The Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) was passed in 1978 as an effort to curtail the disproportionate numbers of Native children being removed from their parents and placed with white adoptive families or sent to boarding schools designed to assimilate them to white culture. When the law was passed, as many as one-third of Indigenous children were torn from their families and tribal communities by the child welfare system.
The bedrock law requires states to make active efforts to prevent the removal of Native children into foster care, and for those who are taken from their parents, it requires a placement preference be given to extended family members or fellow tribe members. But the recent Supreme Court case Brackeen v. Haaland threatened to overturn part or all of the law. In June, the justices voted 7-2 to uphold the law, but the uncertainty leading up to the ruling triggered a flurry of state-level legislation to locally codify ICWA.