The Oregon family police agency fudges the figures at children’s expense

They’re misleading us about the rate of entries into foster care …

 Oregon is one of those states operating under a settlement resulting from one of those pointless McLawsuits that Marcia Lowry brings all over the country. (How pointless? The organization she now runs, A Better Childhood, is the fourth from which she has brought these lawsuits over the past 50+ years. All three of the others have turned their backs on her approach.) 

The settlement requires the state family police agency, the Department of Human Services, to submit “progress reports.” This is the most recent.   

DHS took advantage of the opportunity to engage in a whole lot of disingenuous figure fudging in an area the settlement doesn’t care about (because Marcia Lowry almost never cares about it): reducing entries into foster care. 

Let's start with the basics. In FFY 2025, Oregon took away children 2,391 times. That’s actually 227 more times than children were taken in Oregon in 2024. But what measure should be used to compare Oregon to the rest of the country? Oregon DHS's method is so ludicrous that if torturing logic were a war crime, they'd be hauled before an international tribunal.

After claiming that Oregon took away 2.7 of every thousand children in 2024, the progress report says: 

Oregon has a lower rate of foster care entry than the national median. Nationally, the median foster care entry rate in 2021 was 3.0. 

How are they misleading us? Let us count the ways: 

● The data for the national median are from 2021, while DHS compares it to Oregon data from 2024. Since nationwide entries have been declining slowly but steadily since 2021, odds are the median is lower now. And, by the way, as noted above, data now are available for 2025. 

● National median is an odd choice for comparison. If the DHS figures are correct, it would mean only that, compared to total child population, more states take proportionately more children than Oregon than take proportionately fewer. 

Source: Administration for Children and Families AFCARS database

But comparisons typically are to the national average (the mean rather than the median). Why doesn’t DHS do that? Oh, I don’t know, maybe because when you do an apples-to-apples comparison involving the same year, 2025, Oregon took away children at a rate more than 25% above the national average, even when comparing entries to total child population (which, as is discussed below, is the wrong comparison anyway). 

And, by the way: While DHS says it took away 2.7 children for every thousand in 2024, in 2025 it rose to 2.89 per thousand.

But even that isn’t the worst of it. 

● DHS is using the wrong denominator, thereby hiding the full extent to which Oregon remains an outlier. DHS compares entries only to the total child population. But the far more valid measure is to compare entries to the impoverished child population. When you do that for every state, the national average is 16 children taken per thousand impoverished children. The figure for Oregon is 21.7 – thirty-five percent higher. 

By the way, that’s also the 23^rd highest rate of removal in the country, so it’s above the mean and the median. 

Sources: Entries: Administration for Children and Families AFCARS database
Impoverished children: Census Bureau Current Population Survey (3 year average).

So, DHS misleads by comparing entries only to the total child population (and misleads about even that). That comparison is b.s. for one simple reason: Family police agencies don’t target the total child population – they target the impoverished child population. Can you find a middle-class family caught in the family police net? Occasionally. Can you find such a child placed in foster care? Even less often.

 As we explain in the annual NCCPR Rate-of-Removal Index: 

We could have simply compared the number of children removed to a state’s total child population. But then all the states with high rates of removal and high child poverty rates would complain that this was unfair because we didn’t consider a risk factor for actual abuse (not to mention the factor most often confused with “neglect”) – poverty. 

In addition, since family policing agencies almost never take children from affluent families, using the total child population would allow affluent states that still take large numbers of children from impoverished neighborhoods to camouflage this fact. 

Based on per-capita Income, Oregon is America’s 18^th most affluent state. So Oregon DHS’s selective use of data hides what it does to its impoverished families by diverting our attention to what it doesn’t do to affluent families. And then it further hides the result by comparing only to the median instead of to the mean. 

… and their data on abuse in foster care are meaningless 

The report also contains a bunch of gobbledygook about the rate of abuse in Oregon foster care. The report acknowledges that their rate appears high compared to a target number that is based on the rate in other states. DHS is right in claiming such a comparison isn’t really valid, because definitions of abuse and neglect vary so widely. But it doesn’t matter. Because the entire measure is such a farce that DHS should be ashamed to put forward the figures it does, and Marcia Lowry should be ashamed of using official agency measures of abuse in foster care in this, or any other, settlement. 

That’s because, in every state, official measures of abuse in foster care are ludicrously low. For example, in 2024, 6,675 children spent at least one day in Oregon foster care. DHS claims that, of that number, only 114 were abused by a foster parent or group home or institution staff – that’s 1.7%.  That means Oregon DHS wants us to believe that if you gathered 100 former foster youth in a room and asked them: “How many of you were abused in foster care in 2024?” only two would raise their hands. 

Yet, study after study after study, including at least one specific to Oregon, find abuse in one-quarter to one-third of family foster homes, and the rate in group homes and institutions is even higher. These studies use conservative methodology, often imposing limits on things like which placements or which perpetrators are counted.

(Oregon DHS may try to defend itself by saying theirs is a single-year estimate, while the studies may cover a longer time period. But the average length of stay in Oregon foster care is 18 to 24 months, so even if one doubles the amount of abuse Oregon admits to, as in the graphic below, that figure is vastly below the reality.)  

