MANHATTAN (CN) — A group of parents on Tuesday filed a scathing class action against New York City, accusing its Administration for Children’s Services of engaging in “invasive searches” against the same families it’s tasked with protecting.
The 49-page lawsuit, filed in federal court in Brooklyn, claims that the ACS uses unconstitutional “coercive tactics” during routine home inspections.
“As part of its routine investigations into families, ACS has a widespread custom, policy and practice of entering and searching families’ homes by using coercive tactics to make parents feel that they have no choice but to allow caseworkers to enter and search their homes,” the parents claim.
According to the parents in their suit, ACS agents would threaten to take children away or call the police if the parents didn’t let them into their homes. The parents add that investigators would rarely seek court orders — one of the three legal justifications for searches under the Fourth Amendment — to initiate these probes, despite having every opportunity to do so.
“ACS has the ability ‘at all hours’ to obtain court orders to enter and search families’ homes,” the parents claim. “ACS chooses to almost never seek these court orders. Across the nearly 53,000 investigations ACS conducted last year, it sought only 222 court orders to search families’ homes.”
Once inside, workers ransacked the parents’ belongings and even strip-searched their children without consent, according to the parents.
“ACS caseworkers routinely examine every room of families' homes, rifle through their belongings, and in many cases search children’s bodies, all without regard to whether the scope of the searches has any relationship to the conduct being investigated,” the parents argue.
These unconstitutional searches take place whether or not there’s merit to the investigations, the parents claim. One of the named plaintiffs, single mother of three Ebony Gould of Queens, asserted that the ACS has investigated her at least 12 times thanks to “false and malicious reports” from her abusive ex-partner.
During those investigations, Gould claims that ACS workers used those same coercive tactics against her — including causing a ruckus with the neighbors in Gould’s building, threatening to take her kids away and eventually strip-searching her children for signs of physical abuse.
But after all that, Gould claims that no court case was ever filed against her, nor her children removed from her care. She said in the suit that the investigations were “ultimately unfounded,” but the experience caused “Ms. Gould and her children to suffer severe trauma that remains with them today.”
Fellow named plaintiff Curtayasia Taylor echoed Gould’s experience. She claimed in the suit that ACS caseworkers went so far as to tell her that her children were no longer hers and “instead, clients of ACS to whom she could not talk without ACS’s permission.”
The parents claim that ACS’s unconstitutional investigative practices are well-known to the city. They also say that their claims have been “meticulously documented” by the agency’s internal reports, agency staff and informational material provided to parents.
“Nonetheless, ACS fails to provide anything close to adequate training to its caseworkers about families’ Fourth Amendment rights during home searches,” the parents add. “Instead of ensuring that its staff follows the law, ACS has created and continues to foster a regime of coerced acquiescence by using tactics that inculcate fear in parents that unless they cede to ACS’s demands, their children will be taken.”
The suit cites an unnamed ACS worker, who likened the roughly two-month investigation process to “being stopped and frisked for sixty days.”
In response to the lawsuit, Marisa Kaufman, a spokesperson for the city agency, told Courthouse News that “ACS is committed to keeping children safe and respecting parents’ rights.”
“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,” Kaufman added.
The plaintiffs are seeking damages on claims of Fourth Amendment unreasonable search violations. They’re being represented by David Shalleck-Klein of the Family Justice Law Center, an organization dedicated to challenging unnecessary family separation.
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