Staff Reports
The state takes a child. The parent is told to wait. Wait for hearings, wait for discovery, wait for rulings. Weeks turn into months while a new “status quo” forms in foster care. Two recent developments — a Kentucky appellate denial of emergency relief and the introduction of the Samier Amer Foster Care Improvement Act (H.R.10865) in Congress — shine a bright light on how the system uses time as a weapon against parents. That is the real story here, and it deserves sharper medicine than a polite bill with a 90‑day snooze button.
Kentucky Court of Appeals says “appeal later” — and means it
A Kentucky mother who had been apart from her child for roughly 70 days asked Judge Audra Jeckerle and the Kentucky Court of Appeals for emergency relief. The court refused. It said a final dispositional order — not an urgent interim review — was the normal trigger for appellate action. In plain English: wait. The court acknowledged the separation but found the harm wasn’t the kind that deserves immediate intervention. That is the posture we see again and again — courts treating months of separation as something to be fixed after the clock has run.
Congress’s bill offers a fix — but with a long nap built in
Representative Debbie Dingell has put forward H.R.10865, the Samier Amer Foster Care Improvement Act, which tries to force states to adopt faster notice and a quick review for placement decisions via Title IV‑E rules. Sounds useful until you read the fine print: the state can take up to 90 days to give written notice of its placement decision. The child’s attorney can ask a court for review and the court must start that review within seven days — but the bill sets no deadline for the court’s final decision. So we get a lot of procedure and a lot of delay, with parents left arguing over crumbs while the system builds the evidence it will later use against them.
Why 90 days and narrow standing will not save families
Ninety days is not an administrative quirk. For a toddler it is a season. For an infant it is a chunk of life. During that time the child bonds to foster caregivers, starts a new school, makes a new routine. That state‑created routine is then paraded in court as proof the old home is “disruptive.” Worse, H.R.10865 appears to give the child’s attorney the primary right to seek review, not the parent or interested relatives, and it lacks clear remedies when officials ignore the rules. A deadline without teeth is just a suggestion. A “right” you can’t enforce is decoration.
Real reform must treat time as due process
If we mean to respect parental rights and reunification, we must stop pretending paperwork equals justice. Parents need immediate access to counsel and the whole removal record. Placement reasons should be disclosed within 24 to 48 hours, not 90 days. Parents and relatives must have statutory standing to demand review. Missed deadlines should carry real consequences: expedited relief, fee shifting, sanctions, and a presumption in favor of return when safety allows. Judges who shrug off mandatory procedures should face transparent review. Short of that, Congress will be writing another well‑intentioned bill that lets the bureaucracy do what it already does best: run out the clock and then act surprised when families fall apart.