  1.                                   2.
1.=% Oregon admits to in 2024, x2
2.=LOW END national average estimate from indepdendent studies

The reason for the difference in findings is obvious: When agencies investigate abuse in foster care, they are, in effect, investigating themselves. That creates an enormous incentive to see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil and write no evil in the case file. 

DHS and the governor even tried to get the Oregon Legislature to pass a law that would make this worse – it would have raised the threshold before awful things done to children in group homes and institutions would count as “abuse.” 

The very fact that people in the Oregon family police agency have to know they are putting forward numbers that are probably between one-tenth and one-twentieth or less the real rate of abuse in foster care should be cause to question their credibility and even their fitness for their jobs. (Unfortunately, however, every state essentially lies this way about the real rate of abuse in foster care.) 

If DHS, or Marcia Lowry, really wanted to know how much abuse there is in foster care, they would do what those independent scholars do: Pull together a random sample of former foster youth  - and ask them. 

In fact, Marcia really does know. In 2010, she told the Philadelphia Daily News: 

“I’ve been doing this work for a long time and represented thousands and thousands of foster children, both in class-action lawsuits and individually, and I have almost never seen a child, boy or girl, who has been in foster care for any length of time who has not been sexually abused in some way, whether it is child-on-child or not.” 

And that’s only one kind of abuse. 

Marcia also commissioned an actual study of abuse in foster care as part of another of her McLawsuit. The study found vastly more abuse than officially reported.

Why we need to whack the weeds … 

Here’s why going so deep into the weeds is important. If people get the misimpression that Oregon DHS is removing children at a rate below the national average, it tees up the next inevitable false claim. It will happen right after the next tragedy involving the death of a child “known to the system.” Someone (and I think we all know who it’s most likely to be) will rush to claim that this “raises questions” about whether “the pendulum has swung too far” toward keeping families together. 

That is the biggest lie of all. 

Yes, Oregon has made some real progress. Tearing apart families at a rate “only” 35% above the national average is a big improvement over where things were many years ago. But it’s hard to give DHS the credit it's due, when it keeps trying to claim credit it doesn’t deserve. 

Meanwhile, maybe it’s time to add a corollary to a famous adage in journalism that goes: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out!” Here’s the corollary: “If a ‘child welfare’ agency hands you data, check it twice!”

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending May 5, 2026

● Cruddy journalism by the San Jose Mercury News and grandstanding by a prominent politician have been so effective that it appears that some people in Santa Clara County, Calif. think there were no child abuse deaths back when the county was taking away far more children. It shouldn’t be necessary, but we set the record straight in this post. 

● The Boston Globe has an excellent story about abuse in Massachusetts group homes and institutions – in a state that tears apart families at a rate well above the national average. The Anchorage Daily News has a follow-up to a similar expose in that state, which tears apart families at an even higher rate. But, as noted in this post to the blog, neither story mentions that salient fact, and lawmakers in neither state seem prepared to face up to it. That means nothing is going to change. 

● Ashley Cross, executive director of HOPE585 in Rochester, New York, writes in The Imprint about how child abuse prevention is not about pinwheels and fearmongering. She writes: 

When families lack stable housing, enough food or access to child care, the margin for error disappears. One missed shift, one unexpected expense, one sick day can spiral into a situation that brings them to the attention of the system. … 

Families living in poverty are far more likely to come to the attention of child protective services. Not because they care less about their children, but because they are navigating impossible trade-offs every day. Do you go to work and risk leaving your child home sick, or stay home and risk losing the job that pays your rent? Those are not parenting failures. They are resource failures. 

● Even as the Trump Administration pushes the use of what amounts to computerized racial profiling (a.k.a. “predictive analytics”) in child welfare, the title of this British study says it all: “Beware the algorithm: a scoping review of predictive analytics in children’s social care.” 

● And you read it here first: The latest data from the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting system are now public. There seems to be little change on average nationally in the number of children taken from their homes or the number in foster care on any given day, but there’s bad news in several states, particularly Missouri and Maryland. 

In this week’s edition of The Horror Stories Go in All Directions: 

● Former foster youth are suing the Washington State family police agency seeking compensation for what one lawyer describes as “some of the worst abuse. Just absolute horrific conditions, and unfortunately an all-too-common textbook example of a house of horrors.” The family police agency has been trying to hide the evidence by withholding records. The Center Square reports that the State Supreme Court has ruled that the agency is going to have to come clean. 

● From WTVJ Miami: 

A Broward Sheriff Fire Rescue lieutenant and his wife were arrested for allegedly locking their 12-year-old adopted daughter for years inside a room at their Coral Springs home, authorities said. … According to arrest reports, the couple is accused of subjecting the child to "ongoing mental and physical abuse" over a period of about three years.

How to NOT fix abuse in group homes and institutions in 8 easy steps. Lessons from Massachusetts and elsewhere

Steps already completed are checked: 

_x_Take away children at a rate far higher than the national average, creating an artificial “shortage” of foster homes. 

_x_Due to “shortage,” use group homes and institutions, the worst form of “care,” at a rate that’s also well above the national average, creating conditions for rampant abuse of children in group homes. 

_x_Newspaper does an excellent job exposing rampant abuse of children in group homes but does not mention the high rate of removal. 

_x_People most responsible for, over decades, creating the climate of fear and demonization of families leading to the state’s high rate of removal, are quoted extensively condemning the abuse, while taking no responsibility for creating those conditions. 

