Care and the Family Policing System: A Dialogue with Joyce McMillan

Joyce McMillan, founder and executive director of Just Making A Change for Families (JMAC),¹ is a thought leader, educator, community organizer, and an avid advocate in the fight for abolishing the “family policing system.”² Joyce is committed to calling out the injustices of discriminatory systems and policies that overwhelmingly separate Black, brown, and Indigenous families under the guise of protecting and caring for children in New York and nationwide. Through intentional dialogue, Michelle Grier and Vivianne Guevara, members of the Network to Advance Abolition in Social Work (NAASW), engage with Joyce to gain insight about the intersectionalities of care work, abolition and social work, and the family regulation system, as well as how we answer the call to action in the fight to support all families.³

At this moment, we are witnessing attempts to dismantle public assistance programs, attacks on transgender rights and reproductive and family rights, and the growth of carceral systems through immigration policing. Advocates, people, and families are responding in multiple ways, including grassroots organizing and alternative models of support, focused on knowledge- and resource-sharing, mutual aid, safety practices, and healing work. The aforementioned are forms of state and community care, and yet care being defined as “providing someone with what they need for their health or protection” often takes many different forms in institutions and communities in the United States.⁴ Premilla Nadasen asserts that “contemporary capitalists earn profit from producing and sustaining humans, sometimes for their labor power, but increasingly because they need care. The profits of care accrue from providing market-based services, managing state programs, or financing people’s efforts to combat poverty and misery.”⁵ In a society birthed in capitalism and white supremacy, a commitment to accountable and alternative care models — including abolishing the family policing system — has the potential to be a commitment to a social care project that pushes the boundaries of capitalism.

The history of the United States is entrenched in a legacy of family separation as a means of enacting terror and subjugating peoples to uphold white supremacy and racial capitalism.⁶ Whether through the legal selling of Black children from their enslaved parents or the forced removal of Indigenous children into Native American “boarding schools,” these forms of state and social violence accompanied colonization and chattel slavery and have been remodeled in modern immigration and family policy. Scholars such as Dorothy Roberts, Angela Davis, Alan Detlaff, and advocates like Angela Burton and Joyce McMillan argue that family separation — the act of removing children from their families by the family policing system, through legal systems or force — is a way of asserting control, especially over Black, Indigenous, immigrant, and poor families.⁷ These and many other scholars and advocates also argue that there are clear reasons why a system purportedly meant to give care would continue to enforce harm. The family policing system benefits from the creation of an inexpensive and disenfranchised workforce that is indoctrinated into a state-sponsored saviorship, one that ensures the strength of a continued, self-sustaining family policing system. Moreover, that same system gains strength from a narrative that family togetherness is a privilege reserved for wealthy and white Americans.

The family policing system has its origins in the Social Security Act of 1935, which the federal government enacted with at least one stated intention to be a social justice-inspired system of care and support for children experiencing neglect and abuse.⁸ Instead, the ideals and biases rooted in the country’s origins of racism and white settler colonialism permeated the act. Its exclusion of large groups of Black workers and its paternal oversight of poor children allowed for the family policing system to function with prejudicial policies built and sustained under the guise of care for the most vulnerable. Currently the family policing system is responsible for mandated reporting and family investigations, which result in 250,000 instances in which children are separated from their families and placed in foster care, with a majority of children and families being punished for systemic poverty.⁹ Mandated reporting, a requirement of the 1974 Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA) law, with varied rules and training by state, requires direct service practitioners (social workers, teachers, youth workers, police, and more) to report suspected neglect or abuse by a person in the child’s home. Such practice results in home surveillance, child removals, foster placements, civil right violations, and adoptions.¹⁰

Data collected by the government and assessed by scholars and advocacy groups demonstrate that Black, brown, Indigenous, and immigrant families are disproportionately separated from their families, overwhelmingly for issues having to do with poverty experienced by families and biases in the reporting system.¹¹ Even short-term separations between children and their families can be traumatic and long-lasting on a child’s development, and many children also report experiencing acts of violence and harm while in state care.¹² While the authors acknowledge that people are more than statistics, we add some numbers below to demonstrate these disparities:

