Chas Budnick, Associate Director of Family Defense, testified before the New York City Council Committee on Children & Youth on how systemic failures in the foster system delay family reunification and undermine parental rights. He detailed how ACS and foster agencies routinely separate children from their families while failing to provide the support needed to bring them home quickly.

"Even when families successfully reunify, the families we work with are traumatized by this intervention and are often left to manage the challenge of rebuilding their family bonds with little or no support. We must instead work to ensure all families are well-resourced and supported prior to any state intervention, and that should a child be removed from their family, that they are given every support available to maintain and nurture their family bonds, and to quickly reunify. Too many New York City families experience the compounded harm of being separated and then having ACS and its foster agencies undermine their family bonds at every juncture."​

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"New York City’s foster system often works to keep foster resources and parents separate and to actively build a foster resource’s bond with a child while a parent has minimal meaningful engagement with their child. Not only does this dynamic affirmatively undermine family bonds, it also fails to harness the potential to work with foster resources as support for reunification."

Read the full testimony here.