Some, freshly pressed passports in hand, end up in their parents’ country of origin — even when it’s not their own.

Others are sent to live with family or friends while an unlucky number are placed in foster care, their parents’ rights in jeopardy and reunification precarious. 

The teenagers among them are sometimes thrust into a parenting role themselves: This overnight push into adulthood can leave them managing mortgages while their peers are picking prom dresses in the first of many sacrifices, immigrant advocates told ����Ӱ��. 

“A lot of these older siblings are forgoing college plans and looking for work, trying to figure out how to be mom and dad for their siblings,” said Wendy D. Cervantes, director of immigration and immigrant families for The Center for Law and Social Policy.  

An 18-year-old Texas resident was left without parents or his U.S.-born siblings more than a year ago when his entire family was stopped by federal agents as they were driving to get medical care for his seriously ill sister. All ended up being sent to Mexico. Using the pseudonym Fernando Hernández García, the young man testified before a House and Senate hearing last week that he was forced to give up college in order to work full time to try and keep the family home.

There are measures in place to help families with this unwanted transition. In 2013, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement issued the , a federal guideline meant to ensure “immigration enforcement activities do not unnecessarily disrupt” parental rights. 

It allowed ICE to consider whether it needed to hold these immigrants. And if they were detained, the directive encouraged the agency to house them near their families so they could participate in child placement hearings. 

The agency was also advised to arrange transportation to and from court or otherwise allow parents or legal guardians to participate in such proceedings by phone or video.

“It required some sort of cooperation between ICE and local child welfare agencies,” Cervantes said. 

But this directive has been under attack for years. It was weakened during the first Trump administration, bolstered in the Biden era and diminished once again when Trump took office for the second time — and launched a mass deportation campaign.

found that the parents of at least 11,000 U.S. citizen children were arrested and detained in the first seven months of Trump’s second term. The news site also determined the Trump administration is per day as did the Biden administration. 

That 11,000 number will have ProPublica reported, if arrests and detentions continued at the same pace in the ensuing months.

The data obtained by ProPublica covers a period up to mid-August 2025. Some of the Trump administration’s most aggressive immigration enforcement sweeps occurred after that in targeted cities, including Chicago, Charlotte, North Carolina, and Minneapolis.  

“I do fear in the months ahead that we could see more instances where kids unnecessarily end up in the child welfare system because of the way ICE has been conducting its raids,” Cervantes said, adding its tactics have been carried out “in a way that really doesn’t give us any assurances they are abiding by their own policy to allow parents to make decisions about what happens to their kids at the time of arrest.”

Families too afraid to reach out

Added to this anxiety, the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the execution of these and other directives, is in flux. The DHS is now in the second month of a partial government shutdown as congressional Democrats push to rein in the actions of federal immigrant agents and make them more publicly accountable. 

The department is also in the midst of a leadership change: Oklahoma Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin will replace former Secretary Kristi Noem, who was

Despite concerns about his temperament — a former cage fighter, Mullin once tried to coax a union leader into a physical altercation during a Senate committee hearing — his nomination was .

It’s unclear how Mullin, a 2020 election denier, would wield his authority. But he has said he and recently defended the killing of two Minneapolis residents who protested the government’s immigration enforcement efforts, calling victim Alex Pretti “deranged.” He later said he should not have made the comment, but declined to apologize for it. 

Parents considering their family’s future in the current environment are sure to wonder what comes next as they contemplate the limited tools available to them, including , which allows people subject to immigration enforcement in some states to designate a caretaker for their kids. 

It’s a valuable lever, said Julie Babayeva, supervising attorney with the New York Legal Assistance Group: It goes into effect the moment someone is detained. But many families are reluctant to apply for it, she said. 

“We have been talking to PTAs, schools and community organizations in heavily immigrant communities,” Babayeva said. “It’s just difficult for people to trust this. They think, ‘What if I tell you my phone number and that leads to ICE coming to my house?’ People don’t understand that we’re not giving this information out to anyone, that it is confidential.”

shows 19 million children in the U.S. have at least one immigrant parent and that 1 in 6 — or 9 million school-aged children — live in a household with at least one noncitizen adult. An overwhelming majority of these kids are U.S. citizens. 

A Los Angeles teacher, who asked to remain anonymous because of her own citizenship status, recalled the case of two elementary school-aged children — and a toddler — left with their nearly 80-year-old grandmother, who had to return to work to support them after their parents were taken by ICE. 

Such disruptions inflict enormous psychological and emotional damage on children, she said. 

“They’ve heard the rhetoric of Trump saying he’s going after criminals and though they know that’s not true, they still don’t understand why their parents would be targeted,” she said. 

Roughly were deported in Trump’s first year in office and of the in ICE detention as of February, more than 73% had no criminal convictions. 

Eric Marquez, a teacher at New York City’s ELLIS Preparatory Academy, which serves older, immigrant students, said that from a classroom perspective, what stands out most is that these newcomers often present as remarkably composed. 

