The Hotline Call.

After CPS was called on the Buttigieg family, why wasn't there a larger public conversation about what happens to non-elite families when CPS intervenes?

Izabela Urbaniak, photographer. Her children at their grandparents home in tiny village of Lugowiska, Poland. Urbianiak records their idyllic, dreamy “Summertime” childhood at her parent’s rural farm.

A couple weeks ago, when I was abroad with Edie, something happened here in the US that caught my attention. So much so that on the plane from Dublin to London, I poured my thoughts frantically into a notebook.

The news from the US was that former Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg and his husband Chasten, had been reported for child abuse by an anonymous hotline caller. CPS and police weere at his home investigating. No doubt this is terrifying. Child welfare is one of the largest, most predatory tentacles of the government’s reach, and they often operate outside of constitutional protections typically extended to families and individuals. No one wants CPS or the IRS looking into their personal lives.

The belief, as reported by the media, was that the hotline call reporting the Buttigieg’s was politically motivated, and more about the couple’s gayness than concern for the welfare of their four-year-old twins. The Buttigieg’s had to send their kids to their grandparents house for the night, because Pete was not allowed to be alone with the kids until the investigation was complete.

Buttigieg wrote a heart-wrenching and vulnerable post on his Substack, about what it felt like to be investigated by child welfare. His words felt familiar:

My in-laws had to explain to my children, whom we have taught to avoid talking to strangers, that they would need to have a conversation, one at a time and for nearly an hour each, in a place they’d never been, with adults they did not know, who would ask questions we weren’t allowed to know either. For twenty-four deeply distressing hours, we had no idea what I was accused of or what was about to happen.

We learn, in Buttigieg’s essay, that the police distract the children by allowing them to look around their police vehicles, a kind gesture that doesn’t happen often during these investigations. Buttigieg and his husband were able to call their family, and have the children stay with grandparents for the night until an interview with the kids could be completed by investigators. This, too, is something that does not always happen for families hotlined for abuse and neglect. Children from poorer, less-resourced, less-visible families are, often, taken into custody and processed through foster care before going to a relative in a formal kinship-care situation. In Buttigieg’s own words, his family was treated with a sense of calm and civility that can be attributed to his elite status.

Buttigieg was given something quite precious - the benefit of the doubt.

Podcast pundits and media were understandably so upset at this invasion of family sanctity that some cried, openly, with real tears. Others raged on behalf of the Buttigieg family.

I got to tell you, Tim Miller of The Bulwark said in a June 27th Bulwark podcast that served as a lead up to an MSNOW interview with Nicole Wallace, I can’t imagine my reaction. An agent of the state coming to your house and separating you from your child because someone with a political agenda wanted to torment you?

This could be any of us, Nicole Wallace responded, backing up Miller. Horrific, horrific experience for the kids and for their family.

What an example of an infringement on liberties… Miller continued on an MSNOW panel. That the government would come and separate them from their four-year-old twins and invade their kitchen and ask personal questions of their children, without them around because one sicko made a phone call….This is against how things should work in a free country.

This phrase from Miller stayed with me: What an example of an infringement on liberties. It made me ask: Which Americans get to have those liberties?

I believed, finally, that out of this stupid tragedy, we might get to talk about the policing of vulnerable and poor families by child welfare agencies. We were going to have the hard conversations about who gets to be raised by their families, and who gets to be pulled apart, and separated from loved ones. This conversation matters in a climate, where we are already outraged that families are being separated forcibly by ICE, often on camera, often brutally and by force, and sometimes in full public view. We’ve watched more than 145,000 kids separated from parents in the US since ICE stepped up its deportations this term. 36% of those kids were under the age of six-years-old.

What I expected was a spate of op-eds, podcasts and news panels that interrogated, not the people working in the system, but the systems themselves. I expected smart people with expert-level knowledge, authors of books, researchers and social scientists to weigh in on how hotline calls, and even mandated reporting, can be used as a weapon directed toward poor families.

The reporting system, the “hotline” was designed to track real abuse, but has lapsed into a kind of telling on people situation. A mandated reporter confessed to me that she had called the hotline on a family for “bad language.” Another family I know was reported for their kids playing outside all day alone. Another was reported because a neighbor didn’t like that a mother had found him inappropropriate and kept him away from her severely disabled son. He called the hotline on her, an act of retribution. That CPS investigation went on for three months before they closed it.

These reports, which were all anonymous, caused terror for the families, fear of separation, but also the headache of answering to an often hostile investigation, extra money for lawyers, or to pay for required parenting classes, drug monitoring, and therapies. These extra hardships, mixed with intense stress from being judged and policed, can be a tipping point for families already on the edge.

