A lawsuit filed against New York City this week is unusual in the child welfare field, focusing not solely on poor treatment of children in the foster care system, but on the rights of their parents to protection from unlawful and invasive searches by CPS workers.
The legal challenge now before the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York accuses the city’s child welfare agency of using “highly coercive tactics to illegally search tens of thousands of families’ homes every year.”
Nine plaintiffs named in Gould et. al v. The City of New York allege that caseworkers from the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) violated their Fourth Amendment rights under the constitution, which protects people from unreasonable search and seizure by the government. The suit, filed Tuesday by public interest and private lawyers, states that child protection workers investigating abuse and neglect reports often do not tell parents they can deny entry into their homes without a court order, and threaten to take their children away if they are not allowed inside.
“ACS’s home-search tactics create a regime of threat and control. It’s a cruel choice that no parent should face: surrender the sanctity of your home or surrender your children,” attorney David Shalleck-Klein said in the press release shortly after the case was filed.
Shalleck-Klein, executive director of the Family Justice Law Center, said in an interview that the lawsuit aims to force the city agency to change its practices in non-emergency investigations that require home entry — either by obtaining a court order or asking for “true consent and not coerced consent.”
A city spokesperson did not reply directly to questions about the lawsuit, but said in an email that the child welfare agency “is committed to keeping children safe and respecting parents’ rights.”
For the first time, notifications are being handed to some New York City parents under investigation for alleged abuse and neglect under a new pilot program, and a growing number of early-stage child protection cases — roughly 20% — are being diverted away from the investigation pathway, the city agency reports.
“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,” spokesperson Marisa Kaufman wrote in an email to The Imprint.
“As with any landmark case like this, in an issue area that’s appropriately emerging as truly urgent, I think you’re going to see a lot of people take notice of this legal attack — and quite frankly because it’s deserved.”
— Ira Lustbader, litigation director for Children’s Rights
The U.S. Constitution allows for child protection workers to enter people’s home after a report to hotlines — such as New York’s Statewide Central Register of Child Abuse and Maltreatment — under three circumstances: if they obtain a court order, in the case of an emergency, or with voluntary consent.
But the lawsuit filed this week alleges that none of the investigations met those standards. Court filings describe situations where caseworkers falsely informed parents that their home searches were required by law, threatened to call police if parents didn’t comply, and failed to inform them they had the right “to limit or revoke consent.”
One case detailed in the lawsuit alleges that when Brooklyn parents Marianna Azar and Mathew Eng asked for a warrant, a caseworker falsely informed them that “the agency does not need a warrant or court order to complete a visit.”
In another, agency caseworkers told Curtayasia Taylor of the Bronx that her two sons were “no longer [her] children” and, instead, the legal document alleges, “clients of the agency” whom she could not speak to “without ACS’s permission.”
These situations are all too common, said Chris Gottlieb, who is is the director of New York University law school’s family defense clinic, and serves as co-counsel for the plaintiffs with the Family Justice Law Center and two corporate firms, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, and Emery Celli Brinckerhoff, Abady, Ward & Maazel LLP.
“The routine disrespect and violation of families’ rights is one example of the broader sense in which this system is failing families and failing children,” Gottlieb said. “ACS is coercing them into letting them into the home, which is not meaningful consent.”
Although the city agency conducted more than 40,000 child protection investigations in 2023, its data show that more than two-thirds of the claims are unsubstantiated, and roughly 8% led to petitions filed in family court.
Still, the plaintiffs and their legal advocates allege lasting harm has been caused. The lawsuit details the experience of one New York City mother, Ebony Gould, who for two years allegedly had city workers “banging on her door and her neighbors’ doors and speaking with her neighbors,” even though after 12 investigations, no claims of maltreatment were substantiated. The filing reported that her children were also subjected to invasive searches that involved workers asking them to lift their clothing to check for signs of physical abuse — a routine part of CPS investigations that can leave a lasting impact. In an email to The Imprint, Gould described still feeling fear whenever she heard a knock on the door, and regret over the lasting emotional wounds her children suffered.
“My children have cried to me and said they wished they had a normal life. And I can’t take back that they were teased and embarrassed,” Gould said. “I cannot take back their feeling like I didn’t protect them from strangers looking at their bodies. We live with this forever.”