“They tend to put on a brave face, adapt quickly on the surface and rarely bring up in conversation the people in their lives who may have been detained or deported,” he said. “There’s often an understatedness to it.”

At the same time, teachers can sometimes see the impact indirectly, including shifts in focus, attendance and energy, he said. 

Ellis Prep’s own Dylan Contreras was among the first high school students to be detained by ICE when he was arrested after a May 2025 court appearance. Held in a Pennsylvania detention center for 10 months, he was and returned to school for the first time March 24.

Immigrant families are not the only ones puzzled and angry over the administration’s tactics. Residents in Springfield, Ohio, worried their Haitian neighbors will be deported because their Temporary Protective Status is in jeopardy, have stepped up to do something about it — in this case, house their children. 

One woman, who asked not to be identified for fear of attracting stirred up by Trump, secured emergency foster care credentials to support kids who might need somewhere safe to stay while they wait for a more permanent placement. The process took eight weeks to complete, she told ����Ӱ��.

“I am ready for 0 to 18,” she said of the age of children she could take in at a moment’s notice. “I want to keep siblings together.”

A sudden rush of unhoused kids felt imminent earlier this year when Haitians’ protective status was set to expire and word spread that federal immigration agents would soon arrive in Springfield to deport them. After some 600,000 Venezuelans lost their last year, a lawyer representing the group said “hundreds and potentially thousands of Venezuelan nationals (had)

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court prohibited the Trump administration from ending Haitian deportation protections and in the case in late April. 

Separation not easily undone 

Once separated, family reunification can be difficult, notes Gabrielle Oliveira, an associate professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education who has studied immigration for years. Bureaucratic hurdles mean it can take months for a U.S. citizen child to get a passport to join their parents in a foreign country. 

Oliveira said, too, some of the children who enter foster care have family eager to shelter them but they won’t step forward because they are too afraid to interact with the government.

These new forms of family separation are among many fears undocumented immigrants face. But it’s not the worst of them, Oliveira and other advocates said: Detention is by far the most frightening prospect. 

“It’s been harder and harder to get in touch with people who are detained,” Oliveira said. “Sometimes months go by and (federal authorities) don’t even tell you where they are. So, parents are even more worried about that than the actual deportation.”

And, she said, limited communication with family makes it challenging to come to a conclusion on child care. 

“You can’t make decisions,” Oliveira said. “You can’t make phone calls. You can’t figure out what the plan is.”

Already, Cervantes said, her office has seen the fallout. 

“We’ve heard about 15- and 16-year-olds living by themselves for several weeks because their parents were detained and they had no idea where they were,” she said. “ICE was not checking to make sure they were OK. These are U.S. citizen kids.”

And there are other, practical issues that make it hard to reunite in a foreign country, Oliveira said, recalling one family trying to meet up in South America. 

“The dad got deported and the mom was here with the kids, and then she was trying to leave and go back to Brazil — but she was nervous that if she went to the airport, she would be arrested,” Oliveira said. 

When children are left with undocumented relatives, it’s nearly impossible for them to leave the United States to deliver the kids to their parents, said Shaina Simenas, co-director for the Young Center’s Technical Assistance Program.

“If you have a young child that is left with another relative who has their own immigration needs, how would you get them to the country of origin?” she said. “We’re working with a lot of families who are from Venezuela, and there are so many challenges even getting Venezuelan passports — or getting flights to Venezuela. And, of course, there is the financial toll of buying international flights and paying for passports and travel documents.”

Simenas believes poor record-keeping on the part of the government means a lack of accountability. 

“ICE doesn’t consistently and reliably identify whether adults are caregivers for children and so that alone makes it harder to track what might have happened to their children after a parent was taken,” she said. 

Many families separated during Trump’s first term have not seen justice, she noted. Nearly 1,000 children were still waiting to reunite with their parents in 2023, according to . 

“For families being separated now,” she said, “I think there are even fewer ways to track them, to be able to support and ensure they have access to reunify.”

On Nov. 9, the court heard oral arguments in Haaland v. Brackeen, which pits three non-Native families and the state of Texas against four federally recognized Native tribes and the U.S. government. The families seek to reverse a clause of the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act preferencing kin and tribal members in the adoption of Native children, arguing it discriminates against non-Native families on the basis of race. 

Tribal communities fear the case puts the landmark law commonly known as ICWA in jeopardy, and with it, key provisions designed to protect Native youth from unjust family separation. Nearly 500 tribes, 87 members of Congress, 23 states, along with several Indigenous and child welfare organizations, have signed amicus briefs in support of the government’s case, led by U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, who is a Laguna Pueblo tribal member.

Nationwide, Native youth are already among those most likely to be placed in out-of-home care and are involved in the foster system at the rate of white children, with school often being the focal point for intervention by child protective services. 

It’s “horribly ironic and twisted,” said University of Michigan law professor Matthew Fletcher, that Native families could soon face a loss of protections when, in his view, they need more. Fletcher is a member of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians.

