https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/341/264/1456882/.
[65] Louisiana Revised Statutes, Title 9, Section 422, https://law.justia.com/codes/louisiana/2011/rs/title9/rs9-422/.
[66] National Association of Black Social Workers, “Position Statement on Trans-Racial Adoption,” September 1972, available through the Adoption History Project at https://pages.uoregon.edu/adoption/archive/NabswTRA.htm.
[67] Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, Public Law 93-247, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-88/pdf/STATUTE-88-Pg4.pdf
[68] 94 Stat. 500, Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980, available at https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/granule/STATUTE-94/STATUTE-94-Pg500/content-detail.html.
[69] Catherine E. Rymph, Raising Government Children: a History of Foster Care and the American Welfare State. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017, 182.
[70] Multi-Ethnic Placement Act, Public Law 103-382, https://law.justia.com/codes/us/1994/title42/chap67/subchapii/sec5115a/.
[71] Elizabeth Bartholet, “Adoption is About Family, Not Race,” Chicago Tribune, November 5, 1993, https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1993-11-05-9311050022-story.html.
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[79] Catherine E. Rymph, Raising Government Children: a History of Foster Care and the American Welfare State. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017, 184.
[80] Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997, Public Law 105-89, https://www.congress.gov/105/plaws/publ89/PLAW-105publ89.pdf.
[81] Catherine E. Rymph, Raising Government Children: a History of Foster Care and the American Welfare State. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017, 184.
[82] Catherine E. Rymph, Raising Government Children: a History of Foster Care and the American Welfare State. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017, 184.
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[84] Interview with Christine Gottlieb, August 30, 2018.
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[87] Amy Mulzer & Tara Urs, “However Kindly Intentioned: Structural Racism and Volunteer CASA Programs,” CUNY Law Review, 23 (2016), https://academicworks.cuny.edu/clr/vol20/iss1/3., 25.
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[90] Training manual and power-point obtained by Political Research Associates.
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[92] Roberts, Dorothy, “The Community Dimension of State Child Protection,” Hofstra Law Review, Vol. 34:23, 2005, https://www.law.upenn.edu/cf/faculty/roberts1/workingpapers/34HofstraLRev23(2005).pdf, citing Margaret S. Sherraden & Uma A. Segal, Multicultural Issues in Child Welfare, 18 CHILD &YOUTH SERVS. REV. 497, 502 (1996).
[93] Dorothy Roberts, “The Community Dimension of State Child Protection,” Hofstra Law Review, Vol. 34:23, 2005, https://www.law.upenn.edu/cf/faculty/roberts1/workingpapers/34HofstraLRev23(2005).pd, citing Margaret S. Sherraden & Uma A. Segal, Multicultural Issues in Child Welfare, 18 CHILD & YOUTH SERVS. REV. 497, 502 (1996).
[94] Kathryn Joyce, The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption, New York, PublicAffairs, 2013.
[95] Interview with Kathryn Joyce, September 7, 2018.
[96] Kathryn Joyce, The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption, New York, PublicAffairs, 2013, 215.
[97] Kathryn Joyce, The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption, New York, PublicAffairs, 2013, 1-37.
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[99] Kathryn Joyce, The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption, New York, PublicAffairs, 2013, 9.
[100] Kathryn Joyce, The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption, New York, PublicAffairs, 2013, 2013, 9.
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[102] Elizabeth Bartholet, “Where Do Black Children Belong? The Politics of Race Matching in Adoption,” 139 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1163 (1991).
[103] Elizabeth Bartholet, “Differential Response: A Dangerous Experiment in Child Welfare,” 42 Fla. St. U. L. Rev. 573 (2015).
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[106] Cato Institute, “Solomon’s Decree: Conflicts in Adoption and Child Placement Policy,” Keynote Address: https://www.cato.org/events/solomons-decree-conflicts-adoption-child-pl….
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[109] Adam Serwer, “The President’s Pursuit of White Power,” The Atlantic, January 13, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/01/trump-embraces-white-supremacy/579745/; Naomi Braine, “Trumpism and the Unstable Ground of Whiteness,” The Public Eye, May 15, 2017, https://www.politicalresearch.org/2017/05/15/trumpism-and-the-unstable-ground-of-whiteness/.
[110] Jeff Faux, “How US Foreign Policy Helped Create the Immigration Crisis,” The Nation, October 18, 2017, https://www.thenation.com/article/how-us-foreign-policy-helped-create-the-immigration-crisis/; Gus Leinbach, “Neoliberal Economics and the War on Drugs,” Witness for Peace, http://witnessforpeace.org/neoliberal-economics-and-the-war-on-drugs/.
[111] Mary Elizabeth Williams, “Weaponizing CPS: Shaun King says a troll called in a phony child services complaint on his family,” Salon, August 3, 2018, https://www.salon.com/2018/08/03/weaponizing-cps-shaun-king-says-a-troll-called-in-a-phony-child-services-complaint-on-his-family/.
[112] Stephanie Clifford and Jessica Silver-Greenberg, “Foster Care as Punishment: The New Reality of ‘Jane Crow,’” The New York Times, July 21 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/21/nyregion/foster-care-nyc-jane-crow.html?_r=3&referer=.
[113] Selena Simmons-Duffin, “Trump Administration Plans to Roll Back Anti-Discrimination Rules Tied to HHS Funding,” NPR, November 5, 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/11/05/776496146/trump-administration-plans-to-roll-back-anti-discrimination-rules-tied-to-hhs-fu; “Religious Exemptions Laws,” Movement Advancement Project, http://www.lgbtmap.org/equality-maps/religious_exemption_laws/religious_exemption_services.
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[115] Julie Small, “Judge: Immigration Must Account For Thousands More Migrant Kids Split Up From Parents,” NPR, March 9, 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/03/09/701935587/judge-immigration-must-identify-thousands-more-migrant-kids-separated-from-paren.
[116] Laura Briggs, Somebody’s Children: the Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012, 121.
[117] Amy Littlefield and Tina Vasquez, “Bethany Christian Services Is Fostering Migrant Kids. It Also Has a History of Coercive Adoptions,” ReWire.News, June 27, 2018, https://rewire.news/article/2018/06/27/christian-group-fostering-migrant-kids-history-coercive-adoptions/.