__Lawmakers express shock and outrage and promise sweeping reforms and/or hearings (all duly noted in the traditional follow-up story). 

__Reforms consist entirely of increasing inspections, and screening and training, the same promises made the last time this sort of abuse was exposed, and the time before, and the time before that. This time, they might throw in closing the “age of consent” loophole. 

__Attention fades, and the state continues to take away children at a rate well above the national average. The new training, screening and inspections change nothing. 

__The entire cycle repeats. 

That’s the Massachusetts version. Something remarkably similar is playing out in Alaska.

 Of course, there is one way to break this cycle …

The latest AFCARS data are just out: No change nationally, but some bad news from a few states

CORRECTION, MAY 6: This post has been changed to reflect that I erred in overstating the increase in entries into care in Missouri.

The federal government has released its annual update to the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS), a database that attempts to track, among other things, entries into foster care, exits, and the number of children trapped in foster care on Sept. 30 of each year – known as the “snapshot number.” The data are labeled preliminary, as they are every year when first released. Though it's rare, in a few states revised numbers can be a few hundred higher or lower.

Nationally, when compared to FFY 2024, there is virtually no change in the entry or snapshot numbers. Either there was a slight increase or a slight decrease. We don’t know which, because this year, for the first time since 2022, Wyoming and Washington State finally got their acts together and submitted data. They were not counted in 2023 or 2024. So whether entries slightly increased or slightly decreased probably depends largely on what the actual numbers for those states were in 2024. The only thing we can be sure of is the “slightly” part. There may, however, have been a real, and disturbing, decline of roughly 10,000 in the number of children exiting foster care. 

But, of course, the national figure hides wide variation among states. 

Here’s some of the bad news: 

They're cranking up the foster-care-to-prison pipeline in Missouri

There was more than a 12% a nearly 19%  a nearly 19% increase in entries in Missouri, a state that already had a high rate of removal. The increase may be the largest of any state in 2025. It's probably is due to a big change for the worse in leadership. When Darrell Missey ran the state child welfare agency, he tried to reduce entries into care. He was pushed out and replaced by Sara Smith, who has made her fanatical take-the-child-and-run approach abundantly clear. The increase in entries in 2025 wiped out the gains Missey made in 2024. 

There also was a disappointing 7.5% increase in entries in Texas; but entries there still are well below the level before groundbreaking reform legislation took effect. 

And there was a nearly 17% increase in entries in Maryland, probably the result of the usual wretched response to high-profile tragedies. The fact that one of those tragedies involved a foster youth who committed suicide after being taken away and dumped in a hotel doesn’t seem to have given anyone in Maryland government second thoughts about taking away more children. That, unfortunately, is typical. 

And then there’s Kansas. I’m holding off saying anything about this one, because in that state, there’s either been a giant increase in the number of children placed in foster care – or a giant data glitch. I don't know which. The state says it's the latter and the federal figures involve double-counting. I have inquiries out to federal officials, and I will update this post when I find out more.

And in case anyone in these states actually thinks this is something to celebrate, here’s one more reminder of what the research tells us about the multiple studies showing that, in typical cases, children placed in foster care typically fare worse in later life than comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes. And here’s one more reminder of all those studies showing high rates of abuse in foster care itself. 

And the good news 

There are several states that have shown commendable decreases in the number of children torn from everyone they know and love – but I’m not going to highlight them here. That’s because as soon as a state or county becomes known for dedicating itself to sparing children the enormous inherent trauma of placement, and the high risk of abuse in foster care, it’s like painting a target on the backs of the system’s leaders. 

Those wedded to the failed take-the-child-and-run approach that has destroyed so many children’s lives bide their time until the next child abuse tragedy involving a child “known to the system” in that community. Since no jurisdiction can prevent every such tragedy, no matter how few – or how many – children they take, there’s always going to be one. (Indeed, a massive study finds no relationship between how many children are taken away and child abuse deaths.) 

Then those who are sincere but mistaken, those who are just grandstanding politicians, and those who, I suspect, deep down, just don’t want poor people, especially poor people of color, to be allowed to raise their children, come out of the woodwork, fingers wagging, to claim that the tragedy supposedly shows that the system is placing family preservation ahead of child safety. Case in point: Santa Clara County. Journalists who, at best, believe this because it sounds right and it fits their own stereotypes about parents who lose children to the system or, at worst, are just Pulitzer-sniffing, rush to amplify the false claims and shut out dissent. Case in point: Santa Clara County. 

So while anyone, including those who will misuse the data, is free to check the AFCARS database and do their own comparisons, I’m not inclined to assist in that process.

Foster-care panic in Silicon Valley: Tragically, in Santa Clara County, California, children DID die of child abuse before 2023.

A page from the 2018 report of the Santa Clara County Child Death Review Team

● A propaganda campaign by the San Jose Mercury News and a grandstanding member of the Board of Supervisors has been so effective, not everyone seems to know it. 

● Both the very limited available data from Santa Clara County and a massive peer-reviewed national study find no evidence that taking more children reduces child abuse deaths or that taking fewer children increases such deaths. 

See also our previous post about the Silicon Valley foster care panic.

It shouldn’t really be necessary to point this out. But judging by some statements during the public comment period at a recent meeting of the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors, it appears there may be people who think that children only started to die of child abuse in that county toward the end of 2023. 