Family separations often begin because educators, who are required by law to flag abuse or neglect, report suspected maltreatment. In Alaska and Minnesota, more are investigated by child protective services due to calls from school staff than from any other group of mandated reporters. In Alaska, educators make abuse or neglect allegations roughly five times as often for Native school-aged children as for those who are white; in Minnesota, they do so at approximately eight times the rate.

“We have deputized teachers to be the eyes and ears of the family policing system,” said Rutgers University sociologist Frank Edwards, who authored a recent on the topic. “For Indigenous children, we see this play out to devastating consequences.”

Even when Native kids would be better off staying at home, investigations often conclude that removal is necessary, Fletcher said.

“There’s still an enormous amount of bias. A lot of Native people are poor, they’re brown-skinned, they have different cultural leanings. And almost all social workers are white and more privileged,” he said.

Nationwide, the vast majority of child welfare investigations involve low-income parents of color. Some 80% charge neglect, which can be an amorphous allegation prone to case workers’ subjective judgements.

In New York City, the nation’s largest school district, a previous investigation by ����Ӱ�� found school staff sent over 13,750 unsubstantiated reports of maltreatment over the span of a year and a half, often plunging families’ lives into invasive and sometimes traumatic investigations. Less than 1 in 3 teacher calls yielded any evidence of wrongdoing.

Across the country, K-12 workers are the most likely mandated reporters to flag abuse or neglect and the least likely to have their allegations find evidence of wrongdoing, show.

ICWA was passed by Congress to keep American Indian families together whenever possible at a time when as many as 1 in 3 Native kids were being taken from their parents. In addition to preferencing kin and tribal members in the adoption of American Indian children, it also requires an expert witness in Family Court proceedings and allows tribes to intervene in cases on behalf of Native children, giving them the power to transfer the proceedings to tribal court.

“If ICWA goes, I expect a dramatic increase in the number of Native children going into foster care,” Edwards said.

The adoptive families’ lawyer, Matthew McGill, acknowledged that the “history of unjustified breakups of Native families was a terrible injustice.” But reversing ICWA’s adoption placement preferences would not impact the number of Native kids in out-of-home care because the rules “come into play only after a child already has appropriately entered the foster care system,” he said. 

The attorney added it would “not be appropriate” to speculate on whether the ruling might impact other ICWA provisions designed to curb Native family separation.

Reversing the harm

The law’s provisions sought to correct nearly two centuries of government policy erasing Native cultures by removing children from tribal communities — tactics that tribal advocates say fall within the United Nations’ definition of .

From the early 1800s to late 1960s, tens of thousands of Native youth were taken from their homes and forced to attend federally sponsored boarding schools, brutal and sometimes deadly institutions where students were forced to use English names, wear Americanized haircuts and perform military drills. 

As those schools shut down, officials pushed another assimilation tactic. In the 1960s and 1970s, roughly were put into foster care or adopted — 90% of the time by non-Native families.

“[ICWA] is trying to reverse the harm of boarding school, of child removals and saying we have to make active efforts to … keep a child connected to their family, their community and their culture,” said Jessica Saniġaq Ullrich, a social work professor at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

“You try to maintain them within their culture,” added her colleague, professor Yvonne Elder Chase. “ It’s not rocket science. It’s good casework.”

In Ullrich’s home state, Alaska Native and American Indian children still make up roughly two-thirds of all children in out-of-home care despite representing only a fifth of the state’s overall youth population.

“It’s been disproportionate like that for years,” said the Inupiaq tribal member of the Nome Eskimo Community. “These are families, these are communities, these are future generations affected.”

When child welfare proceedings under ICWA are transferred to tribal courts, she said, outcomes tend to be better. Judges have a level of “kinship” with families and work with them to address issues like food insecurity or unstable housing rather than separating children from parents.

“Tribes are not in the business of punishing poor people because they’re struggling,” Fletcher added.

It’s an approach to child welfare that experts outside of tribal communities also recommend, calling for care-based responses over punitive ones in instances where children are not being intentionally abused. On Nov. 17, the ACLU and Human Rights Watch released a 146-page report titled “” on what the organizations called the “family separation crisis.”

Trauma in schools

Schools can be a site of ongoing trauma for Native children. In light of the ICWA case, Kimberly Cluff, who is non-Native, recalled a case she litigated two decades ago in which she represented a tribal family in California’s Central Valley. The son had been required to shave his head by school administrators due to a lice outbreak on campus. But in his culture, hair was sacred and only to be cut on specific occasions, usually after the loss of a loved one, so the family refused. Rather than finding a compromise, the school reported the family to child protective services for educational neglect. 

“This child could have easily been taken from his family,” said Cluff, who was a staff attorney at California Indian Legal Services at the time.

Instead, the tribal representation and expert witness allowed under ICWA helped the family successfully argue that they were simply following their customs and not neglecting their child.

Still, the process of being investigated by child protective services can be highly traumatizing even when no evidence of maltreatment is ultimately found, impacted families say. For the evaluations, case workers typically open cabinets and refrigerators to check for adequate food and can ask children to strip down to their underwear to check for bruises.

When those investigations lead to their most drastic results, separating children from their parents, those youth go on to face .

