Texas child removals drop, but concerns still linger

The number of children removed from their homes in Texas plummeted by nearly 40% since 2021, a significant shift in the state’s child welfare system.
Child welfare experts and officials attribute this sharp decline to a series of policy changes implemented in recent years.
In particular, they point to when Texas lawmakers changed the legal definition of neglect in 2021, raising the threshold of the situation becoming one of “immediate danger” versus “substantial risk” for a child removal. In addition to physical or sexual abuse, neglect can include poverty-related issues like housing and food insecurity.
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But this drop might not be showing the full picture, according to Matthew Fraidin, a law professor at the University of the District of Columbia.
Informal, or “hidden” foster care — the removal of children from parents to a relative or different family member — does not require court hearings like other cases do. In many instances, these removals are not documented.
“They are quietly squeezing the toothpaste out of a different part of the tube,” Fraidin said. “It’s the same result if you’re disrupting the kids. It’s just being done sort of in a different guise.”
House Bill 730 was introduced in response to concerns about a lack of transparency and due process when parents lose custody of their children.
A piece of legislation aimed at bolstering troubled families in Texas, the bill requires caseworkers to inform parents of their rights, including having an attorney present, during a child removal investigation.
Sept. 1 marked one year since the bill was passed.
The law was hailed as a significant step forward. However, the state’s child welfare system has its gaps. HB 730, had it been in place, might have changed the lives of Candice Jeffcoat and her children.
In 2011, Jeffcoat was forced to relinquish her children to Child Protective Services, even though records say she did so voluntarily, she said. She was four days away from starting time in prison — backed against a wall — and had limited options.
Jeffcoat was told to sign her children over to her aunt or risk having them placed in foster care, where she might never see them again.
Three weeks before she was released, Jeffcoat found out her son was never picked up by her aunt, she said. He was up for adoption.
“I’ve been railroaded many times by CPS with lots of broken promises,” she said. “I’m just tired of my kids being shuffled around in the system and being used for a paycheck when they have a safe home right here.”
It’s been 13 years since she signed. The last time she saw her daughter and son was two years ago.
“My daughter thought I was her aunt. She had no clue,” Jeffcoat said about one of the times she visited her now 15-year-old daughter.
Her son is 20 now, with nonverbal autism. Currently, he’s a ward of the state, but will age out at 23 and will most likely enter a group home.
With HB 730 in effect, Jeffcoat would have been informed to her right to have an attorney present to advise her, potentially preventing her from feeling forced to sign her children’s custody over to CPS.
Aurora Martinez Jones is a judge in Travis County, a place that experiences the widest racial gaps in its child removal numbers in the state.
The latest data shows that in Travis County, Black children are 10 times more likely to be removed than white children. This represents a jump from 2021, when Black children were about six times more likely than white children to be removed.
In Dallas County, African American children represent 22% of the population, but make up 44% of the children removed, according to the CPS 2023 Disproportionality and Disparity report from the Department of Family and Protective Services.
Black children statewide are nearly twice as likely to be reported, investigated and removed, according to the report.
Martinez Jones also noticed in Travis County that older kids aren’t as likely to receive state support compared with younger children.
“They’re not stepping in as much to protect older children,” Martinez Jones said. “It’s very specifically the older children. They’re really hesitant to step in and protect those kids.”
In 2014, 57% of children removed were ages 5 and under. In comparison, that age range made up 62% of removals in 2023.
Martinez Jones said the problem with removals extends throughout the foster care system. It’s common for her to hear that families have sought help from the state or CPS for a long time before any action was taken.
She’s seeing child welfare agencies lose more professionals than they can hire, exacerbating the demand. The state also finds it difficult to compete on pay with private practice, she said.
Additionally, in cases where a living situation is not an emergency but could develop into one, judges used to give CPS temporary custody, or the ability to request a child’s custody without removing the child from the home. But during the last legislative session, the order was removed, according to Martinez Jones.
“The only options I have coming from CPS and the only options that they can consider presenting to me are either, ‘We want a removal to happen right now’ or ‘We’re not going to ask for a removal.’ ”
State Rep. Josey Garcia, D-San Antonio, was a foster child herself in Florida. Growing up, she attended 14 different schools up and down the East Coast before hitting her first year of high school.
Garcia co-sponsored HB 730, driven by her experience and belief that transparency gives parents a chance to advocate for themselves and their families. However, there’s more work to be done in the child welfare system beyond child removals, she said.
“It’s broken. It’s broken severely,” said Garcia about the state’s foster care system. “We know the issues, and they’re not new issues.”
HB 730 was the first legislation of its kind in the country pushing for transparency of parental rights during the investigation process. In New York, advocates filed a similar “Miranda rights” bill, but it didn’t pass.
Fraidin, of the University of the District of Columbia, said in his experience, most cases aren’t about the extreme physical or sexual abuse people might think about when it comes to child removals.
Fraidin explained that the government is making a difficult decision to remove children given their circumstances. It is more likely that poverty is misinterpreted as neglect, often on the basis of systemic racism.
“This is the same government that can’t always cut the grass in public parks and in the north, can’t shovel the snow,” said Fraidin. “Governments make mistakes, and that’s not a crime. But they make mistakes.”
“And the problem when you’re talking about making mistakes in your foster care agency, those mistakes have really dramatic, direct impacts on human children.”