One afternoon last May, four detectives knocked on the door of a $3.2-million mansion in Arcadia, a wealthy city in Los Angeles County. Earlier that day, they’d received a call about one of the mansion’s residents: a two-month-old baby named Walter. Walter had recently been admitted with severe head injuries to the intensive-care unit of a nearby hospital. His mother said he’d fallen off the bed, but his symptoms were consistent with the kind of trauma one might see from a car accident—or after a prolonged shaking.

When the police entered the mansion, they were surprised to find that it had an institutional feel. There were CCTV cameras everywhere, bedrooms filled with cribs, and, in classrooms downstairs, more than a dozen children seated at desks in front of whiteboards. It was impossible to tell the girls and boys apart, since all of them had shaved heads.

“This was definitely something I’d never seen before,” Sergeant Mario Castro, of the Arcadia Police Department, told me. He thought he’d walked into an unlicensed day care. But Walter’s parents, Silvia Zhang and Guojun Xuan, insisted that all the children belonged to them. After some counting—and the consulting of an Excel spreadsheet—the officers determined that Silvia and Guojun were the parents of twenty-one children in total, nearly all under the age of three. As the couple explained that evening, this feat had been accomplished by hiring dozens of women across the country as surrogates.

Such a domestic arrangement was unusual, to say the least, but it wasn’t illegal. Or was it? After police reviewed the home’s surveillance footage, they grew alarmed. On May 9th, Silvia and Guojun were arrested on suspicion of child endangerment, and their children were taken into foster care. The couple was released three days later, but the children have remained in state custody ever since.

For the past year, the Los Angeles juvenile-dependency court has been weighing whether Silvia and Guojun will have a chance to get their children back. Its proceedings are confidential, but, as I reported in an investigation for the magazine, the county’s dependency petition alleges that the couple knowingly enabled an environment of cruelty, including by concealing Walter’s injuries and “delaying critical medical treatment,” and by facilitating “relentless violence and verbal abuse by caregivers toward children of tender years.” In February, the dependency court substantiated these allegations. (One case, involving the oldest child, a teen-age daughter biologically related to Silvia, was dismissed.)

As for whether the rest of the children could go home, the judge was meant to make a decision in early March. But the hearings were postponed, possibly owing to the case’s scale and complexity. During this waiting period, I spoke briefly to Silvia, who said that she would not discuss the ongoing case without consulting her attorney. “I feel really sad for my kids,” she told me. “The children want to go back home.” She said she was certain they would be returned to her, and seemed a little surprised that I’d even posed the question. When I asked her about the allegations of physical abuse, she said she had an appointment. (Silvia and Guojun’s legal representatives did not respond to requests for comment, but Mitchell Krems, Guojun’s dependency lawyer, previously told me that both parents had done everything they could to protect their family.)

Finally, in mid-April, according to sources, the court ruled that it would bypass the possibility for family reunification. What this means, in the short term, is that Silvia and Guojun’s twenty-plus kids will remain in foster care until they are placed into guardianships or adopted, probably by their foster families. Although the parents are challenging the rulings, it seems unlikely that Arcadia’s most infamous family will be brought back together.

The court’s decision has ramifications far beyond California, for reasons that are as confounding as they are unprecedented. Since Silvia and Guojun’s arrest, last May, they have had at least six more children, also through surrogates, bringing their tally to twenty-seven. These surrogates live in California, Georgia, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, and the newborns have been assigned to foster-care placements in their respective counties. Silvia and Guojun have pushed for these babies to be sent to L.A., but the courts and child-welfare agencies in other states have been cautiously watching the case before deciding the infants’ fates. This week, the eldest of these children will turn one.

Despite the stakes of commercial surrogacy—and its incursion into the most delicate realm of private life—it remains largely unregulated in the U.S. For years, the multibillion-dollar industry has been troubled by its share of baroque and tragic scandals. There are many ways for things to go wrong, given the number of parties involved, from surrogates and intended parents to fertility clinics, attorneys, and escrow agencies. What has set the Arcadia case apart is not just its staggering scale—and the ethical questions it raises about a new, assembly-line era of family-making—but the involvement of the child-welfare system in adjudicating parental rights. The termination of those rights is a profound decision, one the courts don’t take lightly.

To those closely following the case, however, the latest ruling in L.A. was hardly surprising. The evidence police and social workers collected was graphic, according to the files I reviewed; moreover, it had been captured by the parents’ own cameras. In one of the home’s surveillance tapes, a nanny admits to Silvia and Guojun that she’d hit Walter’s head with an open hand. In others, Silvia acknowledges that “something is wrong” with Walter, that her son isn’t eating, that his breathing is abnormal, and that his cry is “deep and low.” Despite these observations, Walter was not seen by a doctor until two days after his injuries occurred.

Also documented on tape were the goings on inside the home’s classrooms. The same day that the nanny allegedly beat Walter, other caregivers slapped and flogged his siblings, including with shoes and wooden sticks. According to notes taken by a social worker, one child, stuck in a high chair, tries to protect itself with its arms and hands as a nanny “relentlessly continues thumping the baby in the face (approximately 7–10 thumps).” In another tape, also viewed by social workers, Guojun enters a classroom shortly after a teacher has kicked and pummelled his four-year-old son to the ground. Guojun then commands the child to continue to hold a punitive squat position, instructing him to “listen to the teacher!”