Child welfare threats aside, Native students routinely find that their culture — and very existence — are erased in school curricula, Ullrich observed.

“If it’s only a celebration of Columbus Day [in school] and this colonial view, then there’s a whole population of people that are sitting in those classrooms hearing this history and feeling like they’re invisible and that they don’t matter,” she said.

Gorsuch could be pivotal

Cluff, the California attorney, was in Washington, D.C. for oral arguments earlier this month, assisting tribal leaders from the Morongo Band of Mission Indians with preparing their arguments. It’s a “fool’s errand,” she said, to try to predict how the justices will rule.

Broadly, however, there are a few ways the case could fall, she explained. If the justices side with the adoptive families under equal protection grounds, saying that Native families cannot be preferenced in adoption because doing so amounts to racial discrimination against non-Natives, it would reverse centuries of precedent considering tribal status a political identification rather than a racial one. Such a ruling could possibly undermine Native sovereignty itself. 

Short of that, in what Cluff called the “lesser bad outcome,” the justices could carve out individual provisions of ICWA for reversal, saying certain parts of the policy represent federal overreach.

During oral arguments, Justice Neil Gorsuch signaled skepticism toward the contention that the federal government overstepped its powers. The conservative justice spent years working in the Western U.S. where reservation land is vast. He is considered a pivotal vote, having in the past on issues related to Native rights.

“Is there some irony in your position that you’re here to vindicate state’s rights?” Gorsuch McGill, the families’ lawyer. “We have 23 states who’ve lined up on the other side, and we’ve never had a state court near as I can tell, in the 40 some years since ICWA was adopted, complaining about this arrangement.”&�Բ�����;

There was not as much discussion about equal protection and the question of race, which two lower courts included alongside the issue of federal overreach in their rulings finding certain ICWA provisions were unconstitutional.

The Supreme Court is expected to issue a ruling in June 2023.

Between August 2019 and January 2022, only 24% of investigations prompted by calls from school staff found evidence of abuse or neglect compared to a citywide rate of in 2020 — meaning K-12 workers make allegations that do not get substantiated far more often than most other professions.

Teachers, with whom children spend most of their day, misreport more than any other school staff: Two thirds of their calls to the state hotline are unfounded, according to data obtained by ����Ӱ�� through a public records request.

Meanwhile, families say the investigations plunge their lives into deep uncertainty and inflict lasting traumas on their kids. Parents describe children with recurring nightmares, fearing every knock on the door may be a caseworker looking to snatch them from their home.

Darcey Merritt, associate professor of social work at New York University, regularly engages with families impacted by the child welfare system in her work and research. She also serves on the Child Maltreatment Prevention Committee of the .

Over the years, Merritt has come to see the system as overly punitive toward poor families who love their children but may struggle to meet their basic needs due to lack of resources. 

The expert believes it’s time to reimagine child welfare to better support those families: “We need to start the whole thing over,” she said.

����Ӱ�� spoke to Merritt to learn what issues she sees in child protective services — and what can be done.

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

����Ӱ��: What should people who work in schools understand about the child welfare system?

Darcey Merritt: We can’t disentangle neglect from poverty, it’s inappropriate to do so. 

On any given day, 76% of the children and families that are exposed to child welfare are there because of some form of neglect. And neglect is tethered to poverty: supervisory neglect, physical neglect, which refers to people not having appropriate food, clothing and housing. 

A lot of these issues related to neglect are structural issues that are outside the control of parents. Yet [child protective services] is blaming parents for their unfortunate, involuntary socio-economic statuses. So that’s a problem. 

Teachers are mandated to report out of an abundance of caution if they feel like a child is unsafe for whatever reason. But there’s got to be a way where mandated reporters first figure out how to be more useful in addressing the actual problem. If a child has dirty clothes consistently every day, let’s figure out what to do about that without getting CPS involved. 

I think there needs to be changes in state mandating laws, so [reporters] are encouraged, maybe even required, to first figure out how to address the problem. If they don’t have enough child care, well, then let’s find child care. If they don’t have enough food, let’s find food. Laundry machine is broken and they can’t go to the landlord because they’re behind on their rent? Let’s figure that out. These are all things that are happening. 

What might those changes look like?

We need to start the whole thing over and reserve child protective services for those kids who have been physically and sexually abused. We need to have a separate institution, a separate agency or organization, working with communities and neighborhoods to provide support for all the other kids so that the go-to response isn’t to report a child who’s poor. It all comes down to money and what our society is willing to do to make sure that people have a standard level of resources and support to be able to raise their families.

We need to really have more respect for these parents because they love their children and they are victims of an inequitable society.

To make sure I’m understanding correctly, are you saying child protective services should not be the ones responding to neglect charges?

I do not think they should be handling neglect charges. I think that some other agency that’s not connected to the stigma of having a CPS case should respond. Whatever support we put in place, it needs to be untethered from the institution of child protective services.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t help these families. I’m saying the child protective services is not the agency to handle neglect cases that have to do with poverty.