The “journalism” from Julia Prodis Sulek of the Mercury News, and the comments of County Supervisor Sylvia Arenas, certainly leave that impression. Though they presumably jumped to their conclusions with good intentions, they have wrongly scapegoated very recent efforts to keep families together for three recent deaths. They are undeterred by the fact that one of those deaths occurred well after those family preservation efforts were abandoned, while entries into foster care skyrocketed as a result of pressure from the Mercury News and Arenas. 

They’ve been aided in their propaganda campaign by County District Attorney Jeff Rosen. In response to the latest tragedy, Rosen has pledged to investigate who, besides the actual killer, “is responsible criminally, civilly, morally, ethically, and systemically for what happened in this case. And I think that we should all be asking questions of county officials at the highest level…”  It turns out Rosen has another problem with at least one county official at the highest level. Rosen wants to take funds desperately needed by the county’s health care system to offset federal Medicaid cuts, and divert some of that money to his office. The County Executive disagrees.

Of course, no one literally said that there were no child abuse deaths before 2023. Instead, those pushing the take-the-child-and-run response to recent fatalities engaged in what should be called “inference peddling.” We were left to infer that in all those years before the county tried to do more to keep families together, child abuse deaths didn’t happen.  Therefore, it is suggested, anyone in charge of child welfare in the county now or whose work brought them anywhere near the three recent tragedies should be fired and, ideally, tarred and feathered. 

But of course, children have died of abuse in Santa Clara County, probably every year going back decades if not forever. That’s true in every other jurisdiction of Santa Clara’s size – nearly two million people – and many that are far smaller. 

We don’t know much more than that because of a process for tracking fatalities in Santa Clara County that is subjective and inconsistent. 

For decades, the county has had a Child Death Review Team. It issues periodic reports, on no apparent schedule, in which it examines child deaths and assesses the causes. But determining whether a death is due to abuse or neglect is surprisingly subjective. 

Consider a hypothetical example: Early one Sunday morning, while his parents are asleep, a three-year-old wakes up, manages to unlatch the back door of the family home and wanders away.  He falls into a body of water and drowns.  Accident or neglect?  The history of American family policing suggests that if the body of water is the pool behind a McMansion, it will be labeled an accident. If it’s a pond behind a trailer park, it will be labeled neglect. 

The subjectivity is magnified for an ironic reason: Each child abuse death is the worst imaginable tragedy; the only acceptable goal is zero. But in most places, the number of child abuse fatalities is low enough that, depending on how even one or two deaths are characterized, it can suggest a pattern that does not exist or obscure one that does. Even random chance can play a role. If in one year, say, a father comes home drunk and shoots his wife and two children, that can create a “spike” in child abuse death statistics. 

Compounding the problem: The Santa Clara County Child Death Review Team sometimes neglects to note its assessment of cause of death. Other times, it does not mention the relationship between the victims and the alleged perpetrators. 

So, below is a graphic representation of what I was able to infer from the available data for most of the years from 2005 through 2023. But please read these caveats: 

● There were no data available for 2013 and 2014.

● The official report for 2010, 2011, and 2012 – one death in each year -- is much to be hoped for, but unlikely.

● From 2017 on, the reports gave totals for two or three years, without breaking them down by year, so the numbers shown in this graphic for those years are multi-year averages. 

Source: Santa Clara County Child Death Review Team Reports

So, everybody see the pattern? 

Exactly. There is no pattern. 

While it might be tempting for family preservation advocates to argue that the reported numbers were larger in the early years, when the number of children taken away was at its highest, the relatively low raw numbers and the unreliable reporting methods don’t allow such a conclusion. In fact, they allow only two conclusions: 

● Yes, children did die of abuse and neglect before 2023.

● There is no pattern concerning deaths and entries into foster care.

That should surprise no one – though given the propaganda campaign waged by Sulek, Arenas and their allies, it probably will. 

Once again, the reason is one for which we all should be grateful. In Santa Clara County in 2023, there were allegations of abuse and, far more often, neglect involving 12,036 children. There were approximately six known child abuse fatalities. That means of all the children known-to-the-system that year, at least 99.951% did not die of child abuse. The odds of finding an impurity in Ivory Soap are greater than the chances of a Santa Clara child “known to the system” dying of abuse or neglect. 

Again, the only acceptable number of child abuse fatalities is zero. But such fatalities are needles in a haystack. Here’s the haystack; look closely for the needles. And even this representation makes the needles easier to spot, because they’re all in one place: 

Sources: Investigations: California Child Welfare Indicators Project;
Fatalities: Santa Clara County Child Death Review Team Reports

By pressuring everyone to make the haystack far bigger, Sulek, Arenas and their allies have only made it less likely that the next child in grave danger will be found in time. 

Nationally, some defenders of the take-the-child-and-run approach have a bizarre response. They argue that these are not needles in a haystack because other causes of death – such as cancer – take fewer children’s lives. Of course, cancer tends to be a disease striking older Americans. I’m sure more children also die of child abuse than die of Alzheimer’s.  More important, the fact that other causes of death take even fewer lives means only that there are fewer needles; it is not a reason to keep growing the haystack. 

The only way to really know if there is any relationship between foster care entries and child abuse deaths would be if one could do a massive, peer-reviewed study looking nationwide over many years. Say, a study of 3.4 million records and more than 24,000 fatalities over 13 years.  Fortunately, that’s just been done. And, unsurprisingly, here’s the key finding: 

“Child maltreatment mortality rates did not appear to decrease with higher foster care entry rates or increase with decreasing foster care entry rates.”

