‘No matter what I do, I’m not in control’: what happens when the state takes your child
Two and a half years before a convenience store in Minnesota called the police on George Floyd, a Black father, suspecting a counterfeit bill, a convenience store in Rhode Island called the police on a Black mother named Christina after she argued with the checkout clerk.
Christina, 23, was living in a family shelter and taking classes at the local community college, striving towards her longtime goal of launching a nonprofit organization for youth. “I think I was called to help people,” she often said. Her son, Anthony, the center of her life, was two years old. (“Christina” and “Anthony” are both pseudonyms.)
As Christina later recounted, she ran into the store that day with Anthony to get change for bus fare. The cashier didn’t want to change Christina’s $20 and made a snide comment. From there, the argument escalated. Christina said the cashier came out from behind the counter and got in her face. Christina left, but not before the store made a “keep the peace” call to the police.
The police didn’t keep the peace – they disrupted it. When they stopped her, Christina was already on her way to work, pushing Anthony’s stroller across the street. Exasperated, she recalled saying: “Officer, if I would’ve destroyed the store or did something, I could see me being stopped, but I left the store, so can I please go?” If anyone needed police intervention, she thought, it was the cashier.
Yet the officers arrested Christina, citing disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, and obstruction. They didn’t appreciate her challenging their authority, acknowledging in their report that they would have let her go had she not protested. The police account stated that she “went ballistic” and “started acting irrationally”, swearing, spitting at, and hitting the officers, with one detective saying that he had not seen someone so out of control in a long time. Christina, meanwhile, described two officers pushing her, crying, to the ground when trying to handcuff her, which didn’t make it into the police report. Anthony, watching his mother’s arrest, squirmed out of his stroller to intervene.
The police held Christina, took her to jail, and called child protective services (CPS). Across the US, state and county CPS agencies are tasked with responding to reports of child abuse and neglect. Anthony waited at the police station until CPS arrived.
The CPS caseworker described Anthony as “cooperative and pleasant”, “hyper” but “easily redirected”. Christina didn’t initially want to give her name or sign any forms, but she gave her brother’s name when asked where her son could go. So CPS placed Anthony with Christina’s brother – not informally, as a temporary caregiver while Christina was locked up, but formally, with the state taking legal custody. The doctor who then examined Anthony wrote that he “show[ed] no concerns for neglect or injury”. Nevertheless, the doctor authorized CPS to hold Anthony for 72 hours while the agency prepared to petition the court for custody, recounting the altercation with police and citing a relative’s comment that Christina was not taking medication for her bipolar disorder. CPS didn’t speak to Christina before these legal filings.
That’s how fast it happened. CPS hadn’t been in her life that morning and Christina had little expectation it would be. The situation didn’t snowball; it came like an avalanche.
From jail, Christina phoned her brother, who informed her that CPS had taken her son. “They said I couldn’t see him,” she later recalled. “I don’t have custody. I don’t have rights. Nothing.”
She started crying and screaming. Another woman by the phone tried to calm her down, telling her Anthony would be OK with her brother. But that wasn’t the point. “The point was, I didn’t deserve my son to be taken.”
Christina was out of jail a couple days later. The criminal case closed; the charges were dropped. But CPS wasn’t so easy to shed – it would be a long journey to return Anthony home.
Each year, over 250,000 US children like Anthony enter foster care. This forcible family separation – among the most extreme and intrusive government actions – occurs much more often than many realize, particularly among Black and Native American families. A staggering one in eleven Black children and one in nine Native American children will be placed in foster care by the age of 18. As the law and sociology professor Dorothy Roberts has compellingly articulated, this is a stark manifestation of historical and ongoing racial oppression, as well as a means through which this oppression persists.
CPS is authorized to intervene when children are unsafe – that is, likely to experience severe abuse or neglect. But perceptions of child safety are highly discretionary. Families that come to CPS’s attention are typically navigating issues such as substance misuse, domestic violence, mental health needs, and homelessness, with insufficient resources to address these challenges. This means that family separation essentially punishes parents and children for their poverty and adversity. Just as prison constitutes a central institution in the lives of marginalized men, CPS and foster care looms large for marginalized women raising children.
