How a push to protect parental rights is reshaping Texas' foster care system

Fresh off last year’s voter approval of a parental rights amendment to the state’s constitution, three rulings last month signal how the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services faces more scrutiny when it comes to permanently removing children from harmful and abusive families.

In two cases last month, the Texas Supreme Court pushed back on the agency’s assessment that a parent should lose their rights entirely, clearing the way for the children to be put up for adoption.

In a third June court case, which could change how future abuse and neglect determinations are made, an Austin judge found that DFPS violated the constitutional rights of Temecia and Rodney Jackson after their newborn girl was briefly taken from them in 2023 over a dispute with a pediatrician over managing the child’s jaundice condition.

The judge ruled the agency violated the couple’s due process rights by giving them no way to appeal its decision that it was “unable to determine” whether they abused their child.

“Our goal is to hold people’s toes to the fire to what the Constitution requires. The Constitution requires due process,” said Sophia Howard, a Texas ACLU law fellow who worked on the Jacksons’ successful case.

While there’s no precise way to determine whether families in the crosshairs of a DFPS abuse investigation are winning more than before, Texas courts are giving a clear signal: it’ll take much more than than general concerns about child abuse for the state to permanently remove a child from their home.

What’s happening in the courts is the result of policies Texas has been spearheading for years: an intense decades-long bipartisan effort to rewire the agency’s mission, court-ordered reforms stemming from a costly 15-year-old lawsuit over conditions in the state’s foster care system and a post-pandemic parent population more willing to push back against the state after suffering through school lockdowns and whiplash-inducing public health advice about COVID-19.

Andrew Brown, vice president of policy for the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative policy group that has advocated for reform of the state’s child welfare system, said parents are more vocal about exercising their rights.

“I think COVID played into that, because it gave families a very stark reality check,” Brown said.

The pandemic added fuel to a decades-long trend of some parents pushing back against what they see as government overreach, which helped push states like Texas to remake their child welfare systems, Brown and others said.

As part of that overhaul, the state has been transferring nearly all responsibility for foster care children to private companies.

“I think there are multiple streams that are leading to this particular moment,” Josh Gupta-Kagan, director of the Columbia Law School’s family defense clinic.

Child welfare reforms bring other urgent concerns

The idea of putting parents on better legal footing during child abuse investigations is a decades-old conversation that began after studies consistently showed Black children were unfairly targeted in state child abuse investigations.

Some estimates show that over half of all Black children in the United States will have been the subject of a child welfare investigation before their 18th birthday. Most of those investigations are because of poverty misinterpreted as neglect, not abuse, researchers have found.

“There were abuses in the past of removal power. People who weren’t poor, saw poverty as abuse,” said Vicki Spriggs, CEO of Texas CASA, the nonprofit group of volunteers often called on by a judge to serve as a child’s advocate in a Child Protective Services case. “There were some very significant misuses of removal.”

The parental rights conversation is becoming louder as the state’s child welfare agency enters its most transformative era.

DFPS is up for Sunset this year — the routine performance review for state agencies that will undoubtedly be a first comprehensive evaluation of DFPS’ handoff of foster care management to the private sector.

A little over 50% of the state’s foster care management is now in private hands. But it hasn’t been a completely smooth transition.

This week, DFPS abruptly canceled its $137.6 million contract with EMPOWER, which manages foster care placement and services in Dallas and eight adjoining counties, after a rocky two years that saw at least two children die in its care.

DFPS had placed EMPOWER under state supervision in March. That supervision was supposed to continue until next month — but the agency abruptly canceled the contract and transferred the region’s foster care management to two other contractors. The agency has also asked a court to seal a report on the progress EMPOWER has made since March.

At the same time, the agency is also trying to settle a 2011 class action lawsuit filed by children’s lawyers alleging dangerous foster care conditions — which has cost the state more than $200 million to date to pay for federal court monitoring and reforms.

Spriggs worries that so much DFPS regulatory change, coming at the same time as historic federal cuts to public health and tougher restrictions on food assistance and Medicaid, may put more children at risk as poorer families face even more financial strain.

