Child welfare agency routinely violates families' rights and prosecutes

A sweeping class action lawsuit filed against New York City on Tuesday alleges that the agency that investigates child abuse and neglect routinely engages in unconstitutional practices that traumatize the families it is designed to protect.

The lawsuit alleges that investigators from the Administration for Children's Services deceive and harass their way into people's homes, where they search families' most private spaces, search children and humiliate parents.

The agency's “coercive tactics” include threatening to take children away or call the police, telling parents they have no choice but to let them in and creating public scenes in hallways, according to the indictment. was filed in federal court in Brooklyn.

Marisa Kaufman, a spokeswoman for the agency, said in a statement Monday that ACS would review the lawsuit. “ACS is committed to keeping children safe and respecting the rights of parents,” she said.

She added: “We will continue to accelerate our efforts to achieve safety, equality and justice by raising parents' awareness of their rights, connecting families to critical services, providing families with alternatives to child protection investigations and working with key systems in place to reduce child protection investigations. the number of families faced with an unnecessary child protection investigation.”

One of the women filing charges, Ebony Gould, is a single mother of three in Queens who has been investigated by ACS at least a dozen times – each of them found to be unfounded. According to the lawsuit, the investigations, which involved dozens of home visits, were prompted by her abusive ex-partner.

Ms Gould said that during the repeated examinations she often felt as if she had no choice but to let ACS in. During one of the first visits, she said, an ACS worker told her through the closed door that she was at risk of having her children taken away.

“I felt forced,” she said. “It almost felt like I was being abused again, but by a stranger.”

Ms. Gould, 35, and the other plaintiffs are represented by the Family Justice Law Center, an organization dedicated to preventing unnecessary family separations. Its executive director, David Shalleck-Klein, said the lawsuit was not intended to halt ACS investigations altogether, but to focus on illegal searches.

“They open refrigerators, inspect labels in medicine cabinets, tell children to lift up their shirts and pull down their pants,” he said. “And it's not just a one-time action: they come back often, again and again.”

There are three legal justifications investigators can use to enter homes: court orders, emergency situations, or voluntary consent.

The lawsuit says the agency “chooses virtually never to seek court orders” and conducts tens of thousands of searches each year in non-emergency circumstances, coercing consent and violating the Fourth Amendment's protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.

If the lawsuit were successful, ACS would have to fundamentally rethink the way it investigates reports of abuse and neglect.

The agency investigates more than 40,000 allegations annually. Some are true emergencies, and the agency has the difficult task of balancing the civil rights of families with the safety of children.

When tragedies occur, ACS is often blamed for not taking more aggressive action. The rare cases in which children have died after investigators intervened minimally or not at all could make it difficult to roll back the agency's powers.

Still, criticism of the agency has increased in recent years, mainly because of the large racial disparities in the investigations. Black and Hispanic urban children are about seven times as likely as white children to be the subject of investigations, according to state data.

While ACS has done that progress reported in reducing “the disparities that exist at each of the stages of the child welfare system,” a black child still has a nearly 50 percent chance of being included in an ACS investigation before his or her 18th birthday, according to a of the agency's experts. own press releases.

Ms. Gould, who is black, said her family has been permanently affected by the experience with ACS. All three of her children are now in therapy.

She said an investigator asked her six-year-old daughter if she was suicidal. Her daughter had not known the word before. “From that day on, she started saying — whenever they would come — that she felt suicidal.”

One evening in December 2022, when Ms. Gould's mother was visiting from California, ACS knocked on her door at 3 a.m., she said.

Ms. Gould told investigators she did not want to let them in. They threatened to come back with the authorities.

“I was shaking so bad, and my mom just started praying and then my kids said, 'Mommy, what's going on?'” she recalled in a recent interview.

An experienced ACS worker said that when a family is resistant to home visits and the caseworker has not seen the children for a while, a night shift supervisor is sometimes sent to assess the children. The employee spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to publicly discuss the agency's policies.

Prosecutors are asking a judge to declare the agency's tactics unconstitutional and order them to stop.

In recent years, ACS has worked to reduce the number of children it removes from their families and places in foster care. In 1999, there were almost 40,000 children in foster care. Now there are less than 7,000.

The agency must still investigate any allegation of possible child abuse or neglect, and any investigation requires home visits. About 30 percent of investigations result in a finding of abuse or neglect. according to city data. About one in fifteen investigations leads to the child being placed in a foster family.

A Brooklyn couple who are among those suing the agency said ACS made them feel terrorized after they were investigated in 2022. When investigators showed up at the apartment Mathew Eng shares with his wife, Marianna Azar, and 5-year-old daughter, Mr. Eng said he panicked.

They're going to take my daughter, he thought.

The investigation was prompted by an anonymous complaint that the couple says they received only scant details about: Someone had accused them of medically neglecting their daughter.

Mr Eng and Ms Azar gathered doctor's notes and other evidence to show they had not been negligent. Yet for months several workers showed up at the family's door, demanding to see their daughter and inspect their home.

During the investigation, Ms. Azar underwent abdominal surgery. She was told so little about when ACS might come by or what they were looking for, she said, that she refused to fill an opioid prescription because she didn't want the agency to see the drugs on her bedside table. She said she spent the first two nights after surgery in excruciating pain.

One investigator texted Ms. Azar to let ACS in. Ms. Azar asked if the investigator had a warrant or court order. According to the lawsuit, she was wrongly told that “the agency does not require a warrant or court order to complete a visit.”

Their daughter, once outgoing and cheerful, has been in therapy, her parents said, and blames herself for the investigations.

Ms. Azar explained that her daughter, YA (the children in the lawsuit are identified only by their initials), was asked to write a story about the home investigations. In the story, Ms. Azar said that YA had written, “I'm a bad boy” and “I have to behave at school or Mom and Dad will be arrested.”

Ms. Azar, who works for the federal government, said she was infuriated that her family was being harmed by a city agency whose mission is to protect families. She said that while investigators were at her home, she often wondered, “What happened to all those kids who actually needed your attention?”