Back home from jail, Christina desperately missed her son. “I was a wreck … I’m used to getting up at night, checking on my son.” She felt like she was grieving Anthony. With all the stress, she failed her classes that semester. “I really feel like they took my whole life away. It hurt so bad.”
Seeing little boys at her job, in a supermarket, was heartrending. “Today, I almost cried, ’cause I seen this little boy,” Christina shared, nine months after the removal. She offered one boy’s mother a cookie for him. “She’s like, ‘What do you say?’ He’s like, ‘Thank you.’ I was like, damn. I miss my son. I want my baby.”
Foster care traumatizes children; forcible family separation generates immense pain and trauma for parents, too. Beyond these losses, mothers’ experiences also cultivate a particular kind of citizenship. As social scientists have shown, people’s everyday experiences interacting with the state – with public benefits programs, police, and schools, for instance – fundamentally shape what they know and think about government, inequality, and justice.
Taking children has always been a political act, targeting marginalized racial/ethnic groups to maintain power, as documented by the historian Laura Briggs. Over the years I spent researching CPS – interviewing and spending time with mothers in Rhode Island and Connecticut – I saw how family separation teaches affected mothers that the state is an adversary, working against them given their marginal social positions.
CPS gives parents, especially mothers, first-hand experience with an antagonistic, controlling government. Caseworkers, attorneys, and judges claim to help, but in mothers’ experiences, these officials often work againsttheir interests. Mothers don’t see anyone on their side.
***
When Christina got out of lockup, she called her CPS caseworker, who said Anthony could be home within three to six months. The caseworker’s notes stated that Christina acknowledged her “anger issues”. Christina told me that she tried to see the positives first. “I was like: I’ll use this time to go to school and get myself together, and I won’t think about it as him being taken away from me.”
But the pathway to get Anthony home became long and arduous, with CPS repeatedly adding obstacles. At her first court hearing, the judge ordered that Anthony be placed at CPS’s discretion. “OK. I’m thinking, that’s good. ‘CPS, can I get my son back?’ ‘No … You have to do stuff … Classes, this, that, the third.’”
Christina started therapy, but subsequent court hearings were more of the same. She asked CPS staff whether Anthony could come home after a certain number of therapy sessions, but she was told that her service providers would determine when she was “stable”. CPS didn’t want therapy to be a box to check; they wanted Christina to demonstrate progress – as they defined it – in her ability to parent. But Christina, frustrated, contended that she’d complied with what CPS had asked, yet Anthony still wasn’t home.
Sitting on a metal bench next to a small playground, Christina looked out at the hopscotch marked into the asphalt, wistfully recalling how she used to sit there and watch Anthony play. She was anxious. The clock was ticking: per federal law, once children have spent 15 of the last 22 months in foster care, states are supposed to start the process of terminating parental rights permanently. Her case was coming up on a year, with court officials’ summer vacations delaying the next hearing. “I’m scared because they keep playing with me,” she said.
Two days later, Christina went to a local park to visit with Anthony. When her caseworker arrived with Anthony, Anthony bolted at full speed towards her. They chased one another jubilantly around the playground. Anthony’s father, a young Black man, arrived. The three of them seemed thrilled to be spending time together. Christina relaxed. She held Anthony up to do the monkey bars and clapped wildly when he made it across. Anthony’s father pushed him on the swing. Anthony pumped his legs, grinning widely, and laughing. With a big smile on her face, Christina kissed Anthony on the head when the swing came to rest.
Christina’s caseworker was supervising the visit as ordered by the judge, who cited Christina not showing up for drug screens. Many affluent white parents recreationally use marijuana, as Christina had, without CPS intervention. Moreover, she was working two jobs and had to drive a half hour to the courthouse to do the drug screens. Parents with limited resources face substantial, often essentially insurmountable, burdens to meet CPS’s requirements. But rather than help Christina overcome these obstacles, CPS used anything less than perfect compliance as a reason to prolong the process.