New York State law, as of 2021, requires implicit bias training for mandatory reporters. Does that rule go far enough to mitigate some of these problems?

I don’t think it goes far enough. You can’t just do a training and call it a day. You have to have something in place so that when people are making decisions, you can check whether or not this decision was made because of some unseen bias. For example, ‘Oh, this child’s parent has been involved with the carceral system. Go ahead and report this one.’ That’s how people continue to cycle in between these harmful punitive systems. 

We have our own Western idea of what safety and family well-being means and it’s all from a deficit lens. Rarely do we look at family dynamics and functioning from a strength-based perspective. I interview a lot of moms for my research and all of them say, ‘We love our children, but we needed help.’ 

It’s a really serious problem and the racial disproportionality is going to continue (because impoverished parents have no choice but to rely on the government for welfare). Black children are highly disproportionately involved with the child welfare system and before Black children, Native kids have the highest disproportionality of involvement. People don’t even pay attention to that.

Interesting. I didn’t know that.

The highest is Native American children, then Black children, then Latino children. White children are not overly represented in the system.

Some parents have told me they can’t help but know about child protective services, or, in New York City, the Administration for Children’s Services, because either they’re personally impacted or they know someone who is. Meanwhile, other families are completely oblivious. Have you seen that difference between communities?

It’s true. Once you’re involved, you know what that looks like. Parents’ language is even institutionalized. Have you heard people who are involved with the carceral system say, ‘Oh, somebody caught a case.’ These ACS-impacted moms literally say, ‘Well, I caught an ACS case.’ That language is a thing. 

And another group doesn’t have any idea what ACS is.

What are the harms of overreporting and what are the harms of underreporting [to child protective services]? 

The obvious harm of underreporting is that we may miss children who are in actual danger from parents that abuse their children. 

This whole issue of, ‘out of an abundance of caution, we need to report anything that we suspect might be problematic,’ that’s where the rub lies. We have to figure out how to pull out those issues that are related to poverty. 

The harm of overreporting is that when CPS comes knocking at your door, you are immediately traumatized. The very minute a child is taken from your home for any amount of time, you are immediately traumatized. They then have workers coming in on a regular basis, they’re being mandated to do certain groups and therapy, all kinds of things that don’t relate to the fact that maybe they need some money.

I personally renamed CPS the ‘child poverty surveillance.’ That’s my own little term I’ve made up for them.

You have to be subjective when you’re making a decision about whether or not a child is in danger. And one needs to be really, really reflective about their implicit biases, because [the worry is] a poor Black child will be treated differently than a poor white child. 

You live and work in New York City. Do mandated reporters, like school staff, lean more toward over or underreporting? 

They lean more towards overreporting. 

What messages are those people receiving when they get trained? Is it ‘When in doubt, report?’ Is it, ‘Take every precaution before you do?’ What are folks hearing?

I think they’re hearing, ‘When in doubt, report.’ I think that’s what they’re hearing. 

For the most part, folks are afraid because if you don’t report something and the child ends up really harmed, then the liability is on the mandated reporter. I think they’re being given a double message: ‘When in doubt, report,’ but on the back end, ‘Be careful, because there might not be a need for CPS to be involved.’ 

In schools, especially those that are under-resourced, they don’t have the means to help a family with their basic needs and their financial needs. [Instead], teachers are by law required to report to child protective services. It just makes no sense. The solution does not match the problem. And it causes harm in the meanwhile.

Given the system as it stands, if you are a mandated reporter in a school setting, how do you respond in a way that both protects a child in real danger, but also won’t jeopardize a family for no reason? How do you weigh that judgment call?

It’s hard. 

I had this conversation with my partner who teaches in Philadelphia. He’s not a social worker. I’m a social worker. But he [has to play the role of] a social worker, because he has to do social work as a teacher. 

When something’s going on with a child, my recommendation is to find out what’s happening from the family first. I recommend taking more caution before making a phone call [to the state hotline]. See if you can come up with a solution first. 

That puts a greater burden on teachers because then they end up being social workers as well. So it’s a very fine line, finding out what resources one has at the school, if the nurses or the climate officers or whoever the people are at the school [can help]. 

I’m only speaking about cases where neglect is related to poverty. Now, there are other cases of neglect where a parent intentionally left the child with a child abuser. All the neglect I’m talking about is unintentional. 

Child protective services should not be the go-to for cases of unintentional neglect related to poverty. That phone call should not be made to CPS but to another agency that we just don’t have yet. 

When child protective services investigated Shalonda Curtis-Hackett’s family for neglect in 2021, the Brooklyn mom could measure the personal toll in pounds lost: 20. 

She tried to fight the clawing thoughts that her caseworker “could try and snatch my kids,” a vision she says she still can’t escape in her nightmares.

Though the agency eventually found no evidence her children were malnourished — her husband is a professional chef — the process of having a welfare worker inspect their Bushwick apartment, check the fridge for food and ask prying questions deeply disturbed her children, who are now 8, 10 and 15.

“My children are happy-go-lucky kids and I’ve had to adultify them and tell them about the world much faster than I wanted to,” Curtis-Hackett said. 