I was chomping at the bit to get on a podcast and start railing about all this! How families like the Buttigieg’s join generations of families who have had CPS used as weapons against them, even sometimes within families, and that family separation, even the threat of it, is as painful for non-perfect, struggling, impoverished families, even sub-par families, as it is for affluent and educated families with resources, visibility and capital. I wanted to talk about how family separation has always been a tool of government coercion and compliance since the buying and selling of family members in enslavement, since the Trail of Tears and Indigenous boarding schools, since orphan trains, since Georgia Tan, since the Baby Scoop era. That most programs to “help” children were historically used to help the strangers around children ptofit in some way. Not the children. Not the families of origin.

I expected we might want to talk through what happened to prominent, famous and well-resourced people, like the Buttigiegs AND people in more vulnerable, invisible situations. The folks who don’t have the money, influence, privileges, visibility, or reputations to manage a government agent in their home, looking through their fridge, and checking the children’s bedooms for signs of neglect. I’m sure the Buttigieg’s housekeeper left the fridge full and the house neat, after all.

But media programming gave us silence. Except in the most remote, and loudest, spaces on the internet.

From the loud, remote spaces on the internet:

I’m posting this with a heavy heart. We have another parent who could not take the pain of being separated from their children. On this Sunday, April 21, 2026 we lost Deanne, a mother of three, because CPS removed her girls. She was certain they wouldn’t be coming home. The pain was too much.

Do parents really kill themselves because they cannot handle the forced separation from their children? We know this happens. All we have to do is look at the Netflix film, Take Care of Maya, which chronicles the true story of Maya Kowalski, a Florida girl separated from her family after her parents were falsely accused of medical child abuse. Her mother killed herself, to take herself out of the picture, so CPS would allow her child to come home.

The support group where this death notice was posted is for parents who are being investigated by child welfare. Many have had their kids taken into CPS custody. Many have lost the rights to parent their children. Most of you know that I’m an advocate for families in the child welfare system, a former foster parent, adoptee, foster-adopt parent and a former CASA (Court-appointed Special Advocate for Children.) You know that my book, The Meth Lunches (St. Martin’s 2023) is focused on how vulnerable people slip into more vulnerable situations, including having to suffer the removal of their children from their homes, temporarily or permanently, and what that does to the family and to the community around them. I joined these chat groups to provide support and advice to help parents navigate a systen that is rigged against them, and is almost un-navigatible without resources. Even being able to stay calm, like Buttigieg, to keep your wits about you, to not scream at people, is a privilege that a lot of vulnerable people don’t have.

And staying regulated is critical. Sociologist Dorothy Roberts, author of the book Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families - and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World said it best:

The difference between parents who successfully avoid losing their children and keep their families intact and those who fail is rarely the type of severity of neglect or abuse involved, but is the degree to which the parent is willing to surrender their humanity, individuality and pride to the system and the court.

Child welfare is focused on the immediate safety of the child, but is not so concerned with the whole family or the whole family being successful. If a mom is in active addiction, there is an effort to take her child away to save him from the potential harms of addiction, which are many, but no effort to help her get into drug rehab, so she can parent her child. We protect the child and screw the family, which has ramifications for all of us in our communtities.

Here are more dispatches (anonymous) from the groups just in the last few weeks:

• I’m crying so hard. I lost my appeals case,” a mother pleads. “CPS is putting my five kids up for adoption. I’m a deaf mom. Please help.

  ____________________

• DCS took my kids in 2024. I’m poor and I have autism. How can I prevent them from adopting my kids out to their foster parents?

  ____________________

• I need some advice because my heart is broken and I don’t know what to do. I am a kinship placement for my grandbabies. I have placement of 9, and when my daughter has her last baby 10 months ago that baby was placed into foster care with the idea I could get her back if I got a bigger home. Three of my grandkids are over 18. I was able to obtain a larger home while having visits with my grandbaby and creating a great relationship with her foster mom. We had even started doing 8 hour weekend visits and were told we would go to weekends and then reunification. At the last court date, the judge who had been so pro baby coming with me switched suddenly and said she cannot come with me due to me having too many kids in my home under foster care rules. The judge told me to “figure out a creative solution” and she would reconsider. Tonight I was told they are moving my grandbaby to an adoptive home. Does anyone have any ideas of what I could do so my granddaughter can come home? Would filing for custody over kinship make a difference? I will do whatever it takes at this point. I have the support and finances to take her as well. My heart just hurts thinking of the baby being moved to someone she does not know, and being the only one of 10 not with us.

