Starting this September, child protective services agents across Texas will be required to read parents their constitutional rights, the same way that police do for criminal suspects, reports ProPublica. Under a new law enacted by the state Legislature, caseworkers there will be informing parents under investigation that they have the right to remain silent, to have a lawyer present and to decline searches of their home or of their children without a court order.
The legislation will in many cases benefit Black,
Hispanic and low-income families who often have their lives and homes upended
by CPS officers. It was signed by Gov. Greg Abbott, a conservative Republican
who previously has been criticized for pushing policies
detrimental to those groups.
Meanwhile in New York state, an almost identical
bill was blocked by state Senate majority leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, a
liberal Democrat. She prevented the measure, which had dozens of co-sponsors
and a groundswell of grassroots support, from even getting a vote — showing how
child welfare issues often defy typical partisan binaries.
Stewart-Cousins’ office declined ProPublica’s
requests for comment about her reasoning.
The legislation was not advanced by leadership on
the Assembly side either, though it did pass unanimously out of committee
there.
Earlier this year, Stewart-Cousins and other top
lawmakers in Albany received proposed
changes to the bill from New York City’s Administration for Children’s
Services, which is under the control of Mayor Eric Adams. The agency suggested
removing the word “rights” from the bill text and watering down the list of
rights that its caseworkers would have had to read to families.
The legislative efforts in both states came in the
wake of a
ProPublica investigation finding that child welfare workers —
overwhelmingly without warrants — inspect the homes of roughly 3.5 million
children nationally every year. Despite the Fourth Amendment’s protection
against unreasonable searches and seizures, these government officers ransack
families’ refrigerators and medicine cabinets and inspect kids’ bodies without
informed consent.
They do so even if the allegation of potential child
neglect that they are investigating, such as a kid missing too many days of
school, has nothing to do with the condition of the home. They also sometimes
use manipulative tactics, including threatening child removal or calling the police,
to get inside residences, according to dozens of interviews with caseworkers,
families and attorneys.
Nationwide, the searches ultimately reveal child
abuse less than 5% of the time, federal data show.
The new Texas law has gotten little attention but
will have a major impact on vulnerable families around the state, said Andrew
Brown, associate vice president of policy at the right-leaning Texas Public
Policy Foundation.
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