The mother, who was also PTA president at her younger children’s school at the time, believes the report came from a K-12 staffer who said her kids’ bones were sticking out, an observation made while the children were attending class via Zoom at the time.

If so, the family is among the thousands of New York City households — disproportionately Black, Hispanic and low income — subjected to unfounded investigations into abuse or neglect initiated by calls from their children’s school. 

In fact, between August 2019 and January 2022, city school employees made over 13,750 false alarm reports to the state child abuse hotline, according to data obtained by ����Ӱ�� through a public records request to the Office of Children and Family Services. 

Over that time span, the vast majority of school-based reports were ultimately unfounded, including at least 58% of calls from guidance counselors, 59% of calls from principals and 67% of calls from teachers. Less than 1 in 3 teacher reports led to any evidence of wrongdoing.

“Teachers, out of fear that they’re going to get in trouble, will report even if they’re just like, ‘Well, it could be abuse.’ It could be. It also could be 10 million other things,” said Jessica Beck, a middle school English teacher in the Bronx.

Those reports spur investigations that, at their most dire, can lead children to be separated from their parents — a trauma associated with elevated risks of . Even when closed and dropped, investigations can stay on parents’ records for years afterward and erase job prospects in youth-serving fields.

Kamaria Excell is a social worker who has helped dozens of parents recover from the damaging process. She led a 12-week healing program with the community-based organization . The vast majority of participating parents — 95%, she estimates — had investigations that were ultimately dismissed. But the shame, anger and eroded trust did not fade.

“Families deal with the repercussions of careless [child welfare] investigations for years after,” she said.

When a case gets closed, Curtis-Hackett, the Brooklyn mom, added, “it doesn’t stop the PTSD.”

‘When in doubt, report’

In total, only 24% of investigations prompted by calls from school staff found evidence of abuse or neglect compared to a citywide rate of in 2020 — meaning K-12 workers, teachers especially, make allegations that do not get substantiated far more often than most other professions. (Another 16% of K-12 calls led to an alternate response for children determined not to be in imminent harm and 59% were dropped outright.) Even that rate likely overstates the true level of maltreatment, family law attorney David Shalleck-Klein said, because it’s a metric the agency determines “unilaterally” and includes cases that may ultimately be dismissed in court.

The issue extends beyond Gotham, with similar rates of unsubstantiated reports from school staff nationwide. Among mandated reporters, K-12 workers are the most likely to report abuse or neglect and the least likely to have their allegations find evidence of wrongdoing, show.

Like most states, New York requires educators, child care providers, law enforcement officers, health care professionals and social workers to call a hotline if they believe a young person may be experiencing abuse or neglect. But, in practice, that decision is always a judgment call, said Beck, the Bronx middle school teacher. And in NYC schools, it’s a call made by teachers who are mostly white about students who are mostly Black and Hispanic.

“What looks like neglect to a teacher who has privilege might actually be poverty,” said Beck, who is white.

For example, educators are trained that poor hygiene can be a sign of neglect. But if a kid in her class smells, the teacher will speak with the parents rather than immediately calling in a report, she said. Some colleagues in the same situation, though, may call the state hotline, plunging that family’s life into the havoc of a neglect investigation.

The ethos is “when in doubt, report,” said Darcey Merritt, an associate professor of social work at New York University.

“Instead of immediately reporting a suspected neglect situation, find out how to address that need that’s being unmet first,” she suggests.

That is not what a social worker at a Bronx transfer high school — small schools designed to re-engage students who have dropped out or fallen behind — sees on the ground, unfortunately. She asked not to be identified for fear of getting into trouble at work.

“It’s totally C-Y-A, cover your ass. If you’re unsure, just call,” she said.

“They never provide information on what happens after the call,” she continued. “Mandated reporters don’t know that, many times after making a call, 24 hours [later] someone’s going to show up to this person’s house … and start conducting an investigation: a search of their home, checking counters, checking their cabinets, strip searching their young children to check for any bruises or marks, depending on the allegation.”

Instead, the training sessions she has attended have begun by projecting the names and pictures of young people who have died by parental abuse, the social worker said, a tactic she considers “fear mongering.”

The Department of Education said it cares deeply about the well-being of students and is committed to providing support and care at the earliest opportunity.

“While every NYC Public School member is a mandated reporter, we are focused on connecting with children and families who may be in need, providing them access to the vital interventions, supports and services they need to stay safe,” DOE spokesperson Suzan Sumer said in an emailed statement.

The Administration for Children’s Services, the city agency that investigates suspected abuse and neglect, said it is working to cut down on unneeded reports. Overall, school and child care-based reports fell 17% from spring 2019 to spring 2022, it said.

As per a , mandated reporters are required to undergo implicit bias training. And this fall, ACS will hold a series of five-hour trainings in collaboration with the NYC Department of Education to help school staff better understand the citywide resources they can refer families to rather than calling the child abuse hotline, the agency said. Only one representative from each school, however, is required to attend.

