As Santa Clara County grapples with the fallout from the tragic death of another foster child, the well-regarded law firm representing parents in its child welfare courts for the past two decades is folding.
In a Thursday statement obtained by The Imprint, leaders of the San Jose, California-based Dependency Advocacy Center (DAC), said amid a spike in foster care entries following children’s deaths, the struggle to adequately fund its operations was too much to overcome.
“Our strained resources were never stable enough to withstand a system-wide crisis,” the statement reads. “The demands of court representation grew exponentially, while funding shrank, and we have arrived at a point where DAC can no longer operate in a way that remains faithful to our mission and values.”
Santa Clara County’s child welfare system has been thrust into further turmoil over the past two weeks. That’s when 2-year-old foster child Jaxon Juarez was found badly injured in his crib on Easter Sunday. He died days later from injuries after being physically and sexually abused, allegedly inflicted by his 17-year-old cousin.
Jaxon had been placed with his aunt after his mother’s death last year. The aunt reportedly has a 2014 conviction of felony child endangerment, resulting from driving drunk with her baby in the back seat.
Since Jaxon’s death in her home, 10 county social workers have been put on leave, and the San Jose teenager has been charged by the local District Attorney with murder and remains incarcerated.
The toddler’s death spurred local and state investigations into the Silicon Valley county’s child welfare system. Local officials are working on a “corrective action plan” mandated by the state’s Department of Social Services and the state will now scrutinize the county’s policies governing emergency foster care placements and foster family approvals, county officials said on Thursday.
“Children should not be dying under the care and custody of a system that exists to protect them. It is unacceptable,” Santa Clara County Supervisor Sylvia Arenas said at a press conference. “This level of system failure demands immediate action, course correction and accountability in a way that we haven’t done before.”
But the uproar, widely reported by the local press, has had systemic, perhaps unintended consequences. In its statement bidding farewell to the South Bay county after 18 years, leaders of the Dependency Advocacy Center wrote:
“For the past two years, child welfare policy in Santa Clara County has been driven by reactive politics that valued scoring points in the media over policies that would create true, lasting safety for children and families — policies that acknowledge the trauma of family separation and the risks to children associated with foster care involvement. The result has been a system under immense strain, with the number of children under court jurisdiction skyrocketing as a result of fear-based decision-making.”
In an email sent to The Imprint on Thursday, Alexis Moody, directing attorney at the Law Foundation of Silicon Valley that represents children in Santa Clara County dependency court cases, said she was saddened by the closure of Dependency Advocacy Center, the firm representing parents accused of abuse and neglect.
“Children and families are best served when there is meaningful, high-quality representation on all sides,” Moody wrote in an email to The Imprint. “That balance is essential to achieving safe, stable, and lasting outcomes for children.”
Santa Clara County Executive James R. Williams said in an emailed statement that the Dependency Advocacy Center has been a “vital partner” for families navigating the child welfare system.
“Losing such a trusted partner is deeply felt across our community, especially as we continue working toward long-term stability and wellbeing for families,” Williams wrote.
“child welfare policy in Santa Clara County has been driven by reactive politics that valued scoring points in the media over policies that would create true, lasting safety for children and families.”
— Dependency Advocacy Center
Jaxon is the third young child to die while under the supervision of the county’s Department of Family and Children’s Services. In April 2023, 3-month-old Phoenix Castro died from fentanyl poisoning in the home of her drug-using parents. That same year, 6-year-old Jordan Walker was stabbed to death by a relative.
The cases, by all accounts, are extremely rare and — unlike the vast majority of the civil court’s dependency cases — involve murder charges in criminal court.
Since the 2023 deaths, the number of children being removed from home and taken into Santa Clara County’s foster care system has surged by 229%, according to state statistics. That reaction, referred to by child welfare reformers as a “foster care panic,” often follows widely publicized reporting, such as coverage of the local cases by The Bay Area News Group.
Dependency Advocacy Center Chief Executive Officer Katie Joh said in an interview with The Imprint that the number of families entering the county’s child welfare system over the past two years has skyrocketed in tandem with media accounts of the children’s deaths.
