mission in action: ending “the civil death penalty”

boulette PLLC recently filed a friend of the court brief on behalf of the Indian Child Welfare Act Law Center, in a case meant to curtail unnecessary terminations of parental rights.

The brief itself raises a question too seldom asked: what does terminating a parent's rights mean for the child it's supposed to protect and to the parent it's supposed to correct. What cost are these families paying and to what end?

The answer matters immensely.

Terminating parental rights permanently severs every legal tie between a parent and a child. Roughly one in a hundred American children will lose a legal parent this way before turning eighteen. Over seventy thousand a year. In Minnesota the burden falls hardest on the same families it always has: Native children here lose a legal parent at nearly ten times the rate of their white peers and Black children at five times the rate, even as research doesn't find higher rates of abuse in those homes.

And termination frequently doesn't deliver the protection or permanency it promises. Between 1997 and 2022, more than 200,000 children nationally were severed from a parent and never adopted by anyone, left in the category child welfare researchers call legal orphans. The brief puts these figures into context and, alongside the social science, shares stories about two mothers who show what’s possible when the law stops giving up on families.

This is the work our firm exists to do.