“ACS’s invasive and unconstitutional searches of Ms. Gould’s home caused Ms. Gould and her children to suffer severe trauma that remains with them today,” the lawsuit states.
It also notes the disproportionate impact of CPS investigations on communities of color.
“The trauma inflicted by ACS predominantly and disproportionately falls on Black and Hispanic families,” court records state, citing a stunning statistic: That one out of two Black children in New York City has been subjected to an ACS investigation by the time they reach the age of 18.
“ACS has acknowledged the racial impact of its investigations,” the filing continues, citing a city-commissioned report that describes a “predatory system that specifically targets Black and Brown parents.”
According to the city child welfare agency, while racial disparity continues to exist, disproportionality has improved. Black non-Hispanic families with an “indicated investigation” — cases when CPS finds evidence of abuse or neglect — declined 38% between 2018 and 2022, while family court filings against these households have declined by almost 50%.
“Most lawsuits in the past ignored parents and tried to fix the flaws of this family policing system without attending to the harms to families that are caused by investigations.”
— professor Dorothy Roberts, University of Pennsylvania
For decades, class-action lawsuits have been a major vehicle for reform in child welfare systems nationwide. But typically, they aim to fix poor conditions for children living in foster care. Legal experts say it is particularly rare for groups of parents, such as those in the Gould case, to seek systemic changes to the investigation and surveillance process, asserting their rights before a foster care removal.
“As with any landmark case like this, in an issue area that’s appropriately emerging as truly urgent, I think you’re going to see a lot of people take notice of this legal attack — and quite frankly because it’s deserved,” said Ira Lustbader, litigation director for Children’s Rights. “This is the time.”
The national nonprofit pioneered class-action lawsuits on behalf of foster children, and now has open litigation in more than 20 states on behalf of children poorly served by the government, including those in other systems, such as juvenile justice.
Fourth Amendment rights in the child welfare system are increasingly under scrutiny. A 2022 investigative report by ProPublica and NBC News concluded there are likely millions of warrantless home searches by child welfare agencies across the country each year — presenting a vast and overlooked challenge to civil rights, attorneys for parents say. And last year, an article in the California Law Review argued “CPS home searches have escaped meaningful Fourth Amendment scrutiny for the past fifty years.”
In her 2022 book “Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families — and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World,” Dorothy Roberts, a professor of law, sociology and Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania echoed the concerns about warrantless home searches. She emphasized the significance of the suit filed this week in New York City.
“Most lawsuits in the past ignored parents and tried to fix the flaws of this family policing system without attending to the harms to families that are caused by investigations,” Roberts said. “A promising trend that this lawsuit is part of is recognizing that enforcing parents’ constitutional rights is critical to an approach to child welfare that truly benefits children. You cannot support children by terrorizing their families.”
The class-action lawsuit seeks unspecified individual damages. But it also aims to overhaul child maltreatment investigations citywide. It seeks a reexamination of the “unconstitutional policy, custom, and/or practice of using the coercive tactics” to ensure that caseworkers do not enter families’ homes without informed and meaningful consent.
Legal advocates for children and families are also calling for passage of Senate Bill S901, which would require caseworkers statewide to inform parents of their due process rights at the beginning of an investigation for child maltreatment, similar to the Miranda rights read by law enforcement.
Last October, the Administration for Children’s Services launched a pilot program in select neighborhoods in Brooklyn and the Bronx which required caseworkers to hand parents a palm-sized information card informing them of their rights to not let CPS workers into their homes, and to call an attorney at the very first stage of an investigation. Citing a successful run, ACS Commissioner Jess Dannhauser announced in January that the program would be expanded citywide.
Gottlieb said she hopes the lawsuit will push legislators and opponents of the state bill, which has repeatedly failed to pass amid opposition from Children’s Services, to take notice of the lasting trauma of repeated and unnecessary investigations.
“The Legislature should be standing up and requiring ACS to tell people their rights,” Gottlieb said. “This lawsuit is hopefully going to educate and put pressure on lawmakers to do the right thing that they should have done years ago.”
Feb. 23 correction: This article has been updated to accurately state the percentage of CPS investigations that result in the Administration for Children’s Services filing a family court petition. In 2023, that percentage was roughly 8%, not 15% as previously reported.