“There’s been a much stronger push towards ‘file first and ask questions later,’” Joh said, “and that is not a good way to shape policy for families.”
And as the law firm saw caseloads soar with its parent clients, the workload further strained its already-strapped budget for parent representation.
Similar circumstances have been well-documented elsewhere in the country over many years.
During the pandemic, the number of foster care removals across the country dropped dramatically, due to kids being home from school and other factors. But one state, Illinois, defied that national trend and its cases expanded. Numerous child welfare officials in the state reported that was the result of heightened attention to the widely publicized death of a child known to child protective services.
Foster care critic Richard Wexler, an occasional contributor to The Imprint’s op-ed pages, has documented this trend for many years on his National Coalition for Child Protection Reform blog.
In an email, Wexler called the rise of parental investigations in Santa Clara County “the worst I’ve seen in 50 years anywhere in the country.” According to a database he keeps, “in just two years, the number of children torn from their families in Santa Clara County nearly tripled.”
Wexler said the response “drowned everyone working in the system in a tsunami of new cases. That left no time to investigate any case, or any caretaker, carefully.” The result is that “more children in real danger will be missed,” he added. “Until Santa Clara County breaks the cycle of foster-care panic all children will be less safe.”
Law firms that represent parents and children in Santa Clara County’s dependency court contract with the Judicial Council of California, a state agency that provides funding through a hotly contested funding formula. The firms representing indigent parents — who are the overwhelming majority of clients in the foster care courts — receive funding based on their caseloads for the previous three years. A caseload standard of 141 clients per attorney is set as a benchmark for determining sufficient funding and necessary staffing levels.
According to Joh, that fee schedule left it poorly positioned to deal with a wave of new court filings accusing parents of maltreatment. The surge in child removals brought many more parents into the county’s dependency system without enough resources.
But beyond the sudden surge in recent years, Joh and other legal advocates say the state’s funding structure ensures high caseloads for most dependency courts, with not enough money provided to recruit and retain experienced lawyers.
Her firm’s model was considered exemplary — pairing accused parents with attorneys, staff social workers, and mentors with lived experience.
The Dependency Advocacy Center also created the state’s first “pre-petition” legal representation program — a model matching investigated parents with an attorney who meets with them before CPS agencies open formal court cases. The early-stage legal help aims to prevent family separation through foster care when additional resources and outside supportive services can stave off that traumatic outcome.
The center also created a well-known parent mentor program, which matched supportive parents who had been through dependency courts with fathers and mothers fighting to reunify with children in foster care.
“This ongoing funding gap in our justice system ultimately harms children and families, who deserve consistent and skilled representation when courts are making life-changing decisions.”
— Leslie Heimov, Children’s Law Center of California
Leslie Heimov, executive director of the Los Angeles County-based Children’s Law Center of California which represents thousands of California foster children, said the outgoing law firm has taken an innovative approach to representation.
Heimov, who is also a prominent advocate for dependency court attorneys nationwide, said the struggles of the Santa Clara County nonprofit firm were not unique, “but rather an inevitable outcome” of the current statewide funding system for dependency court attorneys.
“This ongoing funding gap in our justice system ultimately harms children and families, who deserve consistent and skilled representation when courts are making life-changing decisions,” Heimov said in an email to The Imprint.
In Santa Clara County, Joh will step down from her position as soon as May 1. The organization will cease operations by Aug. 31, or whenever the Judicial Council finds a provider to assume the contract for court-appointed parent representation — whichever comes later.
At a meeting of the county’s Children, Seniors, and Families Committee on Thursday, local officials shared the news of the closure of the Dependency Advocacy Center. Some are concerned about what comes next, and specifically the use of private attorneys, who are often compensated with a flat fee for services.
In 2019, New York researchers found that when parents have a child in foster care and are represented by teams of lawyers working in tandem with social workers and parent advocates, they were reunited with their child about four months sooner than those who were represented by a solo practitioner or a court-appointed panel of local attorneys.
“I am really worried about us adopting a panel model,” Santa Clara County Supervisor Betty Duong said at the meeting.
