The proposed plan ‘will harm vulnerable children who need loving homes and set a precedent that undermines everyone’s parental rights,’ an ethicist warns.

Former President Donald Trump, the leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, has promised to crack down on illegal immigration and restrict legal immigration if elected to a second term in office.

Relatives and family friends who step up when struggling parents can’t care for their children play an essential role in keeping countless kids out of foster care. In New York, hundreds of these caregivers receive monthly financial payments that amount to thousands of dollars a year, through the state’s Kinship Guardianship Assistance Program (KinGAP). But here and across the nation, the money is still tight, and not everyone who takes in foster children qualifies. 

The Biden administration announced a mix of final and proposed rules on child welfare policy today that cover the placement of foster youth with relatives, legal representation for parents and children involved with the system, and the placement of LGBTQI+ youth in foster care. 

Given the recent Supreme Court ruling on the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), it is crucial to emphasize the importance of protecting and strengthening ICWA in light of the disproportionate representation of Native American children in the foster care system.

Once considered a last resort reserved for parents who abandon their children, the involuntary and permanent termination of parental rights now hangs over every mother and father accused of any form of abuse or neglect — including allegations of nonviolent behavior like drug use or truancy.

PANAMA CITY, 5 December 2022 - Amidst growing migration flows, violence, and climate hazards, an estimated 16.5 million children in Latin America and the Caribbean will require humanitarian support in 2023, UNICEF alerted today at the launch of its Humanitarian Action for Children appeal.

There was a moment in Cara Courchene's life when reuniting with her children seemed out of reach.

There was a moment in Cara Courchene's life when reuniting with her children seemed out of reach. The child welfare system seems stacked against parents like her, but one Indigenous-led program has had remarkable success in trying to change that. In 98 per cent of cases, the Family Group Conference program either reunited children with families who love them, or prevented a child from entering the child welfare system in the first place.

Unless the treatment of a child makes headlines (for example, when a child dies), Americans rarely think about the agencies charged with child protection. So, the system that handles more than 3.5 million cases a year gets little public scrutiny, in part because the people most affected are poor.

Matthew Fletcher, a law professor at the University of Michigan, where he teaches and writes about federal Indian law and American Indian tribal law, discusses the Indian Child Welfare Act and the U.S. Supreme Court case that could weaken this law, and Native American sovereignty.