That means, at best, all those Santa Clara County children torn from everyone they know and love in the name of reducing child abuse deaths may well have had their own chance for a loving, secure future taken from them for nothing. At worst, making the haystack so much bigger may have contributed to the latest tragedy in Santa Clara County, the death of Jaxon Juarez, and perhaps others to come. 

There are far better ways to work to reduce fatalities – and all other child abuse and neglect – in Santa Clara County. But step one is to consider the possibility that a “Pulitzer-sniffing” newspaper and a grandstanding politician and their allies are not the most reliable sources. 

See also our earlier post about the Silicon Valley foster-care panic.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending April 29, 2026

● What is the result when some of the worst journalism about child welfare and some of the worst political demagoguery about child welfare happen in the same place? The mother of all foster-care panics. And that panic may well have contributed to the latest child abuse death in Santa Clara County, California. I have a blog post about the enormous harm done to children by the Silicon Valley foster-care panic – and who is responsible. The post includes a link to an excellent story from The Imprint on one key aspect of this tragedy – the closure of the provider of family defense in the county. 

● The second-worst example of political demagoguery about child welfare at the moment is coming from the Attorney General of New Mexico (see our recent Issue Brief). With everyone feeling the pressure to look tough, the state appears headed toward further ratcheting up the danger to children. In a column for the Albuquerque Journal, Layal Bou Harfouch, a drug policy expert for the Reason Foundation, writes: 

Under the proposed rules [to implement a new state law], any pregnant patient who admits to substance use, including prescribed medications or legal substances such as alcohol, tobacco or marijuana, can be required to comply with a Plan of Safe Care (POSC), including mandatory substance use treatment, even in the absence of a clinical assessment or diagnosis. Families accessing medication-assisted treatment, like methadone or buprenorphine, would be subject to the same requirements as those using illicit substances. Families deemed “noncompliant” with these plans can be referred directly to the Children, Youth and Families Department for assessment, bypassing the multilevel response system outlined in [the new state law]. 

● Meanwhile, Source NM reports that the author of a report from the Attorney General, which accused the state child welfare agency of supporting family preservation “at almost any cost” and of being guilty of a “systemic moral failing,” says NCCPR’s response is “not only misguided, but hyperbolic.” You be the judge. 

● Want to know why New York State – and every state – needs a Family Miranda law, so families know their rights when the family police pound on the door? Read this account, in the Albany Times Union, of what an investigation of a false report did to one family. 

● The Imprint interviewed Rowan Wilson, the chief judge of New York’s highest court, the Court of Appeals. Asked about public misconceptions about foster care and child welfare, he replied: 

There are a few. One is that unless you are sort of putting your child in danger by abusing the child or something like that, your child can’t be taken away from you. That’s not true. You can lose your child for various reasons, a lot which have to do with poverty.  

If you’re middle-class and you’ve got a child who shoplifts something, you’ll take care of that — you’ll go to the store, you’ll deal with the person, you’ll pay them, and the thing is never going to wind up in the criminal justice system. If not, your child is apprehended, and things start to snowball. You may be in public housing, and the fact that your child is found with a small amount of marijuana — not any longer, but previously — may then disentitle you from public housing. So now you’re in a shelter. There are all sorts of snowball effects like this that disproportionately affect poor people and result in their children being taken away. …

● Still another review of the ever-growing mass of evidence shows that Judge Wilson is right. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities concludes: 

When parents have enough money to pay their bills, buy nutritious food, and spend quality time with their children, they are better able to respond to their children’s needs and create a nurturing home, something every child deserves. 

Supporting families and improving economic security have many benefits, including reducing near-term hardship among families with children. Evidence from a wide range of income support programs also shows another important benefit — reducing involvement in the child welfare system. 

By now you’d have to be willfully blind to think otherwise. But, unfortunately, in “child welfare,” where so much is in short supply, willful blindness exists in abundance. 

● ChildTrends reports that their new analysis of federal data 

… shows that parental drug use is a factor in roughly one in three children’s entry into foster care, although the rate of children entering care for this reason is at its lowest since 2009. 

What that also means is that, contrary to the impression those same willfully blind fearmongers try desperately to leave, in two-thirds of entries into foster care, parental drug abuse was not a factor.

● The “child welfare” system has long been obsessed with adoption by strangers as the only “real” form of permanence for children. Never mind that we don’t even know how often these adoptions fail.  But this Associated Press story offers some alarming clues. From the story: 

An Associated Press investigation finds that a business known for tough-love boarding schools for rebellious, rich teenagers has also set its sights on a different demographic: adopted kids. Experts say adoptees, only 2% of American children, account for an estimated 25-40% of those in residential treatment. 

Adoptees told the AP they believe they’ve been enmeshed in a shadow orphanage system where children end up with the very fate that adoption was supposed to spare them — promised ‘forever homes’ but institutionalized instead, some for years, in oppressive and sometimes abusive facilities. … 

Police reports reveal children as young as 9 experience or witness violence, chaos, self-harm and sexual abuse inside facilities. Adoptees and adoptive parents said children left more traumatized than when they arrived — if, that is, they ever left. Some have died inside the facilities that promised they would keep them safe. … 

The industry no longer relies exclusively on the checkbooks of wealthy parents. The COVID-19 pandemic prompted more bipartisan political support for youth mental health funding, bolstering programs that tap public taxpayer dollars via healthcare, child welfare, juvenile justice and school systems. 