“We take our mandate of protecting children and supporting families seriously, while simultaneously being committed to reducing unnecessary child protection involvement with families, particularly families of color,” a spokesperson wrote in an email.

Of in 2020, 36% found evidence of abuse or neglect and 86 children died, according to the . The large majority of those deaths “​​were unrelated to abuse or neglect,” the agency wrote. However, when a child is killed as a result of being beaten or neglected by a family member, the agency frequently for failing to investigate or properly follow through on earlier reports of abuse.

‘School-to-ACS pipeline’

In New York City and across the nation, involvement with child protective services breaks decisively along racial lines.

Citywide, some of children named in ACS investigations are Black or Hispanic, while, together, those racial groups make up 60% of NYC young people. Even among neighborhoods with similar poverty rates, those with greater shares of Black and Hispanic residents face higher rates of investigations, shows.

Child protective services involvement becomes so normalized in many low-income communities, Merritt has noticed, it changes people’s vernacular.

“These ACS-impacted moms literally say, ‘Well, I caught an ACS case,’” as if they’re referring to the criminal justice system, the social work professor said.

Meanwhile, more privileged communities are often unaware of the disastrous effects that system can have, said her NYU colleague Anna Arons, assistant professor of law.

“It is really easy to be a person with money in this country, … particularly white, and not have any sense of child welfare services as anything more than people who are genuinely helping children,” she said. “You might never know there are 50,000 investigations every year in New York City, which is really an astronomical number.”

Curtis-Hackett, for her part, has taken the situation into her own hands. After being reported to child protective services, she no longer wants her family to participate in a system she calls the “school-to-ACS pipeline.”

Last year, she pulled her kids from the public school system. Now, they homeschool.

“I don’t trust the [Department of Education],” she said. “I will not allow my children to be collateral damage.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story stated national figures for the number of children in 2020 who had died, suffered abuse or neglect, and been reported to CPS by any source, not just educators. Those contextual data have been corrected to reflect New York City’s rates.

Morris Jenis Jr.’s father knew only his son, a Native American student at the Genoa Indian School in Nebraska 100 years ago, had not been seen in a year. 

Morris ran away from the school in 1921 — “deserted,” according to the militaristic language school officials used — like hundreds of other young Indigenous children who resisted the boarding school policies that forcibly stripped them of language and identity, often hundreds of miles from home. 

“The father…is very anxious to see where his son has gone,” a school clerk wrote the superintendent on the father’s behalf. “He recently heard that a student from Genoa was killed in Montana by a horse and he fears that this may be his son.”

Public archives do not provide any answers about Morris, nor his age and tribal affiliation. The school told his father that they could not find “,” and reportedly returned the $26 — worth about $450 today — his family previously paid to send him home. 

The plea is among thousands of stories made public by the Genoa Indian School Digital Reconciliation Project, one to digitize elusive school, state and federal records, to bring the stories of Indigenous survivors and those who never made it home back to their families and tribes. 

Last summer, the discovery of more than 900 child graves at former Canadian residential schools tore through international media and reignited investigations of U.S. boarding schools; reports focused on brutal abuse and quantifying death. 

Archivists and community members have continued to retrieve haunting letters, student and local newspapers, photographs and other school documents that paint a poignant picture of resistance and survival in day-to-day student life in the boarding schools. 

Still, many records remain out of reach to descendants, and those that are accessible can be traumatizing. Some collections sit dormant, held by churches or universities with no plans to return them to tribal communities; others require extensive time and . 

“Native people have never had easy access to their records. And that in itself has continued to contribute to the genocide,” said Tawa Ducheneaux. a citizen of the Cherokee nation working as an archivist at Oglala Lakota College’s Woksape Tipi library on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, where she raised her family for 19 years. “You’re not having access to relatives and descendants that can educate you more about who you are and where you come from.”&�Բ�����;

Among the archived collections are receipts for music lessons, requests to use funds to buy shoes, picture contests — a glimpse into students’ interests and how they spent very limited leisure time. Others include letters from parents pleading that their child be allowed to travel home for the summer — a trip families were required to pay for.

Student discipline records and letters show many of such requests denied for lack of funds or because children had to continue building “strength of character,” as a punishment for bad behavior or running away. 

Parents encouraged runaways, hid their children, and, when students were able to return home for summers, would teach children their language, culture, and ways of life as a way to undermine the schools’ assimilationist aim. Families would not legally be able to deny placement in off-reservation schools until 1978, after over a century of resistance, with the passage of the . 

For those working to find and make material more accessible, the retrieval and research is exhausting, but a necessary step toward healing and reckoning with historical trauma.

“It’s painful especially when you recognize relatives’ names or people that you know … I kind of learned to reconcile with that and just understand that, OK, well, maybe my involvement is that these children, they need help to have their stories come to light,” said Genoa Project co-director and historian Susana Geliga, a member of the Rosebud Sioux tribe and of Taino descent.

“They insisted on their humanity:” Student life as seen in archives

The material that has been made available in digital archives is largely from an official government or school perspective. Yet there are phrases, quotes and clippings from students pointing to how they lived and survived. 

