Taking Children from Their Parents Without a Court Order
When child-welfare officials in New York City talk publicly about taking children from their parents, they often point out how drastically the system has changed since the dark days of the nineteen-nineties. Back then, there were nearly forty-five thousand children in foster care; now there are fewer than sixty-five hundred. This reduction is a source of pride at the Administration for Children’s Services (A.C.S.), the child-welfare agency in New York—no one says that, in the nineties, children were safer. During the pandemic, A.C.S. was forced to reduce its removals of children even more, and the commissioner conceded afterward that there was no evidence of an increase in child abuse. But still, when A.C.S. takes children from their parents, around half the time the agency bypasses the judicial vetting that’s legally required to make sure the removal is necessary. A.C.S. doesn’t apply to family court for a removal order, although it’s often possible to obtain one in a matter of hours—it just takes the children and argues later that it was dealing with an emergency.
All forced removals, even short ones, are traumatizing for children and parents. A.C.S. acknowledges that many of its caseworkers have “experienced the toddler whose little fingers have to be pried off of her mother.” The children are often taken to bleak facilities by strangers, sometimes separated from their siblings; the parent may not know where they are. Even once the children are returned, the family is changed: the parent now knows the family is not safe in their home; the children know that there are powerful forces from which the parent cannot protect them. Children who have been taken from their families have nearly twice the levels of P.T.S.D. as combat veterans do; the stress hormones released can permanently change a child’s brain.
Government agents are not allowed to go into a person’s home, or to take their stuff, much less their children, without a court order, unless it’s a real emergency—house on fire, audible screaming. In order for A.C.S. to justify an emergency removal, the danger is supposed to be “so immediate, so urgent that the child’s life or safety will be at risk.” Despite this, in the past few years, A.C.S. has taken around fourteen hundred children every year on an emergency basis, many of whose cases involve no allegations of abuse. In more than a quarter of the cases in which A.C.S. seeks authorization after an emergency removal, the judge orders A.C.S. to immediately return the children.
Today, a landmark class-action lawsuit against A.C.S. was filed, accusing the agency of violating children’s rights under the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable seizures—in this case, of the children themselves. The lawsuit also alleges that A.C.S. has violated the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment by removing children in a racially discriminatory manner: around ninety per cent of children removed on an emergency basis are Black or Latino; one in two Black children in the city is caught up in a child-protection investigation in the course of their childhood. The lawsuit is asking not only for compensation for past injuries but for injunctive relief in the future: it is asking the court to order remedies that would insure that A.C.S. stops taking children without an order except in a genuine emergency.
The lawsuit is being filed on behalf of two lead plaintiffs. The first is Denise Archer, a thirty-six-year-old Black mother of three children. Her eldest, Jasmine, who is twelve, has diagnoses of autism and A.D.H.D. Three years ago, Jasmine grew agitated and got injured, and her mother took her to the hospital. After she was treated, a social worker wanted to talk with Jasmine alone, without her mother present, but Archer refused. She had been in foster care for three years as a child, and the thought of her daughter getting involved with social workers scared her. At some point, the hospital called A.C.S., and although the doctor said that Jasmine’s injury was consistent with her mother’s explanation, A.C.S. did an emergency removal of all three children. Jasmine was later interviewed by forensic experts trained to detect child abuse, who concluded that the injury was indeed an accident. After two days of separation, A.C.S. returned the children without filing a case.
Meanwhile, as the investigation was going on, Archer’s caseworker had talked with her about re-starting respite care, a state program that offered supervision for disabled children, to allow parents to rest or focus on their other kids. Archer had used it before, but the service had closed during the pandemic. On a particularly difficult day, when she was struggling to cope, she called the caseworker to ask if she could have care right away. She wasn’t able to reach the caseworker, so she called the state child-protection hotline. It seems that either she did not use the phrase “respite care,” or the hotline operator did not understand what she was saying, because the hotline report that got to A.C.S. stated that Archer felt unable to care for her children any longer and wanted A.C.S. to take them.
This call triggered a new investigation. A different caseworker inspected the family, and noticed that the youngest child, Daevon, who was two, had a burn on his arm. (All names are pseudonyms.) Archer explained that, a few days before, Daevon had been burned accidentally while she was ironing, and that she had already taken him to urgent care. The caseworker took Daevon to the hospital, where staff confirmed that the burn had been treated and was healing. But A.C.S. decided to again remove all three children on an emergency basis. Later, in court, everyone agreed that Archer had been calling the hotline to ask for respite care, but A.C.S. told the judge that Archer had depression and anxiety, and that she was refusing treatment. The judge agreed with A.C.S. that, because of her struggles coping with her kids, they would be at imminent risk if sent home with her (the order didn’t mention the burn), and approved A.C.S.’s decision to send the children into foster care.