“People are losing jobs, so all those things that keep tensions from happening in families are increasing while … they’ve raised the bar on (child abuse) removals,” she said.

Texas’ long road to reform and rapid fixes

So how did Texas get here? Starting in 2004, a gruesome series of child deaths occurred despite state intervention and regulation.

A 9-year-old Arlington boy was found starved to death despite six CPS visits to his home in 2004. The same year, a woman killed her 10-month old in Plano, months after a CPS visit. More highly publicized deaths followed involving children already known to be in danger by the state.

Then-Gov. Rick Perry and Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst called for investigations into the agency. In 2005, the state claimed it would need 800 more workers and more than $300 million to improve the state’s child protection system.

Texas lawmakers responded, approving money to improve training, salaries, recruitment and technology for CPS workers.

But by 2017, Democrat and Republican Texas lawmakers had grown frustrated with more than a decade of attempts to fix a swamped state Child Protective Services system that seemed to produce more heartbreaking headlines than stable families. That year, they began moving away from a remove-and-hold child foster care system and enhancing the rights of parents being investigated.

Meanwhile, headlines about the ongoing federal lawsuit over troubling foster care conditions — which lingered despite federal court oversight — prompted the state to hire private lawyers to try to bring it to an end.

“It finally got to the point where people started paying attention and realized, ’Oh, this isn’t right,” the TPPF’s Brown said. “The system had grown so large, and the net had grown so large, that you were pulling in families that did not need to be there, and you were pulling in families who … previously would have just been helped by community organizations, and places of worship, you know, the civil society in their neighborhoods.”

That year, with House Bill 7, lawmakers streamlined removal procedures, making it less likely that children were removed simply because they lived in poorer circumstances instead of facing immediate physical danger. With House Bill 11, lawmakers began moving both care and placement of foster care children into the hands of private nonprofit organizations.

The 2021 legislative session produced two landmark bills that pushed Texas into the forefront of child welfare reform.

One new law strengthened parents’ rights in child abuse medical investigations, prohibiting the removal of children based on the sole medical opinion of an expert contracted by DFPS. And because most CPS investigations involved families accused of neglect, not immediate harm, the Legislature also narrowed the definition of neglect that would require state intervention, from “substantial risk” to “immediate harm.”

As a result, the number of children removed from their homes began dropping rapidly. In 2016, there were 19,070 child removals in Texas. That number declined by 47% in 2025 to 10,011.

“I do think the system is often overbroad and intervenes in families harmfully and unnecessarily,” said Gupta-Kagan, the family defense lawyer and Columbia Law School professor. “I think the system is basically spread too thin and distracted by too many petty cases.”

In 2023, Texas lawmakers passed another nation-leading initiative by expanding parental due process rights: Parents subjected to a state child abuse investigation must now be given a written, Miranda-style warning telling them that they can have an attorney present during a CPS investigation interview and can refuse to participate in an interview.

“What Texas really did was, we looked at our system from a couple different angles,” said the TPPF’s Brown, “We looked at both the structural failings of the way the bureaucracy was running. But we also started looking at, well, how are we making these decisions that are impacting the lives of kids and their families?”

State leaders keep child welfare a priority for 2027

When Texas lawmakers return to Austin in January, the public is going to hear more about the treatment of parents and families in the foster care system and whether any adjustments are needed in the way foster care is working under the newer contracted system.

Both Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Dustin Burrows have listed the child welfare system — particularly how parents are investigated — as priorities for the upcoming session.

Brown said he’s hoping to see more reforms, especially when it comes to helping parents. Florida has a new complaint office just for parents who are facing state abuse investigations and Brown said he’d like to see a similar office created within the attorney general’s office in Texas.

But he also wants to see the results of the Sunset review of the agency before pitching even bigger ideas.

“We’ve done so much,” Brown said. “Let’s watch Sunset play out … and then make strategic choices on how to move forward.”

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Disclosure: Dan Patrick and Texas Public Policy Foundation have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in The Texas Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.