Past and Present

Family separation has a long, sordid history in the United States, with debilitating effects.¹ Removed children show increased trauma responses, including elevated rates of academic challenges, substance abuse, and mental illness.² Rather than being a low-risk intervention, separating children from their families is “universally negative”³ and may have worse effects than neglect or doing nothing.⁴

For 400 years, family separation has been justified by rhetoric that poses certain parents—mainly parents of color—as undesirable, inferior, and morally suspect.⁵ The story begins with the slave economy and African people torn from their homes and forced to go to the Americas. Amid the horrors of bondage, enslaved people honored familial connections and expected women to prioritize motherhood over freedom.⁶ But enslavers would sell, or threaten to sell, children to keep mothers working.⁷ Moreover, they used family separation as a punishment and deliberately severed the bonds that undergirded resistance efforts.⁸ Although enslavement ended more than 150 years ago, today the government continues to disproportionately intervene in Black families: every fourth report to CPS is about a Black child and one in five children in foster care is Black.⁹

Starting in the early 1800s, the federal government targeted Indigenous families for separation to advance assimilation into the dominant white culture.¹⁰ At military-style boarding schools, Indigenous children faced labor exploitation, sexual and physical violence, and humiliation.¹¹ By combining “all the harmful aspects associated with separation,”¹² boarding schools severed students from their communities, traditional practices, and first languages.¹³ Recent research found that boarding school students—and their descendants—have had poorer physical, mental, emotional, and general health outcomes than Indigenous families without a relationship to boarding schools.¹⁴ Indigenous activists shocked the nation in the 1960s and ’70s with stories of families torn apart by removal. They catalyzed the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act, but the legislation has failed to achieve its aims: Indigenous parents are up to four times more likely than non-Indigenous parents to have their children placed in foster homes.¹⁵

Poor, immigrant children were also targeted in the mid-19th century for removal and placement with “good, Christian families”¹⁶ to assimilate and learn skills for good citizenship. Upon arrival to rural destination communities, the youth were often treated like human cargo on an auction block and expected to perform child labor. Sponsoring charities finally ended this “orphan train” movement (a misnomer since the majority of the children had parents) following stories of widespread trauma and abuse and a cultural shift that expanded the social concept of whiteness to include Catholic families. Deemed white, these families were more likely to be given aid than torn apart.¹⁷

Mental disability has been a justification for separating families since the nation’s inception.¹⁸ Grafted onto European values of community order, America’s early response to disability was isolated confinement; if a family could not furnish an adequate attic or basement for the task, asylums, workhouses, and prisons served the public interest.¹⁹ Over the next 200 years, these institutions grew in size and by reputation for their brutal handling of residents.²⁰ In the 20th century, once eugenics fell out of favor, the United States moved to zealous termination of parental rights in families with a mentally disabled caregiver.²¹ Today, parental disability accounts for one in every five child removals by CPS.²² Furthermore, nearly one-third of children removed by CPS have a disability.²³ Human Rights Watch has raised serious concerns about how low-income parents are punished with child removal when they struggle to access quality care for their disabled kids, as well as the ways that institutionalization and family separation thwart disabled children’s development.²⁴

Aren’t 400 years of family separation and child trauma enough?

Endnotes

1. A. Sinha, "A Lineage of Family Separation," Brooklyn Law Review 87, no. 2 (2022): 445–500, brooklynworks.brooklaw.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2294&context=blr
2. P. M. Crittenden and S. Spieker, "The Effects of Separation from Parents on Children," In C. D. Kelly, Understanding Child Abuse and Neglect—Research and Implications (London: InTechOpen, 2024), intechopen.com/chapters/1160067
3. Crittenden and Spieker, "The Effects of Separation from Parents on Children." 
4. S. Trivedi, “The Harm of Child Removal,” New York University Review of Law and Social Change 43, no. 523 (2019), socialchangenyu.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Shanta-Trivedi_RLSC_43.3.pdf
5. Sinha, "A Lineage of Family Separation." 
6. S. M. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women & Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
7. D. Green, "Ain't I ...?: The Dehumanizing Effect of the Regulation of Slave Womanhood and Family Life," Duke Journal of Gender Law & Policy 25, no. 191 (2018): 191–220, scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1327&context=djglp
8. E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014).
9. Joint Coalition for the 139th Session of the Human Rights Committee, Geneva, Family Separation in the U.S. Child Welfare System, at the U.S.-Mexico Border, and of Indigenous Communities (American Civil Liberties Union, 2023), aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/ICCPR-Family-Separation-Submission-Finalized.pdf
10. The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, "US Indian Boarding School History," boardingschoolhealing.org/education/us-indian-boarding-school-history/; and Sinha, "A Lineage of Family Separation." 
11. Sinha, "A Lineage of Family Separation." 
12. Crittenden and Spieker, "The Effects of Separation from Parents on Children."
13. D. Feir, "The Long-Term Effects of Forcible Assimilation Policy: The Case of Indian Boarding Schools," Canadian Journal of Economics 49, no. 2 (2016): 433–480, doi:10.1111/caje.12203 
14. P. Wilk, A. Maltby, and M. Cooke, "Residential Schools and the Effects on Indigenous Health and Well-Being in Canada—A Scoping Review." Public Health Reviews 38 no. 8 (2017), doi.org/10.1186/s40985-017-0055-6
15. Joint Coalition for the 139th Session of the Human Rights Committee, Geneva, Family Separation.
16. Sinha, "A Lineage of Family Separation." 
17. Sinha, "A Lineage of Family Separation."
18. L. Appleman, "Deviancy, Dependency, and Disability: The Forgotten History of Eugenics and Mass Incarceration," Duke Law Journal 68 (2018): 417–478, scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3958&context=dlj
19. Appleman, "Deviancy, Dependency, and Disability"; and K. Nielsen, A Disability History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018).
20. Appleman, "Deviancy, Dependency, and Disability." 
21. E. Anderson, The Parent Trap: Parents with Disabilities and the Flaws within Termination of Parental Rights Proceedings (Cincinnati, OH: Cincinnati Law Review, October 2021), uclawreview.org/2021/10/20/the-parent-trap-parents-with-disabilities-and-the-flaws-of-termination-of-parental-rights-proceedings/#:~:text=Immediately%20after
22. S. DeZelar and E. Lightfoot, "Use of parental disability as a removal reason for children in foster care in the U.S." Children and Youth Services Review 86 (2018), 128–134, doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2018.01.027
23. E. Slayter, "Youth with Disabilities in the United States Child Welfare System," Children and Youth Services Review 64 (2016): 155–165, sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0190740916300834
24. H. Naveed and A. Neier, "If I Wasn't Poor, I Wouldn't Be Unfit": The Family Separation Crisis in the US Child Welfare System. (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2022), hrw.org/report/2022/11/17/if-i-wasnt-poor-i-wouldnt-be-unfit/family-separation-crisis-us-child-welfare#:~:text=The%20146-page%20report; and S. Barriga et al., "Children with Disabilities: Deprivation of Liberty in the Name of Care and Treatment (Human Rights Watch, 2017), hrw.org/news/2017/03/07/children-disabilities-deprivation-liberty-name-care-and-treatment

[illustration by Erin K. Robinson]