  _______________________

• I’m a great grandmother. I had my great grandson for over a year. My granddaughter lost him because her house wasn’t safe. I made a mistake and let her see him and they took the baby from me. Never gave us a chance. They sent him to a foster home and allowed them to adopt him. We never see him or know how he is. My heart has been broken for a year and a half. This is how the system has treated us.

  ______________________

• This is my baby that was stolen from me (Photo of dad and smiling baby.) They promised to return him after two months. They said I neglected him. They said he wasn’t fed right and wasn’t happy…. They steal babies and lie. They said my baby didn’t have clothes on, but the reason my baby didn’t have clothes on was because it was hot in the house, we were working to fix the air conditioning unit, but couldn’t and we went out and bought one, but it didn’t cool the room down, so had to go out and buy a new one. They still took our baby.

I’ve been studying these groups of parents for years. Taking notes, connecting with people about their stories. I often will provide advice and support for these parents if they are in Vegas, and reaching out.

I met a young woman in group. CPS wanted to take her infant. The infant had an eczema flair. She told the doctor she felt uncomfortable using the steroid cream. She had Googled the cream’s effects and worried. She asked for an alternative. The doctor reported her to CPS. There was no education about the cream or explanation of why it was necessary. They didn’t send visiting nurses to support them in the home. The caseworker intimidated them, and ultimately, removed the baby. English was not their first language. They were not given translators during the proceeedings. I started going to court hearings to help them understand what was happening. The pressure of the removal created stress in her marriage. By the time she got her baby baby back home, the parents decided to split.

Another family lost their four children for two years, because one person in the family had a domestic violence charge that she refused to have discharged. (She was a step parent. She had been a foster child, and refused to become involved in the system again.) Her charge had nothing to do with the children in question, or any children. After the kids had to move through multiple homes, the judge finally had enough, and returned the kids to dad. The siblings were reunited, happy to be together. Their nightmare was over. This family is Black. This matters, too.

Black families are targeted for child invetigation and removal at stuning rates. More than half of Black families in the US will be subject to the scrutiny of a CPS investigation, twice as much as white children. And one out of every 41 Black kids will have their relationship with their parents terminated permanently, which is double the rate for everyone else, even as most children are taken from Black families because of issues related to poverty, not abuse.

Add to this, that Black kids who are permanently separated from their biological families are adopted at lower rates than white kids, so they are more likely to flounder in the system, move around a lot, and have less stability and lifelong connections. The end result of these policies is that Black families have a deserved distrust of the system that polices them. Families are more apt to suffer in silence and in hiding, without admitting to need help or support.

Take this quote from Threads from retired social worker and Black activist, Feminista Jones:

If you run out of formula and call your pediatrician, Black mama, there’s a good chance a social worker will show up to your door because you’ve been flagged for being neglectful. You might even lose your child because they take pleasure un extracting Black childten from their homes to feed their systems. Go to your community first, second and third. Socials might be even safer. WE GOT US.

There are repercussions for these biased policies. We have broken children that are lost, kicked out of adoptive or foster homes at 18, disconnected from their biological families, and on their own. Would they have been better off staying with their problematic families? How do we think a child who has never had a home, or any kind of permanency, will not end up homeless?

We can do better. We could provide a massive services innoculation into these families to help them manage their poverty, generational legacies of domestic violence and mental illness, to support them to recover from addiction instead of making them take parenting classes to tick off boxes, while pretending we don’t know they still get high?

What if child welfare meant family welfare? What if we stopped conflating poverty with abuse and neglect?

The young men on their own between the ages of 18 and 25 scare me the most. They are so lost. This rings true, especially after we spoke last week about how our young adult kids still need us to be there for them. I’m working with two young men now, both floundering out in the world. One has an adoptive mom who abandoned him. He has been couch surfing for two years, and finally reconnected with a former foster parent who is helping him. The other is a 21-year-old who works and supports his mom, who is in active substance abuse, and who has lost her youngest kids to removal. He is stuck and desperate to find a life for himself. He uses AI chat bots for advice, because this is all he has for guidance. His mother, he tells me, has given up. He has no future, no dreams for himself. He is just trying to keep his phone on.

Here in Nevada, the research is clear: 60% of our foster youth will touch homelessness. 60% is a clear sign that this system DOES NOT WORK. It’s awful. If you got a cancer diagnosis with a 60% chance of death, you’d be terrified. That stat alone should scream the need for reform.

The culprit, for me, is a lack of attachment that happens in the system. Attachment to family, to a special person, to a mentor, to someone who isn’t paid to hang with you, who will be your ride or die. So many of these kids have no ride or die. They are vulnerable to finding someone who can lead them into trouble and more of the same chaos and impermenance.