• “On average, 700 children are removed from the custody of their parents every day, and more than 200,000 children enter the foster system each year.”¹³
• “In 2023, Black children represented 22 percent of those entering care but only 14 percent of the total child population. American Indian and Alaska Native kids have the highest rate of entry into foster care, at 6.2 per 1,000 in 2023, more than three times the national average of 2.0 per 1,000, and well above the rates for all other racial groups.”¹⁴
• “In 2021, approximately 100,000 children — less than half of youth exiting foster care — were reunified with their families. Native American children are reunified with their families at lower rates than children of any other race.”¹⁵

These facts and the shared stories of those impacted by this system raise many questions about the goals of the system and why, despite decades of similar reports, there has been little change in the structure of the family policing system. Additionally, while we know children are affected by these acts of separation, we also know that parents, guardians, and caregivers in these cases are prosecuted, incarcerated, lose employment and resources, and are placed under high surveillance and restrictive “improvement plans” with little financial resources and support to meet the conditions set by family courts for reunification between children and their families.

Impacted parents, children, and workers have organized for decades and continue to gain more public awareness as they call for an abolition of the current system and a movement towards new care practices. These advocates recognize that children can experience harm both inside their homes and within/through a foster care placement. They witness that removals are not a catchall intervention to promote the success of young people experiencing hardship and families experiencing poverty. The call for an abolition of the family policing system is, therefore, like calls for the abolition of prisons, a direct demand by the people most affected to envision new ways to address child and family safety — ways that combine imagination and freedom in the creation of a path that recognizes disparities, fosters healing, and protects the rights of people to have families.¹⁶

The advocates who have been holding the family advocacy movement, the term created by impacted advocates for the work to shift family policing practices, seek creative interventions by and for children and families directly impacted by the family policing system. Continually, the family advocacy movement often engages in collective care, mutual aid, popular education, and organizing for self-empowerment and collective healing. In Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Premilla Nadasen takes us on a journey to investigate the different forms and implications of care work in a capitalist society.¹⁷ Nadasen demonstrates the ways in which the demand for care services has been converted into a business market engaging in exploitation of labor force and sustaining people in need of support in crisis to keep the demand high for the market. While providing insight into the contradictions of care work, she also highlights alternative modalities of care that have been imagined by Black radical traditions, Indigenous movements, disability justice, and abolitionist movement practices, including Joyce’s engagement in abolition politics.¹⁸ Abolitionist practices call for a world without prisons and carceral interventions, recognizing that the oppressive tentacles of slavery, colonialism, and capitalism are the foundation for policing systems in the United States and the world and cannot be a part of the liberation of Black people or society.¹⁹

And so we gathered to share stories, listen, and learn from Joyce McMillan, fierce and unapologetic advocate fighting against the family policing system, which she deems a construct of social work.

Michelle Grier and Vivianne Guevara are two social workers who met through NAASW at the height of mass uprisings in 2020 related to the killing of George Floyd and calling for less police and more care supports.²⁰ This collective of social workers came together to question, comprehend, and share about abolition projects and the challenges of practicing abolition and social work given how, as many of the scholars we cited above insist, the field of social work can and often does uphold systems directly related to criminalization. For many of us, we were and are implicated in the family policing system as licensed practitioners and mandated reporters, holding deep questions about this system that our profession has built. It was time for a reckoning and further investigation of the family policing system. At that heightened time, Joyce shared her stories and knowledge as a directly impacted person, organizer, and leader at events the collective held for the social work community. She gave clear and unapologetic marching orders for what social workers could be doing now to support families. 

