“Even after a judge required ACS to reunite Ms. Rivers with her baby, ACS continued to subject Ms. Rivers to needless court proceedings and a litany of conditions that interfered with her parenting of TW for months, while the unlawful removal of her baby was ratified by senior ACS leadership,” the complaint reads. “This was not because ACS was trying to protect TW; this was because Ms. Rivers is Black.”
OK think of it like this, CPS’ duty is to the child. Their goal is to provide the best environment for the child they can. Absent other factors that will always be with the parents. If they see issues with how the child is being raised or their environment they don’t immediately take the child away (depending on the severity, obviously). They will provide the parent with education, supplies, etc to fix the problem and get the child back into a healthy environment.
Things can escalate from there if repeated attempts are not yielding positive results. In this case it said she had previous issues with smoking around her other children. That is unhealthy. I doubt that was the only factor in removing them but it is part of the history, so when they saw she had been smoking while pregnant they removed the child.
I would also like to point out from Googling it sounds like that is the procedure in NY, a child can be removed and then the parent can go to court to ask a judge to have the child returned. That is what happened. Then it sounds like the issue with CPS was them not returning the child in a timely manner and using marijuana use it self as a factor determining a child was in a bad environment. Those are obviously issues, but the initial removal (keep in mind we are both armchair quarterbacking) did not seem like an issue to me, it fit standard practices as I have known them.
You failed to provide an example. Feel free to do so along with a source.
What abuse that “doesn’t rise to the level of illegality” gets kids seized by child protective agencies?
What else could it be?
