We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America

by Roxanna Asgarian

Many of these people speak only of Devonte; he seemed to be the children’s ambassador, the public speaker. He was also, according to Jen’s friends, the golden child, the only one she really talked to, and the one who got special privileges.

Judges and attorneys representing the state, Sankaran said, rarely consider the emotional impact of the life-altering decisions that happen in family court—both on the parents and the children themselves. “The number one thing that bothers me about how we conduct business in foster care is that we’ve lost key concepts like humanity, dignity,” he said. “We’re prioritizing compliance and the needs of bureaucracy.” Suzanne Sellers

One of Sarah’s final searches was especially brutal: No-kill shelters for dogs.

It’s possible that a major reason the Harts escaped accountability for so long, and the children were not saved, is that many people, both inside and outside the child welfare system, held a common assumption: that these six Black children must be better off with the white women who adopted them, that whatever issues they were having as a family must have been an improvement for the children over the poor conditions of their early childhood homes.

Despite the bad publicity, the two judges seemed untouchable, each having been reelected multiple times. But in 2018, pressures began to mount. The Chronicle reported that the Justice Department was probing racial disparities in sentencing and the pay-to-play practices in Harris County’s juvenile courts, and that federal authorities were asking about specific judges by name. That fall, as part of a “blue wave” in an increasingly diverse Harris County, every single one of the fifty-nine Republican judges up for reelection—including Phillips, Devlin, and the third juvenile court judge, Michael Schneider—lost their seats to Democrats. The day after the election, Devlin made national news for releasing every young person charged with a juvenile offense on his docket, “simply asking the kids whether they

planned to kill anyone before letting them go,” the Chronicle reported. “Apparently he was saying that’s what the voters wanted,” one public defender told the paper.

Still, he wanted to talk about what he saw as flaws in the child welfare system. In his mind, it started back when the two states agreed to give the women more children than anyone could reasonably handle. “When I learned of the first three, I could say, ‘Well, I’m happy for them, because here’s three children that will have a chance in life.’ But when I was informed that they adopted three more, all I could do was sit there and do this,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m going, What in the world are they thinking? What in the world is the adoption services thinking to allow this to happen?”

Some advocates—like Alan Dettlaff, the dean of the University of Houston Graduate School of Social Work and the director of the upEND Movement—want to push that thought further. “We remove kids for neglect and place them in strangers’ homes, and give the stranger a monthly stipend to take care of the child,” Dettlaff says. “What if we just gave that one thousand dollars a month to the mother who needed it?”

“The family policing system is part of that same carceral regime, and like the police and prison systems, family policing is designed to maintain racial injustice by punishing families in place of meeting their needs.”

The idea requires a radical reimagining of what support for parents looks like, and it calls for something even more difficult for many to embrace: a release of the urge to judge and blame parents and of wanting to punish them for their failures. In a society that resorts to individual punishment as a response to many of its systemic ills, this concept is deeply embedded into our psyches, and it is hard to let go.

The harm I experienced was real—I struggle with PTSD to this day. But would it have helped for me to have been separated from my friends, my school, the sources of stability in my life? Would it have helped if I had been made to stay away from my family, split up from my siblings? And why, as a middle-class white person, did I never have to worry about that happening, when every day Black families are making parenting decisions with the threat of government intervention looming over them?