We authors/interviewers have been impacted by the work of Joyce McMillan.²¹ Joyce is unapologetic in her role as a disruptor of systemic barriers that disproportionately affect people of color, particularly within the family policing system. She has first-hand experience of how a system that is purported to be a system of care harms people and perpetuates a legacy of punishment, control, and exploitation. This experience is central to her story and drives the urgency in her work, informing the creation of Just Making A Change for Families (JMAC). As the group declares, “JMAC is a non-profit organization working to dismantle the family policing system while simultaneously investing in community support that keeps families together.”²²

In public ad campaigns on NYC buses and billboards, Joyce promoted community dialogue and called for the abolition of the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS), using visuals that boldly declared “Fuck ACS.” She has been an intentional disruptor by lending her voice on panels, supporting student protests for accountability at NYC Schools of Social Work, and calling for better protections of parents and children and accountability from institutions that are the stewards of the family policing system in New York City and across the globe. She is the founder and co-chair of Parent Legislative Action Network (PLAN) and Narrowing the Front Door Working Group, which supports change at the macro level and informs New York family policies. Most recently, Joyce worked on the Anti-harassment in Reporting Act (S550/A1234), which would reduce malicious calls by requiring reporters to provide their name and contact information, remaining confidential (not anonymous) to improve accountability.²³ Moreover, she is also a thought partner and contributor to the Family Miranda Rights Act (S551/A1234), the Maternal Health, Dignity and Consent Act (S845/A860), and the Preserving Family Bonds Act (S5240/A4940),²⁴ all rooted in protecting families, reducing harm, and affirming dignity and autonomy across New York.²⁵ Joyce’s unwavering dedication to her community and this fight is an example of care in action.

The interview took place virtually on a fall day in 2024, with a follow-up in early 2025 as the United States experienced another political shift. We are honored to take this time to highlight Joyce’s work through this conversation and offer insight into acts of care that are pushing past the pull of capitalism. 

Michelle Grier (MG) and Vivianne Guevara (VG): Joyce, thank you for being here with us during this conversation. Let’s get into it and start with an introduction to your work. How do you define your work? What is the inspiration and mission of JMAC? How has this evolved since you started?

Joyce McMillan (JM): I define my work as protecting and defending the rights of families to have control over their own lives and decisions, especially when it comes to parenting, without unjust surveillance or intervention by the state through what is often called the “child welfare system,” but which we in the family advocacy movement refer to as the family policing system.

The inspiration behind founding JMAC comes directly from my own experience as a system-impacted person. From the start, JMAC was founded with a commitment to ensuring that system-impacted people are not just represented but centered in leadership and decision-making within the organization. That same commitment extends to our role in the broader family advocacy movement: we believe that those most directly affected by the system must be the ones guiding the work. We know this system intimately because we have lived it. Our mission is to expose the harms of the family policing system and to advance meaningful reforms that reduce its reach and power. Shrinking the system is a necessary step toward our ultimate goal: dismantling it entirely. Our work is about ending family surveillance, ending separation, and building a future where families are truly supported, not controlled.

When I began this work, I was focused on supporting individual families, providing court advocacy, material support, and guidance as they navigated interactions with ACS/CPS [state-named “Child Protective Services”]. But it became clear that for every family I assisted, there were countless others who were being impacted. The scale and reach of state surveillance and intervention in Black family life needed a broader response. That realization moved me toward legislative advocacy and systems-change work. At the same time, I recognized that shifting public narratives was just as critical. Much of the harm this system causes is justified under the language of child protection, a narrative that masks the realities of state control and family separation.

Care and the Family Policing System

MG: Thank you for grounding us in your origin story and advocacy work. Now, what does actual care look like for you, and what does it look like in this system? 

JM: Care means ensuring families have their basic needs met: health, welfare, stability, and protection, while honoring their humanity with love, kindness, and without judgment. 

We’re so far from true care. So many people working in the system are so focused on the claim that they’re protecting children that they fail to understand what real care means. If reporting and removals demonstrated care for children, then we wouldn’t have over eight hundred lawsuits against child welfare agencies in New York City post the “2019 Child Victims Act” lifting statutes of limitation.²⁶ In reality, many people who work for agencies or teachers, doctors, etc. are trained in mandated reporting and then put into overwhelming situations where they are told that this is the best intervention. If they don’t engage this reporting structure, they are at risk of losing their jobs and license. The system is overtaxed and under-resourced; there isn’t care for the child, families, or workers. People leading these systems rarely take responsibility for these disparities. They work within its broken boundaries without challenging them, even when the outcomes are harmful. Mandated reporting isn’t about protecting kids — it’s become a tool for covering oneself at work. Care is being removed from the intervention for policy and protocol. This fear-driven approach has created a culture of overreporting and further harming families.