Two footnotes: The estimate that 25 to 40% of those in residential treatment are adoptees does not mean that 25 to 40% of adoptive placements fail, only that adoptees are overrepresented among the institutionalized. And those adoptees include many who were not adopted from foster care. 

● Even when the adoption doesn’t fail, often it still means cutting children off not only from parents but also extended family, friends, teachers, classmates and often even siblings. It’s permanence on paper, but for the child welfare establishment, that’s all that counts. In Youth Today, Molly Bernard, a youth connections advocate with Raise the Future, argues that it’s time to emphasize not paper permanence but the real thing. She writes: 

Legal permanency has long been the goal of the child welfare system. But too often, it fails to deliver what young people actually need: lasting, supportive relationships that continue into adulthood. 

● In 2024, Minnesota passed a law that does little more than require counties, which run family policing in that state, to get serious about helping families so their children don’t endure the trauma of needless foster care. In the state’s largest county, Hennepin, it may already be showing success. But what’s really startling about this article in The Imprint, is that what the law demands hasn’t been standard operating procedure all along. And yet, now rural counties are whining about how being given a mere three years to prepare to do their jobs isn’t enough and the law should be delayed. 

● The Trump Administration’s persecution of immigrants extends to children, of course. Whether they crossed the border alone or were swept up in raids targeting their parents, some are institutionalized, sometimes in the same institutions that family police agencies use for foster youth. One of those places was Children’s Village in Dobbs Ferry, NY. Now, CNN reports, Children’s Village 

faces allegations of physical abuse, including placing some children in isolation in a so-called “red room,” according to multiple sources who spoke with CNN about what’s unfolded at the shelter. 

One teen who was transferred to another facility recalled spending four days alone in what he described as a “red room” with a red light and no door, according to an account shared with a shelter clinician in early January and reviewed by CNN . … 

Over those four days, the teen said he didn’t bathe and was only provided bread for food. The boy said the room was located near the shelter’s security staff office, so personnel could monitor him while he was confined to the room. 

The teen also recalled a so-called “special” unit that would swoop in when fights occurred or restraints were required. He said he was thrown to the floor and hit, as well as placed in restraints, nearly two dozen times. 

Even Trump’s Office of Refugee Resettlement is investigating the allegations, which Children’s Village denies. Children’s Village is no longer housing migrant children. It still houses foster youth.

Did a media-fueled foster-care panic contribute to a child’s death in Silicon Valley?

Source: California Child Welfare Indicators Project

KEY POINTS

 ● After two children known-to-the-system died in Santa Clara County, California in 2023, Julia Prodis Sulek, a reporter for The Mercury News and Sylvia Arenas, a member of the county Board of Supervisors, rushed to scapegoat recent efforts by the county to keep families together. Arenas and Sulek had no evidence and no interest in any contrary point of view. The claim was false. 

● The result was what may well be the worst foster-care panic in decades anywhere in America. The number of children torn from everyone they know and love and consigned to the chaos of foster care nearly doubled in a single year, and increased by another 50% the year after. 

● In addition to the enormous harm to the children needlessly taken, the panic instigated by Arenas and The Mercury News plunged the entire system into chaos (something one of Sulek’s own stories even acknowledged – while taking no responsibility for it). That left workers no time to investigate any case, or any potential caretaker, carefully. 

● Now another child is dead. And, however unintentionally, Arenas’ demagoguery and The Mercury News’s reporting – and the shutting out of all dissent – may have contributed to that death. 

● The Imprint reports that, as a result of the skyrocketing caseload the contracted provider of family defense in Santa Clara county has decided they can no longer do quality work - so they're shutting down. That means even more children are likely to endure the trauma of needless placement.

● But instead of learning from their horrendous blunders, Arenas is doubling down – now joined by County District Attorney Jeff Rosen. Sulek’s stories are cheering them on.  Rosen is threatening prosecutions and County Executive James Williams is warning that any or all of ten child welfare agency employees placed on paid leave might be fired. Yet no scrutiny has been directed toward the role of Arenas, Rosen or The Mercury News. 

● Through it all, Arenas has reveled in humiliating the leadership of the child welfare agency, with every humiliation chronicled almost gleefully in The Mercury News. 

● This risks setting up an endless cycle of child death, foster-care panic, public humiliation, more panic, and another death. And while it was never their intent, Arenas, Rosen and The Mercury News share responsibility for the terrible consequences.

In a story on February 26, 2025, The Mercury News in San Jose and its sister papers in the Bay Area News Group quoted caseworkers describing the chaos in the county’s child welfare system: 

“The workers and supervisors are in crisis mode, triaging cases and doing the minimum when it comes to child abuse investigations,” said one worker.  Said another: 

“We have children who are placed in foster care who are not able to visit their families … We have children who are placed hundreds of miles away from their communities. We have children and families who are not adequately served because we don’t have language capacity to meet their needs. Court matters are being delayed, continued for weeks, if not months due to the influx of cases, and we don’t have any staff to handle that.”

What The Mercury-News did not tell readers is which county institution is most responsible for this chaos:

The Mercury News. 