They stayed in foster care for almost three years. The first set of foster parents found Jasmine too difficult to handle, so she was sent to another home without her brothers, then to a third home, and then a fourth. The various parents found her so troublesome that they repeatedly called 911. She was forcibly medicated; on about ten occasions, she was sent to psychiatric wards, something that had never happened when she lived with her family. Her mother was not allowed to visit her in the hospital. Finally, earlier this spring, the case reached an appellate court, which noted that Archer had, in fact, been in treatment for her depression and anxiety, and that, anyway, there was no evidence her mental health had posed a danger to her kids, effectively insuring that the children would be immediately returned to their mother.
The three years of separation and foster care will leave a permanent mark on the family. Daevon, who is five, fearfully apologizes to his mother if he does something wrong. He was two when he went into care, and, when he first got home, he would sometimes cry for his foster mother. At first, Archer allowed him to speak with his foster mother on the phone, but then his school told her that she should cut that off because it was too confusing. Jasmine withdraws much of the time. While she was away, she once threatened to hurt herself and said that she wished she were dead. She blames herself for things that happened to her in care. When Jeremiah, the middle child, who is seven, was in his foster home, he started pulling out his eyebrow hairs and wetting the bed. He now tells his mom that she is not a bad mother.
The second lead plaintiff is Danielle Lorimer, a thirty-seven-year-old Black and Latina woman who lives in the Bronx with her five children. (Again, all names are pseudonyms.) Lorimer lived with her parents until she was twelve, when they split up. She started college, but left after she got pregnant; she had her baby, a girl, Zoe, in 2011. Sometimes she found work—she had a job at TJ Maxx for a while, then a gig as a security guard—and sometimes she was on welfare. She went back to school to get certified as a medical assistant. In 2015, she had a second daughter, Yolanda, and, in 2018, a third, Xena.
After she had Xena, she fell into a deep postpartum depression. She and the girls were staying in a single room in a hotel turned into a shelter. By then, Zoe was in school, and Lorimer spent most of her time in the room alone with Yolanda and the baby. Her mother was living in North Carolina; she felt that her father, who still lived in New York, saw her only when convenient.
Near the end of the year, she received a visit from an A.C.S. caseworker. Someone, possibly from the shelter, had called the state hotline. Later, in court, A.C.S. told a judge that it was concerned about her mental health. It said that the floor of her room was covered in garbage, dirty clothes, and leftover food, and that the sink was full of dirty dishes. A.C.S. didn’t ask to remove the kids, but it wanted her to accept mental-health services, which she agreed to do. During the next few months, the caseworker visited a few more times. In April, Lorimer bought decorations to celebrate Xena’s first birthday.
A few days later, she was in her room with Yolanda and Xena when the caseworker turned up with a colleague. The caseworker told her to come by herself to the shelter office; the colleague would watch the kids. In the office, she was told that A.C.S. was doing an emergency removal. The colleague had already left with Yolanda and Xena; A.C.S. would pick up Zoe at school. She could not say goodbye. The caseworker asked if she knew someone who could put them up—if not, they would go into foster care. Panicked, she called her father, and he agreed to take them in.
She had barely been apart from Yolanda or Xena since they were born; the separation was brutal. She couldn’t understand why A.C.S. would remove her children rather than help her to take care of them. “I might be struggling, but there is nothing wrong with my kids,” she said. The children were gone for nearly a year. When they came back, they seemed different to her—angrier.
While the children were away, she started seeing someone. She got pregnant and had a fourth girl, Willow, in August, 2020. After she, her partner, and her kids moved into an apartment, in 2021, her partner became violent with her. In 2022, when she was pregnant again, she told him to leave. She had her fifth child, a boy, Kayden, in August, 2023.
She took out an order of protection against her ex, but he ignored it, so she moved in with a friend. She felt that things were finally getting better: she was safe from her ex; she was working for DoorDash. But the friend lived far from Yolanda and Willow’s school, so it was difficult to get them there on time. In October, 2025, the school called the hotline, alleging that Yolanda and Willow were often late, that they had poor hygiene, and that their clothes didn’t fit.
When caseworkers visited the family’s apartment, the workers noted that there were holes in the walls, roaches under the sink, and a foul smell. Lorimer asked them for help in finding a new apartment closer to the kids’ school, where her ex wouldn’t find her; they told her to move to a shelter. She said that she wouldn’t go back into a shelter—she was still traumatized from her last shelter, which she guessed had called A.C.S. on her—but they later told her that, if she didn’t, they would take her children. So she left with her kids and went to Prevention Assistance and Temporary Housing (PATH), the intake center for the city’s shelter system, in the Bronx.