VG: As a follow-up to that question, how have you been able to highlight these realities to leaders in government and agencies? I saw you were just at the White House in September 2024. Can you tell us more about this too?

JM: There is a story as to how we got to the White House. In August 2022 I traveled with advocates Shereen White (director of advocacy and policy at Children’s Rights) and Angela Burton to Switzerland to testify before the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD). We spoke about the realities of family policing and how the United States had neglected the United Nations treaty and called on President Biden to take action.²⁷ After our UN meetings, the committee conducted a year-long hearing on child welfare in New York, where over three hundred people, including judges, lawyers, doctors, social workers, and impacted individuals gave testimony. The findings were clear: child welfare should be abolished in America.

Despite the overwhelming evidence, there was resistance to these findings. Several board members also quit just days before the report was finalized, creating chaos within the committee. However, the committee decided to move forward, and the findings were published.²⁸ The meeting at the White House was a follow-up to this work. During the White House meeting, Shereen spoke about children in congregate care settings, and I focused on child welfare more broadly. We in this movement are trying to engage leaders at every level. We share stories about people we know and prepare folks to tell their own story. We also try to make the invisible visible and show the long-lasting impact on families, but it is still a struggle to be heard in these spaces.

VG: I’d love to hear what care has felt like to you personally over the years. What’s your vision for these organizations moving forward?

JM: I didn’t have a clear vision of what the outcome would look like, but I did expect honesty about how the system fails families. When the family policing system entered my life, I was a banker; when they left, I was addicted, homeless, incarcerated, and had lost my children. The emotional pain of losing precious memories and moments, like my kids’ baby pictures or birthday celebrations, will never go away. The system destroyed my bond with my younger daughter, and we’ve been struggling ever since she was returned to me at almost three years old. I believe if we hadn’t been separated, I would have a relationship with her like I do with my older child. At no point did the system help us. It was community members, groups that support parents, where I was able to share my story, be seen and held, and begin to learn my rights and how to advocate.

On moving forward, I’m thinking about an interview I had with Jane Spinak, a former Columbia Law School professor who later wrote a book calling for the abolition of family court after she retired.²⁹ She had spent years defending the system, but once she left academia, she started advocating for its end. In the interview, Jane said that abolition would never happen because the system supports middle-class jobs, like social workers, case managers, and judges. These jobs are built on the foster care system, and ending it would disrupt their livelihoods. I responded that I wasn’t trying to take anyone’s job away, but simply asking people to do their jobs in a way that supports families rather than harms them. The resistance to abolition often comes from people who fear losing their jobs, but I believe we can maintain our livelihoods while treating people with humanity and respect.

Shifting the Culture of the Family Policing System

MG: You provide a mirror and direct insights to the institutions and key stakeholders at the Offices of Children and Family Services and leaders of social service agencies invested in foster placements and the work of caring for children. What is the part of your work that feels most relevant to shifting the practices of care workers (such as social workers, legal advocates, and others) to include care for Black and brown families?

JM: JMAC’s The Reckoning series, for example, is a project that has curated conversations and convenings with some of the biggest NYC social services agencies, legal advocates, and impacted folks. This space is aimed at uncovering sometimes brutal truths about the disparities in the practices of these institutions. Yeah, The Reckoning is the body of work I’m most excited about right now. It began with the Narrowing the Front Door Working Group, started by Jess Dannhauser, Anne Williams-Isom (Former Deputy Mayor), and Angela Olivia Burton.³⁰ I was selected to be a committee member. Later, I became the co-chair alongside Angela Burton and Christin Morris, with whom I also work at the New School through my fellowship.

We’ve been having ongoing conversations about “narrowing the front door” — a term we use to highlight the need to decrease anti-Black practices in supporting families and promoting the well-being of Black families and communities in New York City.³¹ There have been three events with three major social service agencies in New York. The attendees include case managers, legal advocates, directors, and other staff. Here, they had space to publicly acknowledge their mistakes, which is often a difficult position to take. Being able to name the harm gives space to begin to create interventions that make change. The real progress comes when those in power start doing things differently, and these events mark a shift in how these agencies are approaching their work.