Running away became a common occurrence among students fleeing the conditions of the boarding schools, eager to find a way home, like Susie Romero. Before leaving for Genoa one night in 1933, Romero composed a theme song — “I don’t want to go to school here.” In just one year at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, at least 45 boys did the same. 

“…That tells you a lot about the children’s point of view — that they were running away from this,” said Margaret Jacobs, co-director of the Genoa Project and historian at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln. 

The documents suggest Romero was discovered and returned to Genoa, but some did find their way back home. In 1920, one student left Genoa for good after a teacher struck him in the face, breaking his nose.

“He can prove it was done for personal reasons,” an acting superintendent wrote in a letter seeking guidance. 

Student newspapers, common at the boarding schools, though likely heavily scrutinized by school officials, also reveal how students kept themselves informed of local and national news and found ways to make .

When compared to how student deaths were reported briefly in the local Genoa paper, student publications shared more detail on their peer’s life and personality. One student, whose name has been redacted out of respect for descendants who may not yet know the information, was described as an “unusually bright child and the little ones among whom his lot was cast will miss his fair example.”&�Բ�����;

Jacobs said the student newspapers, “insisted on their humanity. They insisted that we matter, and you might not care about us, but we care about each other.”

Some 90 students, in one account published in the Genoa student newspaper, were reportedly in attendance for a funeral at the school — a detail not lost on Geliga.

“They were so policed and monitored with everything that they did … from the time they woke up until the time they went to bed every day …” she said. “Those instances where you can catch their own perspective coming through, they’re really heartwarming because there’s so few and far between — when you find them they kind of pull you into the moment.”&�Բ�����;

Archives also reveal another facet of student life: the “” system, where children were assigned to white families and expected to work in fields, on ranches and in local homes as part of their “civilizing” process. Piloted at Carlisle, the practice was later adopted by other off-reservation schools including Genoa and the Sherman Indian School in Riverside, California. 

Lorenzia Nicholas, a student at , once refused to return to the family she was placed for outing because of ”&�Բ�����;

Though they were paid minimally, students were often forced to go on outings during summer vacations instead of returning home to their respective lands and families. The practice grew popular in communities surrounding the schools: children were a source of cheap labor — girls often cleaned homes and looked after white children, while boys were often placed in undesirable harvest jobs that were , exploitative and dangerous.

On campus, labor did not stop. Children as young as 9 were forced to , likely, Carlisle archivist Jim Gerencser told ����Ӱ��, to save on infrastructure costs. Half of their school days were devoted to learning vocational trades; photographs show students fixing roofs, washing clothes in “laundry class” and fashioning utensils. 

Expanding access to archival records, family history

In and the United States, churches are holding onto an untold number of records. Many religious institutions received schools until 1928, yet according to the Department of the Interior’s investigation, must independently decide to share documents. 

Ducheneaux added tribal governments only recently have had the infrastructure or resources required to retrieve and disseminate records held in various public and government archives – tribal colleges and universities have been working at returning access since at least the ’60s. 

Some records have been passed on to private universities like Augustana and Marquette instead of tribal communities and descendants, presenting another barrier to access: fees. Marquette has held a including at least 10,000 images from the Red Cloud Indian School for nearly 14 years, only having digitized about 10%.

“[It] is maybe the only collection that might have images of certain individuals’ relatives … There’s no known images of that person except possibly within that collection,” she said. “And I couldn’t ever get anywhere with them. We have to do justice to all these people that are contacting us asking if we have anything about their relatives.”&�Բ�����;

An intergenerational legacy: “It’s part of the blood that’s in us”&�Բ�����;

Justin Shedee, a member of the Apache nation also known as Corn Cobb Smoker, entered the Carlisle Industrial School in Pennsylvania at 16. Though a letter in his own handwriting expresses his desire to leave, school documents say he “consented” to stay enrolled.

“The reason is I have been so long enough here, about six years now. So I am very anxious to [go] home. That is all I want to ask you,” he wrote in the spring of 1890, requesting to leave the school. 

He would not leave for three more years, “discharged” on July 5, 1893 for “ill health.”&�Բ�����;

Shedee’s desire to return home lives on in descendants. Community members, scholars and activists describe the weight of their ancestors’ experiences as intergenerational trauma that impacts their current health and ways of life. 

Native American communities and over 80 U.S. representatives are advocating for l on Indian Boarding School Policies to create a commission to investigate nearly two centuries of boarding school policies. 

Among the policy recommendations that have been floated are reparations, a hotline for those experiencing intergenerational trauma, and reformed child welfare adoption practices to prevent “.”

“We’ve been subjected and our ancestors have been subjected to such atrocities and such attempts to wipe us out that we’ve sort of normalized suffering, in a way,” said Stacy Bohlen, CEO of the National Indian Health board and member of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, during a webinar hosted by the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition. 

“It’s part of the blood that’s in us and the blood of our ancestors that we know was shed for our survival.”

This story was made possible by the archives and archivists at the Genoa Indian School Digital Reconciliation Project, Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center, and National Archives.