Going through the system at PATH takes many hours. While they were there, Lorimer got a call from a lawyer at the Bronx Defenders, the public-defense firm that was defending her in family court; the lawyer informed her that A.C.S. was at that moment filing a neglect petition against her. A.C.S. had told the judge that she had run away with her children and that it didn’t know where they were. She phoned into the hearing to show that the whole family was at PATH. A.C.S. said that it was not seeking removal of the kids. If it had asked for removal, it would have needed to convince the judge that the children were at “imminent risk,” and the attorneys for Lorimer and the children would have been able to respond to the allegations; as it was, the hearing was adjourned with everyone agreeing that Lorimer would bring her kids to the A.C.S. office the next day.
Soon after, she and the kids were sitting on a bus parked outside PATH, waiting to be transported to a shelter, when an official told them to get out and led them back indoors to a small, windowless room, guarded inside and out by police. An A.C.S. worker said that, despite the agreement made in court less than two hours ago, A.C.S. was indeed doing an emergency removal. She and the kids became very upset. She pleaded with the worker not to take them, but her lawyer told her that, for now, she had to let A.C.S. do what it wanted.
People who know about police misbehavior are often astonished to discover that you are more likely to have your Fourth Amendment rights violated by child-protective caseworkers than by police. Entering a home without a warrant is rare for police, in part, because most people understand police have no right to do it. But with caseworkers, it’s more complicated: caseworkers are required to try to gain entry to a home before obtaining a court order, and most people don’t know their rights in child-protective investigations. So, if a caseworker insists on entering a home, or says that if they are not allowed in they will come back with police or a court order, a frightened parent is unlikely to resist. Many police officers wear body cameras, and on the street there are often witnesses with cameras of their own, but once child-welfare investigators are inside a home, there are no bystanders watching. Caseworkers in New York City are by no means the worst offenders in this: removals of children without an order are common all over the country. A.C.S., at least, tracks its removal data, all of which is made public—most child-welfare agencies do not. (An A.C.S. spokesperson said, “Emergency removals are only considered in circumstances where all other options are ruled out,” and that, “in more than 97 percent of child-protection cases, children are not removed from their homes.”)
A.C.S. obtains an order about half the time it removes children, but it hardly ever bothers to get one for a home inspection. The class-action suit accusing A.C.S. of unreasonable seizure is paired with a prior Fourth Amendment class-action suit, filed in February, 2024, accusing A.C.S. of unreasonable searches. The lead plaintiff in that suit was Ebony Gould, a Black woman who lived in Queens with her three daughters. A.C.S. had turned up at Gould’s apartment more than a dozen times in two years, each time without an order. The caseworker said that Gould had to let them in or they would come back with the police. The caseworkers searched every room and inspected the children’s bodies. Each time, A.C.S. determined that the accusations against her were unfounded. Gould guessed that they had been called in by an ex who had been abusive. Now her ex—if it was her ex—had perhaps found a way to continue his abuse by proxy, through A.C.S. (This happens a lot: calling the hotline anonymously and accusing someone of child neglect is a singularly effective means of revenge.) Gould’s experience was typical. In certain neighborhoods of New York, A.C.S. surveillance is omnipresent. Caseworkers inspect children’s bodies in nearly every initial home investigation, according to interviews conducted by ProPublica, even though the vast majority of accusations are not of abuse but neglect—a child missing school, or turning up in dirty clothes.
Both the search and the seizure suits were put together by a legal team led by the Family Justice Law Center (F.J.L.C.), an organization founded four years ago to challenge A.C.S.’s practices through litigation. F.J.L.C.’s founder, David Shalleck-Klein, had previously worked as a family-defense attorney at Bronx Defenders. He and Christine Gottlieb, the head of the Family Defense Clinic at N.Y.U., along with others, modelled F.J.L.C.’s strategy, in part, on a piece of litigation that has had a profound effect on the behavior of the police. The plaintiff’s 2013 victory in a class-action lawsuit, Floyd et al. v. City of New York, concerning the N.Y.P.D.’s racially discriminatory stop-and-frisk practices, brought about a dramatic change: in 2011, the N.Y.P.D. made more than six hundred and eighty thousand stops; in 2016, it made fewer than thirteen thousand.
