"Recently, the U.S. Children’s Bureau has been focused on supporting kin caregivers and helping children maintain their familial and cultural bonds. Addressing hidden foster care is vital to achieving these goals. The consequences of this version of foster care — disruption to the child’s relationship with their parents and siblings, lack of access to much-needed services and supports, trauma, tension in the family’s support network — deserve greater recognition and acknowledgment from the Children’s Bureau, particularly because they add to the many challenges facing children and young people of color in an increasingly hostile society. "

Across the country, an unregulated system is severing parents from children, who often end up abandoned by the agencies that are supposed to protect them.

"As documented in The Imprint’s ongoing Hidden Foster Care series, these informal placements do not require evidence presented to a judge that a child is being abused or neglected, warranting their removal from home, and there are no lawyers to advise parties of their rights. Low-income caregivers like K.H. who take in the children are denied access to the financial support, health care and therapeutic services provided to foster parents, placing further strain on their households and the kids in their homes."

"Legal scholars and child welfare experts have long been concerned about these often informal maneuvers, under which social workers arrange for children to be moved from their homes to the care and custody of friends and relatives. An article published in the Stanford Law Review last year estimated that between 100,000 and 300,000 children may be separated in this manner each year with no transparency or accountability — a number on par with children entering the formal foster care system. "

Josh Gupta-Kagan of the University of South Carolina School of Law joins to discuss “hidden foster care,” the practice of informally moving children out of their homes without the involvement of the courts. Gupta-Kagan’s research on this practice suggests that potentially hundreds of thousands more kids enter foster care every year than we think.

Children are separated from their parents involuntarily in ways that are often hidden by agency practices and not counted as "foster care. " In this workshop, we'll explore the widespread practice that is known as Hidden Foster Care, including why and how it occurs, how it harms children and their families, how it can be addressed by advocates and systemic policy and litigation remedies that advocates are pursuing to better protect families from this hidden form of foster care. Featuring Josh Gupta-Kagan, Andrew Brown, Diane Redleaf, and Heidi Redlich Epstein

A jury issued a combined monetary award of $4.6 million — $1.5 million for a father and another $3.1 million for his daughter, who were separated by Cherokee County DSS. The father signed a Custody and Visitation Agreement (CVA), thinking that if he did not, the state would take his daughter away and he would never see her again. Social workers testified they used CVAs on “stuck cases,” including instances when social workers could not convince a judge to issue an order to separate children from parents in circumstances where the social workers thought the child was unsafe.

"Recent data suggests that use of hidden foster care is prevalent in Nevada. Numbers obtained from the state indicate that such arrangements comprise roughly 20% of children separated from their parents.

Some child welfare advocates are concerned that while plenty of kin prefer an arrangement with fewer social workers in their lives, the opaque nature of hidden foster care obscures what we know about how many children have been removed from their parents and the justification for those removals, and the conditions of where those children are now living."

The Biden administration can address hidden foster care in three ways: (1) by using the flexibility provided by the Family First Act to prevent parent-child separations, not only prevent foster care; (2) by working with states to ensure parents are appointed lawyers whenever agencies ask a parent to change a child’s physical custody; and (3) by requiring states to collect and report data regarding their use of hidden foster care

Outside of the traditional foster care system exists a shadow system of potentially hundreds of thousands of children removed by CPS to their relatives or family friends—without a court case, monetary support, or due process.

Can the separation of a parent and child, without a court review or due process and often without a plan for reunification, after the insistence and involvement of a child welfare agency ever be truly “voluntarily”?