New York City’s child welfare agency routinely uses “coercive tactics” to search families’ homes and even strip-search their children, according to a landmark class-action lawsuit filed Tuesday that aims to fundamentally transform how the city investigates reports of child abuse and neglect.
The nine named plaintiffs claimed in Brooklyn federal court that caseworkers from the Administration for Children’s Services lie to parents, withhold information about their rights, and threaten to involve police or remove children to enter their homes without a court order or true emergency. The lawsuit seeks to stop those practices.
“When ACS comes, they treat me like a criminal in my own home,” said Shavona Warmington, a Queens mom of six children and one of the plaintiffs. “They give no respect to my wishes. They come banging the doors so loud that the neighbors came out wanting to know what was going on. The caseworkers don’t show identification and they threaten to bring the police if I don’t allow them entry.”
ACS conducted close to 53,000 investigations of local families last year, but sought court orders in only 222 of them, court documents show. Absent an immediate threat to their children, the families charge that caseworkers are violating their Fourth Amendment rights by pressuring them into unreasonable searches and intrusions by the government.
“Once they are inside, they open every cabinet, search the refrigerators, strip search my children and ask them questions when I am not present,” Warmington said. “That is traumatizing.”
The investigation was ultimately unfounded, according to the lawsuit. But before ACS closed the probe in 2021, three of Warmington’s children were strip-searched, the youngest who was 1 year old at the time.
Marisa Kaufman, a spokeswoman for ACS, said the agency is expanding an initiative to inform families of their rights during child welfare probes and reduce the number of baseless reports called into the state.
“ACS is committed to keeping children safe and respecting parents’ rights,” she said. “We will continue to advance our efforts to achieve safety, equity, and justice by enhancing parents’ awareness of their rights, connecting families to critical services, providing families with alternatives to child protection investigations, and working with key systems to reduce the number of families experiencing an unnecessary child protective investigation.”
The majority of child welfare investigations, more than 7 in 10, are ultimately unfounded, and advocates charge stem from family poverty, not parent wrongdoing — such as inadequate food, clothing or shelter. Even among those investigations that ACS does find enough evidence of child maltreatment, few lead to a case filed in family court.
“ACS has been operating for decades with a no harm, no foul mentality. That when they conduct an investigation, and the caseworkers don’t find anything concerning, ‘Well, we did our job,'” said David Shalleck-Klein, an attorney for the plaintiffs and the founder and executive director of the Family Justice Law Center. “What families that have been impacted have been saying — for years now — is that there is harm, and there is foul.”
“It’s not about saying ACS can’t go into families’ homes. Of course they can. It’s just that they have to do it legally: They get actual consent or there’s a real emergency. Or they need to show a judge they have probable cause,” he said.
The lawsuit alleges that a lack of adequate training and supervision caseworkers receive about Fourth Amendment rights is a “deliberate choice” by ACS to encourage the widespread use of coercive tactics — and to press families to let them in without a court order. In 2020, a report commissioned by ACS itself found that caseworkers felt pressured to not tell parents their rights.
“ACS believes that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to the agency,” said another attorney for the plaintiffs, Audra Soloway of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP. The lawsuit is also being brought by Emery Celli Brinckerhoff Abady Ward & Maazel LLP and the NYU School of Law Family Defense Clinic.
The trauma inflicted by home searches disproportionately falls on Black and Hispanic families, who each year make up the majority of cases ACS investigates. A Black child in the city has a 50-50 chance of being subjected to a child welfare probe, court documents show.
Warmington, who is Black, said her family will “forever” be negatively impacted by ACS.
“It is a slap in the face,” she said, “when the agency assigned to help us only succeeds in doing more harm.”