Once in Christina’s life following the convenience store incident, CPS added all manner of shifting conditions. Like Christina, other mothers I met described how their cases dragged on. The first devastating days without their children became weeks, then months, then years. CPS kept coming up with new services needing completion. With its broad focus on child safety, the agency did not want to ignore concerns that arose over the course of the case. But as mothers saw it, CPS kept adding hurdles. They went to counseling, they did regular drug tests, they did anger management and domestic violence and substance use treatment. It felt like as soon as mothers met one request, CPS added another. Their cases kept getting continued in court. Meanwhile,
their kids were growing up.
***
On paper, CPS cases are supposed to be different from their criminal counterparts. Theoretically, parents and CPS usually have the same goal: to reunify children with their parents or keep children at home. Yet mothers whose children are removed see caseworkers working in opposition to them. As one mother said of her caseworker: “She don’t talk about the good things that I do. She talks about the negative when we get in front of the judge.” Another recalled: “The way she would talk to me and look at me, I felt like to her I was trash.” In Providence family court, CPS staff sit at one table alongside children’s attorneys, across from parents and their attorneys at another table, presenting parents’ interests as opposed to CPS’s and to their children’s.
In theory, mothers can dispute the terms CPS sets for them; in Connecticut and Rhode Island, they are even provided attorneys. In reality, this doesn’t do much to shift the power imbalance. One mother described leaving messages for her attorney but never hearing back: “I literally am stuck in a corner with nobody on my side.”
Christina, too, called the legal aid office every day after getting out of jail, seeking her assigned attorney. The secretary told Christina to stop calling, as she wouldn’t meet her attorney until the court date. When that date came, her attorney knew nothing about her case and approached her with the wrong case file. Later, a different man was appointed as her attorney and asked Christina for her information. “[Legal aid] doesn’t service me,” Christina concluded. At court, legal aid attorneys like Christina’s are overburdened, spending their days flitting in and out of the courtroom between multiple cases, with only a few minutes to speak to parents before each session.
As in a criminal case, the judge sits on a platform at a large, imposing table. Arriving for her first hearing, Christina felt relieved to see a Black judge. She thought he would understand, perhaps having “had a struggle” himself. But he silenced her. Christina described how she kept raising her hand to speak, but was advised not to: “The judge is like, ‘Put this on her record. We’re advising her not to speak. She still wants to speak, so she can speak.’” Christina
said this “infuriated” her. She saw her silencing as an insult to her intelligence – like she was expected to “mess up” – and as an injustice. “You should give me that right, you understand?” she later reflected. “You’re already taking my rights away from me.”
Still, Christina spoke, rebutting something the CPS attorney had said. The judge admonished her, said she was being “‘a little aggressive’. I said, ‘I’m sorry, your honor. I don’t mean to be aggressive, but I’m really just trying to get my son home.’”
Such experiences show mothers like Christina how the system views them – through racialized and gendered lenses framing advocacy as aggression. “He’s trying to teach me a lesson, like, ‘Don’t mess with me, ’cause I’m the judge.’” She felt she didn’t have a say. “It’s killing me because it’s like a major energy force pushing me down, I feel. The judge as being the powerful – it’s like, who can override him besides the supreme court?” The judge, who saw her for a couple of minutes every few months, had the power to determine whether Anthony could come home.
Christina wished she had the funds to hire a lawyer, “because if I get a paid lawyer and he sees what’s going on, I bet you any amount of money I would get my kid back just like that”. The inequalities Christina noticed taught her how the system worked: She added: “People who have a major support system, like … a paid lawyer, those are the people who get out. Other people like me, very low income, not great support system, bad background, the system’s made for people like me.”
She continued: “It’s great for them to antagonize me, ’cause they’re like: ‘Oh, she don’t got nobody. She don’t know the ins and outs. We could whip her right into shape, or we could do whatever we want, basically.’”