One question that remains unanswered is whether law enforcement plans to act on this evidence. The police have been in possession of the same videos as the social workers, yet no charges have been brought against the parents in criminal court. Curiously, this is not for lack of trying. The Arcadia Police Department already submitted their case to the district attorney’s office last May, but the D.A. asked for further investigation. When I pressed the D.A.’s office on what that might entail, it declined to comment. The police told me that they had not conducted additional interviews with witnesses or caregivers, nor seized additional devices from the parents since the arrest.

In September, Arcadia’s police captain Kollin Cieadlo told me he expected officers would resubmit the case by October. He said it was taking them time to finish translating all of the video footage, which is largely in Mandarin and spans about two weeks, but that they were nearly done. When I followed up in November, that date had been pushed—to the end of the year. In January, when I visited Cieadlo, along with his colleague, Sergeant Castro, at the station, they said they’d rather not share a deadline, lest they miss it again. Both reiterated, however, that the investigation was still active and the translations almost complete. “My main priority is to get justice for Baby Walter” and “to get charges brought against the mother, the father, and the nanny,” Cieadlo said. Last week, when I checked in, Sergeant Castro estimated their case would be sent over to the D.A. “in the near future.”

After news of Silvia and Guojun’s arrest broke last summer, many of their surrogates questioned how the couple’s family-making scheme had been allowed to unfold for years without anyone stopping it. The couple had opened their own agency, Mark Surrogacy, to recruit gestational carriers; dozens of women had been led to believe they were helping the couple have their second or third child. The women felt betrayed upon learning this was not the case, and—more acutely—horrified when they heard that the babies they’d carried had ended up in a home crowded with children, one of whom had been gravely injured.

And yet, besides the alleged child abuse, what the parents had done was perfectly legal. “Incredibly permissive laws make it easy to create children through surrogacy with no regard to their well-being,” Emma Waters, a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, told me. Most surrogates are extensively vetted by the agencies they sign up with, while most intended parents—that is, the customers paying for their services—are not. A surrogacy can cost upward of a hundred and forty thousand dollars, and surrogates rely on the good-faith assumption that a family wouldn’t invest that much money unless they really wanted to care for a baby. By treating “children as commodities as opposed to beloved family members,” as a social worker observed in court filings, Silvia and Guojun had reduced surrogacy to its least flattering caricature: a cold, exploitative transaction.

Unsurprisingly, opponents of surrogacy have seized on the Arcadia scandal to call for an outright ban on the practice. “This is not surrogacy gone awry,” Katy Faust, the founder of Them Before Us, a conservative children’s-advocacy organization, told me. “This is surrogacy as planned: the point is to deliver a custom-order product in a marketplace for adults. Of course you’re going to get these dystopian scenarios.”

Prominent members of the surrogacy industry have likewise expressed their shock and dismay at the situation. But this hand-wringing has led to little tangible reform. At present, nothing in California’s family code requires parents to disclose how many children they already have in their home, or whether concurrent surrogacies are under way. This spring, the Academy of California Adoption Lawyers (ACAL) drafted a proposal to push for more transparency, but, ACAL members told me, not a single legislator they approached was interested in sponsoring it. Florida has had better luck, at least when it comes to getting politicians to consider legislation: one bill, introduced this year, would have required mental-health evaluations and background checks for all participants in a surrogacy arrangement, including the intended parents.

Robert Walmsley, a family attorney who has litigated several key surrogacy cases in California, told me that he’d recently spoken on a panel about the Arcadia case, and that, afterward, an audience of his peers had been divided on whether screening prospective parents was the best course of reform. On the one hand, background checks and psychological evaluations could help weed out individuals with questionable motives. On the other, who gets to decide what a family should look like?

“I wouldn’t want my current federal Administration telling me who’s an appropriate parent,” Walmsley said. “That opens the door for all kinds of discrimination. Should every gay-male couple who wants to be parents have to undergo evaluations, when the vast majority of heterosexual couples can reproduce by having sex in the back of a car?” At the same time, Walmsley went on, situations like the one in Arcadia are forcing an industry-wide reckoning. “Even though screenings feel potentially unfair, they may just have to happen.”

One night, during a cold snap earlier this year, I visited Alexa Fasold at her home in Sunbury, Pennsylvania. Fasold was one of six surrogates who were still pregnant at the time of Silvia and Guojun’s arrest. In October, she gave birth to a boy, who was immediately taken into foster care in a nearby county. Silvia and Guojun were now attempting to assert custody rights over the infant there, along with the newborns whom surrogates had recently birthed in Georgia and Virginia. “People think this is all over, but it’s a very active case still,” Fasold told me.

Fasold, a motor-coach driver, had got back late from a shift, after her bus had briefly been stuck in the snow. We sat at her kitchen table, warmed by a space heater. She and her husband, Michael, were considering suing Silvia and Guojun, who had yet to pay all of Alexa’s medical bills and lost wages. Alexa had been hoping to try a second surrogacy experience, but she was still haunted by her first one, always wondering whether the child she’d helped bring into the world was O.K. “He and these other babies have lived their entire lives inside the system,” she said.

“The hardest part we wrestle with is the not knowing,” Michael told me. “Is that baby going to go back to the parents? What can we do to help these children go elsewhere than that house in California?”

When I reached the Fasolds recently, to share the L.A. dependency court’s decision, they were driving to pick up their older child from a soccer game. Alexa told me she was relieved by the outcome. She was hoping it would mean that the baby she’d given birth to, who is seven months old, would remain in Pennsylvania. “What we know right now is that he’s safe,” she told me. “He’s being taken care of.”

To her, the lingering mystery was not what had happened in the Arcadia home but whether the authorities planned to do anything about it. As we spoke, the Fasolds kept asking me if Silvia and Guojun would be held responsible for everything that had happened. I didn’t have an answer. ♦