CPS & Family Court is not a broken system but a “well-oiled machine by design,” says Bill Crouch, Secretary of Health and Human Resources of West Virginia. “The federal government has always paid us ONLY IF we pull children from their homes.”
By Catherine Wang Anderson / Stolen, Sold, Slaughtered in Nebraska
What’s called child protection is no social service system. *** It’s a multibillion dollar apparatus that relies on terrorizing families by taking their children away.
— Professor of law at University of Pennsylvania Dorothy E. Roberts
Multi-billions dollars gravy train: trafficking American children. The more kids removed from parents, the more federal dollars flow to the state.
Foster children aren’t people. To state governments they are a ‘revenue generating mechanism.’ *** States actively seek out disabled, removed and orphaned children to apply for and seize their federal benefits without their knowledge, and without giving them any of the money.
— Professor of law Daniel L. Hatcher at University of Baltimore The Poverty Industry: The Exploitation of America’s Most Vulnerable Citizens
Kids are literally being nabbed from homes. States make money when kids are taken from parents. The state paid one foster home more than $725,000 over a recent 2 1/2-year period.
Family court — used to strip children from families to convert the children into a commodity that can be sold for cash — persists because it is allowed to exist by the complicit authorities. *** Governments are complicit in child and asset stripping, which would not occur if lawyers and judges were held accountable. False claims and documents abound, and in their tolerated existence, challenge the legitimacy of the government.
— Chief Counsel Robert David Steele, International Tribunal for Natural Justice
“The United States destroys more families than any other country in the world. While our Supreme Court has recognized that a parent’s right to care for her child is one of the oldest and most fundamental rights recognized by our Constitution, our federal child welfare policy is centered on the destruction of families.
Once a child enters foster care, federal law places strict time frames of how much time a court can give a parent to reunify with their child. If that time elapses, the law prioritizes terminating that parent’s rights so that the child may be freed for adoption. In fact, states are given financial incentives to make that happen. The more adoptions they process, the more federal funds they receive. Other options can only be pursued after the child welfare agency rules out destroying the family.”
— Vivek Sankaran, professor of Law, Director of the Child Advocacy Law Clinic and the Child Welfare Appellate Clinic at the University of Michigan Law School. Author ofThe Legal Fiction of Permanency
A story about Shawn A. McMillan (California), one of the top rated civil rights attorneys, on why he fights CPS: “They’re stealing kids.” When asked why he is so passionate about it, he states that he does his work reluctantly:
Because I make a business out of [this], that’s a bad thing. People like me should not be able to exist in a free society. McMillan states that the handful of attorneys like him in California that make their living from suing CPS because they are violating the civil rights of children and parents are all busy, and that this is indicative of a very deep rooted problem. What we have is a system that is inherently corrupt, in that the entire funding scheme, where all these county agencies *** are funded by the same federal funding schemes. And those federal funding schemes are tied to the number of kids in the system.*** If they don’t take children [into custody], their agency dies.
“‘Foster Care Industry’ – an industry where children become a commodity that profits doctors, lawyers, judges, social workers, advocates, and other organizations, an industry that can only exist by taking other people’s children, an industry that damages the very children it purports to be helping.”
— Molly McGrath Tierney, former director for the Baltimore City Department of Social Services
Tierney goes on to explain the trauma inflicted on children by the foster care industry, saying: We’re digging a wound so deep, I don’t believe we have a way of measuring it. This dismantling of families – it has enormous consequences.”
“(Foster) children have been shuttled throughout a system where rape, abuse, psychotropic medication, and instability are the norm.”
— U.S. District Judge Janis G. Jack in her Dec. 17, 2015’s ruling, p.255
“Predators go where the prey is,” says Richard Wexler, director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform.
I’ve been doing this work for a long time and represented thousands and thousands of foster children, 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.
— Marcia Lowry (legendary child rights attorney)
George Miller, chairman of the congressionally appointed Select Committee on Children, Youth and Families in 1988, more than 33 years ago, calls the CPS system “state-sponsored child abuse.”
I think what has been demonstrated here is that you may have a system that, for lack of a better phrase, is simply in contempt.
This system has been sued and sued and orders have been issued and people have just continued on their merry way. And HHS has just continued to look the other way. You have a system that is not only somewhat out of control; it is also illegal at this point. *** The real battle would be fought by a variety of special interest groups with vested interests in maintaining the levels of children in foster care, and by a bureaucratic structure intent on ensuring its own survival.
— George Miller
“Removing a child from his or her home is one of the most violent acts a government can undertake against its people. Yet the child welfare system has operated in this discriminatory and dehumanizing way with too little attention from society. In part, this inattention reflects the success of the system in hiding behind the smokescreen of those rare but highly publicized cases of tragic deaths of children who have come into contact with the system. It also reflects the secretive nature of courts deciding child welfare cases — unlike criminal courts, the vast majority of family courts are closed to the public.”
— Professor of Law at University of Pennsylvania Dorothy E. Roberts
Judge Judy Sheindlin, supervising judge for the Manhattan Family Court, describes the foster parent typically found today in the New York City foster care system
“The typical foster parent I see is a single woman who has several biological children of her own. She is supported by welfare or social security disability. She is a high school dropout whose own kids are marginally functioning. She does not have the ability to help them with their schoolwork, and she has little hope for a brighter economic or social future.”
“One of these victims was a premature, 2-month-old foster child who was alone in this world except for a foster parent who was supposed to provide a safe and loving environment. *** Lutts was trusted with the care of two infants who he sexually exploited and abused repeatedly. These infants suffered in silence, unable to speak for themselves, and unable tell others of the horror they were suffering,”
— FBI Special Agent in Charge, Eric S. Birnbaum
U.S. District Judge John Houston called Lutts the “worst of the worst” and described his conduct as “horrific” and “worse than a mass murderer shooting 20 people” because the newborns he targeted “are the most fragile people to victimize.”
Stopping the Foster Care to Child Trafficking Pipeline is a book by Malika Saar, founder and former Executive Director of the Human Rights Project for Girls, and Google’s Senior Counsel on Civil and Human Rights.”Most of the children who are being bought and sold for sex in our nation are foster care children.”
“Most Americans who are victims of sex trafficking come from our nation’s own foster care system. We have failed our children by not fixing the systemic failures that have allowed this to happen for decades. In 2012, Connecticut police rescued 88 children from sex trafficking; 86 were from the child welfare system. And even more alarming: the FBI discovered in a 2014 nationwide raid that many foster children rescued from sex traffickers, including children as young as 11, were never reported missing by child welfare authorities. Much more needs to be done to stop abuse in care, and those who allow it to happen must be held accountable. To protect our nation’s most vulnerable children, we need the federal government to compel states that accept hundreds of millions of dollars for child welfare systems to answer. We need law enforcement consistently prosecuting those who fail to report child abuse and runaways in a timely manner so we can find them before the pimps do.”
Michael Dolce, We Have Set Up a System to Sex Traffic American Children. Dolce is a highly regarded trial attorney whose practice is dedicated to representing survivors of sexual crimes.
“It’s important to understand that our foster care system only appears to be broken,” said Lexie Gruber, a vocal proponent of foster care reform who spent seven years as a youth in care in Connecticut. “In fact, it is currently working exactly as it was designed — separating children from their loved ones and underinvesting in helping families in crisis. … It’s one of the most violent acts that the government can do.”