Aided and abetted by a grandstanding member of the County Board of Supervisors, The Mercury News has set off, and continues to fuel, what is probably the worst “foster-care panic” in America in decades, perhaps ever. In the time since The Mercury News blamed the horrific deaths of three-month-old Phoenix Castro and six-year-old Jordan Walker in 2023 on a supposed fanatical desire to keep families together, the number of children torn from their families and consigned to the chaos of foster care in Santa Clara County nearly doubled in a single year, and surged another 50% in the following year. Now another child is dead – and while it was never their intent, the foster care panic that the newspaper and the politician started may well be one of the reasons why. 

● The Imprint reports that, as a result of the skyrocketing caseload, the contracted provider of family defense in Santa Clara county has decided they can no longer do quality work - so they're shutting down. That means even more children are likely to endure the trauma of needless placement.

And let’s be clear about which children are suffering most: In Santa Clara, the child population is 35% Black and Latino. The foster care population is 81% Black and Latino.    

A once-great regional newspaper hollowed out by a hedge fund appears desperate to recapture its former glory by falsely scapegoating efforts to keep families together for high-profile child abuse deaths, no matter how many children suffer in the process. Children endure the enormous inherent emotional trauma of needless separation. As a result, in typical cases, not the horror stories in which The Mercury News revels, study after study finds that children left in their own homes typically fare better in later life even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care.

One recent study from Sweden found that, again in typical cases, when compared to comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes, children placed in foster care were four times more likely to die by age 20. The most common cause of death: Suicide. There’s also the high risk of abuse in foster care itself. (And though the latest tragedy took place in a kinship placement, typically kinship foster care is safer than what should be called "stranger care.") 

How many children torn needlessly from everyone they know and love during the Silicon Valley Foster Care Panic will be dead by age 20? Who will be held accountable then? 

The other price of panic 

At the same time, “triaging cases and doing the minimum” only makes it more likely that children in real danger will be overlooked. 

Now, more than a year later, the worst may have happened for that very reason. The media-fueled politician-aided Silicon Valley Foster-Care Panic may have contributed to the death of Jaxon Juarez, a toddler allegedly killed by his cousin. Everyone should have learned the obvious lesson – that tearing vast numbers of additional children from their families does not curb child abuse deaths (a lesson reinforced by a recent massive study). Instead, The Mercury News, led by reporter Julia Prodis Sulek, and grandstanding politicians, led by County Supervisor Sylvia Arenas, are doubling down, joined by a new ally, Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen. 

In its coverage, The Mercury News has been the ultimate no-dissent zone. Other than one early story, good luck finding the voice of an older child wrongly taken, the parent of such a child, or an attorney for such a parent or child.  

Something else has been missing as well: The current foster-care panic followed several years of effort to reduce needless foster care. The Mercury News has failed to tell readers that, rather than creating what the newspaper proclaims is a “child safety crisis,” the reduction in entries into foster care was accomplished with no compromise in safety, according to the standard measure used by the state and federal governments. 

A throwback to an ugly era

There was a time when this kind of news coverage was common.  A child “known-to-the-system” dies. The casefile has more “red flags” than a Soviet May Day parade. Everyone rushes to blame a supposed overemphasis on family preservation. Whether driven by the news media itself or politicians whose false message they amplified, the result was a foster-care panic – a sharp, sudden surge in children needlessly torn from their families and thrown into foster care. It’s happened in Los Angeles, of course, and also New York, Chicago, and many places in between.  

But children known-to-the-system keep suffering horrendous abuse; sometimes deaths increase because workers are now so overwhelmed they have even less time to notice the red flags. The failed, take-the-child-and-run response to the deaths of Phoenix Castro and Jordan Walker may well have contributed to the death of Jaxon Juarez. In that case, though, of course, it was never their intent, Arenas and The Mercury News share responsibility for this latest tragedy. 

In much of the country, the journalism of child welfare has matured.  At one time, The Mercury News even was a leader in getting these issues right. But now, what’s left of the newspaper has sunk to a pathetic pursuit of cheap glory.  

As a result, in the five decades I have followed child welfare, first as a journalist and author and now as an advocate, the worst foster-care panic I’ve ever seen, by far, is the one underway in Santa Clara County. When rates of child poverty are factored in, Santa Clara County now takes children from their loved ones at a rate double that of New York City and quadruple the rate of metropolitan Chicago. It’s even surpassed Los Angeles, a county once notorious for its take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare. But just days ago Arenas said that still wasn’t enough! 

Caseworkers are rushing to take away children not to protect the children, but to protect themselves from the wrath of the cheerleaders for panic, Arenas, Sulek and District Attorney Rosen, who has pledged to investigate who, besides the actual killer, “is responsible criminally, civilly, morally, ethically, and systemically for what happened in this case…” 

If that isn’t enough to terrify workers into taking almost every child in sight, ten employees who came anywhere near the latest case have been put on paid leave. County Executive James Williams declared that “Depending on the findings of our investigation, staff may face disciplinary action up to and including termination.” 

Over and over, almost from the moment Phoenix Castro died, Sulek wrote that “a Bay Area News Group investigation found that county policies favored family preservation over child safety.” And despite the mind-boggling increase in the number of children torn from their homes since then, Arenas repeated the same false claim just days ago. 

The data on child safety outcomes – data The Mercury News never shared with readers – show that the claim is false. In place of evidence, The Mercury News demonizes families the way Donald Trump demonizes immigrants – they rely on horror stories. 