Baher Azmy, the legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights and one of the lead lawyers in Floyd, has joined F.J.L.C.’s legal team for the seizure lawsuit. (Melissa Friedman, a leading attorney at the Legal Aid Society, which represents children in family court, has joined the team as well.) Azmy was glad to learn that the team was being advised by a group of parent activists, not only because they were the ones who had a firsthand understanding of the issues at stake but also because it was their ability to sway public opinion that would make the lawsuit count. Legal results without an organized movement to sustain public outrage, he knew, were fragile and ineffective.
In the lawsuits against A.C.S., a legal victory may actually be less important than changing public perception, because the law as written isn’t the main problem: the problem is that A.C.S. isn’t following it. A.C.S. isn’t following it because public pressure is pushing it in only one direction. Insofar as most people know anything at all about child-protective services, they know that its caseworkers are people who rescue children from danger. They hear about A.C.S. only when this mission fails and a child ends up dead. Therefore, A.C.S. follows the mantra of “better safe than sorry,” where “safe” often means preventing the kind of harm to a child that A.C.S. might be blamed for, while discounting the harm of separating children from their families. An unpublished report in 2020 found that some A.C.S. staff “described an internal culture that operates on fear and intimidation. . . . This frequently means that staff err on the side of safety for themselves, by seeking removal.”
This means sending into foster care thousands of children who would be better off with their parents. But the tabloids rarely write about children traumatized by removals, only about dead children, and no one at A.C.S. wants to end up on the front page of the Daily News. The litigators hope that the seizure lawsuit will bring public attention to unwarranted A.C.S. removals, because, if sufficient outrage can be generated, then “safe”—both for children and for A.C.S. staff—can be redefined.
For a long time, the legal team putting together the seizure suit couldn’t decide whether to include an equal-protection claim, accusing A.C.S. of racial discrimination. On the one hand, A.C.S. itself acknowledges the extreme racial disparity in its investigations and removals. (The 2020 A.C.S. report characterized the agency as a “predatory system that specifically targets Black and brown parents.”) On the other hand, it has become far more difficult to prove racial discrimination in court. A systemic pattern is not enough—you need evidence of individual intent.
The idea of systemic racial injustice is at once far more mainstream and far more inflammatory than it was a few years ago. In 2022, an American Bar Association resolution described “anti-Black systemic racism within the child welfare system, stemming from the history of slavery.” But the litigators know that, in 2026, decades of Supreme Court decisions had made it extremely difficult to bring an equal-protections claim. They feared that if they brought such a claim and lost, the decision could undercut activists’ efforts to hold A.C.S. accountable. In the end, the legal team was leery of making the decision by itself, and solicited the help of the group of parent activists who had been advising it on strategy.
The most prominent of these activists is Joyce McMillan, who, after her own children were taken and returned, founded JMACforFamilies, an organization with the goal of abolishing the child-protective system altogether. McMillan, who is Black, believes that proving discrimination will not be as hard as the lawyers fear. When caseworkers interviewed her about her parenting, she noticed that they posed questions that seemed irrelevant: “They would ask things, like, How much money did I make? Did my children have the same father? Was I ever married?” Would they have asked those questions of a middle-class white woman? She didn’t think so.
After A.C.S. conducted its emergency removal of Lorimer’s children from PATH, they were taken to the Children’s Center in Manhattan, a holding place for kids who have entered the system. The children were separated from each other and assigned to dormitories by age. It felt to them like a jail. (Many children say they have been assaulted there.) Zoe arrived carrying a spiral notebook that contained years of drawings; it was taken away because wire wasn’t allowed, and she never got it back.
On Halloween, three days after the removal, Lorimer arrived outside family court at the same time as her children, who ran to her. Despite having argued, days earlier, that the children needed to be removed, A.C.S. agreed to give them back right away. Lorimer and her kids left the court together, went trick-or-treating with friends in their old neighborhood, and then, later that night, went back to PATH to re-start the shelter intake process.
After four shelters, six months, and many inspections, Lorimer and her kids are now back in a regular apartment. Her case ends on June 1st, but she is not optimistic that she’s seen the last of A.C.S. “I’ve done everything they ask, every single time,” she said. “I’ve done preventative services, family therapy, self-therapy, homemaking services, but I feel like nothing is ever good enough. You still take my kids.”
Although the most recent removal was shorter than the first, she sees that her kids have been changed by it. The girls cling to her. Kayden cries when she leaves. Zoe fills her book bag with as many things as she can carry—extra clothes, her sisters’ stuffed animals. Lorimer anxiously hounds her children each day as they leave for school, because she knows that people there will be watching: “Make sure you have socks on with those Crocs. It’s cold, put on an extra sweater. Did you put on deodorant today? Did you put your perfume on? Is your hair in place?” ♦