Parents have rights when it comes to visits by ACS, but standing up for them is hard to do when an investigation begins.
by Rachel Holliday Smith Oct. 5, 2023, 5:00 a.m. Oct. 11, 2023, 2:35 p.m.
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Every year, the Administration for Children’s Services visits families in New York City tens of thousands of times.
Typically, those investigations start with a knock on the door as staff members of the child welfare agency try to assess reports of abuse or neglect by a parent or other family member.
That first moment is often stressful and traumatic, say advocates and attorneys for families, and always crucial in shaping the future of the investigation.
“We have seen circumstances in which things the parent reveals during that initial interaction shows up in the Family Court petition against them,” said Miriam Mack, policy director at the Family Defense Practice for the Bronx Defenders. “A parent might start to open up about the way that they struggle with intimate partner violence, and that has been used against them. Or there’s not enough food in the home — that shows up in the petition.”
ACS caseworkers together handle tens of thousands of investigations a year, many resulting from calls by so-called mandated reporters — professionals who come into contact with kids, including teachers, social workers, day care workers and doctors, who are required by law to report any signs of suspected child abuse or maltreatment.
Those accounts combined with anonymous reports to a state hotline result in a mountain of leads: ACS began 43,782 investigations in the past fiscal year, the agency said. Of those, 28% were substantiated and 8% resulted in a court filing. In that same year, with Family Court oversight, ACS placed 2,441 children into foster care.
The agency’s cases affect primarily Black and Hispanic families. They comprise 87% of ACS cases while accounting for just over half of the city’s population.
New Yorkers contacted by ACS have rights they can assert, but few know what they are, or how to use them.
That was the case with Aaliya Ingram, a mom who lived with her then-5-year-old daughter in Queens in 2017 when ACS came to their apartment after the child’s school principal reported her for missing school. The worker, Ingram said, told her that if she cooperated and spoke transparently, the case would be cleared up quickly. In a two-hour-long visit, Ingram “overshared” that she occasionally smoked marijuana; a drug test a few days later confirmed it.
“I didn’t know that she was building a case against me,” she said. “It’s a level of betrayal, right? Like, this high level of betrayal.”
Her daughter was later removed from the home and Ingram contended with a six-year ACS case that finally closed last month. Her daughter now lives with relatives outside the city.
“I wish I just would have known what they were capable of, right? Just, what my rights were. It was so traumatic after the fact,” she said.
Advocates say the knowledge of rights should be a primary part of the process.
“We don’t want parents to be first learning about their rights when they’re in a scary situation,” said Sarah Duggan, manager of communications at the advocacy group JMAC for Families.
As advocates push for better rights notification, ACS is readying a pilot program in parts of Brooklyn and The Bronx to hand out know-your-rights cards to families it visits for an investigation, as first reported last month by The Imprint.
In a statement to THE CITY, ACS commissioner Jess Dannhauser said the pilot program will be in place by the end of October and said that for the past year and a half, the agency has provided families “with important information including the contact information for parent defense counsel during the first contact with a family.”
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