They also cite a report in which the state Department of Social Services said sometimes the county got it wrong – while omitting any quotes from the county’s response. The state report made no claim that the county was putting family preservation ahead of child safety; Sulek, Arenas and their allies dreamt that up themselves. 

The Mercury News and Arenas assume that, since children are dying in cases that sure seem obvious, what else could it be other than some sort of Vast Family Preservation Conspiracy? The fact that now another child has died, even after entries into foster care skyrocketed, has not dimmed their enthusiasm for this theory. 

But most of the time, the tragedies occur because workers are overwhelmed. They must rush from case to case, so they make terrible errors in all directions. A foster-care panic only makes that worse. 

In the most recent tragedy, Jaxon was placed with a relative who had been convicted of felony child endangerment related to a DUI arrest in 2014. Her son is accused of killing Jaxon. Why might workers place a child in such a home? One possibility is that they all gathered in a conference room to brag about how they didn’t care if Jaxon was safe because all they care about is family preservation. 

A more likely possibility: With the number of children torn from their families soaring from 149 in SFY 2023 to 276 in 2024 to 421 in 2025 – they simply had no time to carefully examine the record of the relative with whom Jaxon was placed when he died or to weigh the merits of alternative placements. 

For example, other relatives, in Arizona, had said they would take Jaxon, but that would make it impossible for his father to visit. Did the workers in this case have time to weigh that option or engage in the complex process of interstate placement? At one point, Jaxon’s grandfather had custody, but couldn’t get him to visits with his father. An agency that wasn't drowning in needless removals of children could have provided the transportation, instead of changing the placement. If the foster care panic is the reason none of these alternatives was considered, then the foster care panic itself was a key factor in Jaxon’s death. 

The typical cases 

Most cases are nothing like the horror stories.  In Santa Clara County, fewer than ten percent of foster children are there because of allegations of physical or sexual abuse. More than 85% are there because of “neglect.” Sometimes that’s extremely serious. More often, it means the family is poor. 

That explains what we know thanks to the data about what happened to child safety when Santa Clara started emphasizing family preservation. The key measure used to evaluate safety is the percentage of children left in their own homes who are allegedly abused or neglected again. During the time Santa Clara County reduced foster care, that measure stayed the same.  The evidence shows that Santa Clara County saved hundreds of children from the trauma of needless separation – and the high risk of abuse in foster care itself – with no compromise of safety. 

Reveling in “an epic takedown” 

The journalism of foster-care panic is nothing new – though happily, across the country, there is less of it. But what sets the behavior of Sulek (and Arenas) apart, even from the worst examples in other cities, is what appears to be a willingness not only to see families torn apart, but an obliviousness to the consequences. The Mercury News seemed almost to gloat about getting its foster care panic – while Arenas complained early on, and again just days ago, that it still hadn’t gone far enough.  

They also seem to share a compulsion to humiliate those they see as standing in their way. Look at their behavior toward one of the few Black men to hold a position of power in Santa Clara County government – the now former director of the Department of Family and Children’s Services, Damion Wright. 

Consider the scene at a Board of Supervisors meeting in 2024, as Arenas both literally and figuratively looked down on Wright and his boss, Department of Social Services Director Daniel Little. 

As Sulek gleefully reported at the time and then reminded readers months later: 

Last summer, after an epic takedown of Wright and Little during a board meeting, Supervisor Arenas demanded they each write a “letter of reflection” about their leadership failures that led to the child safety crisis. 

Little did it. Wright, to his credit, did not, allowing him to leave with some dignity. But Sulek wasn’t through trying to strip him of that dignity. In two stories, she lamented the lack of firings, noting that 

Only Wright has resigned, and he did so on his own accord, announcing the day after Christmas that his father’s recent death — not any pressure related to the investigations — led to his departure.  

Apparently, for The Mercury News, nothing short of tarring and feathering will do. 

Arenas seems to take a Trump-style pleasure in humiliating anyone she can. A few days ago, she drove Wright’s successor, Wendy Kinnear-Rausch, to tears, suggesting Kinnear-Rausch didn’t care if “brown children” died. The Mercury News loved it. 

Through it all, Arenas has never indicated how many children must be torn from their homes before she will be satisfied. She implies that the criterion is that no child will ever die of abuse. That is always the only acceptable goal. But with nearly two million people, Santa Clara is the 18^th most populous county in America – it’s bigger than 11 states. I know of no jurisdiction of that size that has ever achieved that goal. And, as we’ve seen with the death of Jaxon Juarez, while it was never their intent, the behavior of Arenas herself, and The Mercury News, may have moved Santa Clara County farther from that goal. 

The harm to the public officials Arenas and The Mercury News have scapegoated and humiliated pales compared to the harm it’s all done to children. 

Now, Santa Clara children cry themselves to sleep hundreds of miles from everyone they know and love, others may bounce from home to home, increasing the chances that they will emerge years later unable to love or trust anyone – or die at their own hand before they turn 20. That’s even if they defy the odds – at least one in four, and probably greater – of being abused in foster care itself.  And what evidence there is, from the few jurisdictions large enough to measure, is that the odds of children in real danger being overlooked have increased – as we may have just seen in Santa Clara County itself. 

Perhaps Arenas and Sulek, and their respective colleagues, should take some time to reflect on that.