Christina’s frustration mounted. She didn’t know why Anthony couldn’t come home or what more CPS wanted. “I feel like it’s secretive, like there’s things, there’s missing pieces. I feel like they’re out to get me,” she said. It seemed like no one wanted to help her – even non-profit organizations were just “in it for the money”.
She had recently watched a documentary series on Kalief Browder, a teenager incarcerated for years without trial for allegedly stealing a backpack. Christina saw their experiences as linked, part of a larger narrative of racialized injustice. She recognized how the system had “beat him down to the ground” without evidence of his wrongdoing. One minor incident spiraled into a traumatizing, years-long saga. Christina, too, tried to prove her innocence, but to no avail. “Sometimes I feel like [Kalief], closed in, no one can help me,” she said. So she learned “to remain humble”, because “no matter what I say or do, I’m not in control”. Still, Christina remained resolute. She would continue to stand up for what she knew was right. “I’m not letting [the judge] take my power away from me,” she declared.
Anthony remained in CPS’s custody for nearly two years. Finally, a judge ordered Anthony home – even though as far as Christina could tell, her situation hadn’t changed beyond securing a medical marijuana card. She’d simply been assigned to a different judge who saw no reason Anthony couldn’t come home. And she figured her caseworker had grown tired of dealing with her.
When Anthony returned, Christina had just moved into a new two-bedroom apartment. Not much adorned the place, except affirmations Christina had written on bright pink sticky notes, posted on the cabinet: “you will be successful”, “today will be a good day”, “Christina, you are beautiful”, “God loves you every day”.
Things were looking up. “Everything is just, I guess, falling in place,” she beamed.
Still, Christina thought often about what she’d lost. “I can’t even believe they took two years of my life,” she sighed. “They took two years of my son’s life that I can’t get back.”
***
In the US, CPS puts hundreds of thousands of parents each year through this devastating experience. Certainly, these parents are often experiencing substantial adversity; they cannot always meet children’s needs in their current circumstances. Nevertheless, all deserve to be treated with dignity; all ought to have a say.
Instead, the state exerts power: not only through direct force – taking children – but also by subjecting mothers to a system that disciplines and disregards them. Because CPS intervention is concentrated among marginalized groups, poor women of color in particular are further destabilized and marginalized. Mothers come to see their place as subordinate others whose perspectives merit little state consideration. CPS thus produces what the law and sociology professor Monica Bell calls legal estrangement, or “the process through which institutions perpetuate the idea that marginalized groups do not fully share in all the rights and freedoms that flow to other Americans”. As they are part of family and community networks, the parents’ experiences also ripple outward. Many end up raising their children or grandchildren; the trauma of child removal, and their understandings of justice and the state, carry over to the next generation.
These experiences can make mobilization challenging; they can also create new opportunities for activism. Affected parents, and mothers in particular, are leading the way. When the coronavirus pandemic hit, Representative Gwen Moore, a Wisconsin congresswoman whose own child had been placed in foster care, introduced legislation suspending federal deadlines to terminate parental rights. Around the country, parents are speaking out, galvanized by their experiences with CPS. They’re calling for alternative means of promoting child and family wellbeing, from direct cash assistance to investments in schools, parks, housing, and community activities. Inclusion, not exclusion.
Christina concurred, requesting “more supportive help” beyond CPS. It should go without saying that mothers like Christina are full members of our society, with intimate, first-hand knowledge of government operations. Why aren’t we listening to them?
This is an extract from Investigating Families by Kelley Fong (Princeton University Press, £28). To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
The situation didn’t snowball; it came like an avalanche
all this dysfunction and deliver. So yes, I do think it’s a dangerous dynamic for democratic systems.”
As Republicans move towards electing a new speaker, it’s still unclear which candidate, if any, will be able to get a majority of the votes. But regardless of which Republican ultimately prevails, they’re almost certain to have to deal with the same issues that McCarthy was ultimately unable to control – a fragmented party where a small minority can wield extreme power irrespective of what the majority wants.