As for their foster families, if they have them, some 50% of children are removed from a home, at least once for behaviors, even though the acting-out behaviors are understood as communications of their trauma, and these traumas can be worked through and healed. But foster parents want kids who fold into their families. A kid who is lying, stealing and aggressive isn’t going to fit.

Most kids, except for the extreme examples, would be better off if we left them in their imperfect homes, and simply poured resources and support into them. If we raise everyone in the family, we raise the children.

When CPS removes children from a home, the first public reponse seems logical: There must be a reason. They must’ve done something to have their kids removed.

High profile abuse cases like the one recently in Vinton County, Ohio make us all feel like families might need more policing, not less. No one wants to see children nelgected, abused and tortured at the whims of sick parents. But even that case is complicated. The mother, Elizabeth Siders, has repeatedly asked about the kids and whether she can see them, and this 33-year-old woman has had some 18 back-to-back pregnancies, which makes me wonder if she was also abused. A victim herself, and not simply a perpetrator of the abuse.

There are parents who cannot parent their children and will never be able to. There are foster families who have been instrumental in helping pull families up out of their hell, so they can reclaim their children and build a healthy, safe life together. There are adoptive families who say yes to kids no matter how intractable their trauma, and love them through the turbulence. There are CPS workers who have pulled kids off the cliff edges of their lives, over and over, only to be repaid with mediocre pay and heavy caseloads. There are biological families who have worked the system after their kids were taken, and have turned their family around, and then turned around and supported other families in similar circumstances. There are foster kids who had the worst experiences, and somehow got themselves onto a pathway of prosperity and goodness.

The whole foster care tree is not rotten. It is both a curse and a blessing. The people doing this work care deeply for children, and are doing the best inside a tough, unwieldy, archaic system. It’s often easier to go with the flow of the organization then to try and change it. But there is no doubt that the number of kids in care should be much lower than it is, even as the number has been dropping since the pandemic.

And this should be where we hold our legislative focus.

In her excellent book Wards of The State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care, Claudia Row writes about Judge Ernestine Gray, a Black judge on the bench in New Orleans during the 1990’s and 2000’s. The New York Times described her parish’s juvenile court system, before Gray, as “the most dysfunctional in the country.” But Judge Gray could not look away from the statistics. She was horrified over the scant reasons the state removed people’s children, almost all of them related to being poor.

By 2017, Judge Gray had just 20 kids in foster care in a city with over 75,000 children. She understood the data, that kids reunited with families quickly after an act of neglect were no more likely to be “revictimized” than kids in places with very high removal rates. Certainly, if Judge Gray could reduce the number in her parish, every county could do the same? Her work has shown that removal is not usually necessary to protect children, even in complex family dynamics.

Right now, there are over 100 children in Child Haven, the children’s shelter here in Las Vegas. The county is advertising in the local papers about a higher number of babies and toddlers in need of foster homes.

44 of the children are infants up to 6 years old, the article in the Review Journal says. Nineteen are under age 2, they tell us.

This matters because hopeful adoptive parents looking to build their families want younger kids. This puts greater stress on impoverished and troubled families, who will not have a healthy foster family pulling for them, and supporting reunification. They will experience a greater risk of losing their kids to wealthier and more stable families, who are essentially, and without recognizing it, building their families on the backs of poor people.

Clark county is also offering abbreviated foster care training to get more foster parents to meet the demand for these babies in Child Haven. This feels scary, because without the proper trauma-informed training for foster parents, there will be more disruptions, more moving kids around in the system, more cherry-picking “well-behaved” kids for families, who are more typical and obedient. There will be less security for some of the most vulnerable (read: less adoptable) kids in care. This is complicated by states being given federal funds, not for family reunification, but for the number of kids adopted out to strangers.

These short-sighted policies will further flood the pipeline with more delinquency, addiction and homelessness down the road. Homelessness could be curtailed for future generations simply by keeping families together, helping them achieve stability, moving them towards healthiness, working on building healthy attachments, and pulling them out of abject poverty and dysfunction. It’s not easy, but if we focus on it, we can make noticeable progress across decades and generations.

All we need to start is a national conversation. And the Buttigieg’s experience was an excellent instigator of that conversation. But it didn’t happen. Instead, the media, pundit and podcast communities continued their rage-bait focus on the injustice to this elite family.

They missed the main point, which shouldn’t be a surprise. Poverty makes you invisible, even to the people who say they see you.

Thank you, as always, for reading. xo Kim