I see as next step what the Narrowing the Front Door working group and JMAC for Families, in partnership with the Commission on Racial Equity (CORE), are creating: a thirteen-member, community-led NYC Accountability Council focused on family investigations, separations, and wellbeing. This council will conduct research, hold public forums, and recommend actions to end ongoing harm, address past injustices, and prevent future harm within NYC’s family policing system.

VG: After doing The Reckoning work and collaborating with impacted folks and workers, how does the care you receive now — from the professionals you work with, collaborate with, and organize with — differ from the care (or lack of care) you experienced from professionals when you were going through the system, or even now as you fight against it as a parent?

JM: I don’t think state care has changed that much yet, but I’m working with people in the system to create that change. What I’ve noticed is that they are starting to recognize the harm they’ve caused to families and children and are actively working to do things differently. They’re holding internal meetings to address past mistakes and correct them. The key difference now is that, unlike before when people harmed my family without acknowledging it, these professionals are now saying, “I don’t want to be part of that,” and are committed to finding better solutions. They’re trusting impacted people to help guide these conversations and create a thoughtful, lasting roadmap for real change. We don’t all agree on the methods, but we are all fighting for a big change to this system. 

MG/VG: Social workers are hired in departments of child services in overwhelming numbers. We are social workers who supervise and teach, and we have shifted our practices and seek to infuse abolition and alternative practices in our teaching and supervision. Training is also a means of shifting practices. We know you have worked with schools of social work on revising their mandated reporter training. How have you further collaborated with social workers and social work schools in shifting the frame around caring for families?

JM: I mentor social work students from a range of colleges, including Smith College, Barnard College, and Columbia University. Currently, I host social work interns from both Smith and Columbia. Interns are meaningfully integrated into the work of JMAC for Families and are exposed to every part of the organization so they can develop a well-rounded understanding of the issues and the work. This experience challenges what academic institutions may have taught them and helps them see what the system does, as opposed to what it claims to do. They are also encouraged to work directly with system-impacted advocates, like myself, so that as future professionals they carry forward a more profound understanding and a commitment to supporting the dismantling of the system rather than upholding it.

MG/VG: What would you say to social worker students who often go to school so they can support people and provide an idealized version of care?

JM: I’d tell them, “Don’t be part of the problem — be the solution.” You don’t have to harm others. No one can force you to hurt someone, even if the system gives you the tools to do so. Listen to impacted people, understand what it takes to avoid harm, and trust your conscience. Do right by families, even if it costs you your job — many have lost their jobs for standing up and have found ways to move forward. The system doesn’t want to change or to lose power, and those who think critically are seen as threats. If you’re a free thinker, you can help turn this system upside down quickly. Right now, the focus is on “do no harm,” and the younger generation, including students, is starting to see the injustice in the system. They’re speaking out, realizing that the protection of children often means denying them the opportunity to thrive.

It’s not just about Black people fighting for justice — it’s about all people standing together for change. As Martin Luther King Jr. in [the] “Letter from Birmingham [Jail]” said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”³² We’re seeing more young people, especially white students, recognize how they benefit from systems of oppression, and they’re starting to stand up. Times are changing, and we must fight for everyone to be treated with humanity.

Collaboration as Care

VG: It sounds like the work you are doing is addressing injustice while providing support to people. It sounds very much like “healing justice”?³³ Do you think you are engaging in healing justice work? 

JM: I’d call it healing work because it’s healing to tell your story, to hear someone admit, “It wasn’t your fault. We made it harder for you.” Recognizing that creates space for truth telling. Whether you call it healing or restorative justice or something else, it’s healing work. Coming together with impacted people to shift mindsets and inform policy and train workers. 

MG: You mentioned earlier that care came from outside systems and instead came from people in the community. Are there any comrades or activists that you would like us to name as partners in this work?

JM: I definitely want to shine a spotlight on April Lee, founder and executive director of Philly Voice for Change; Corey Best, founder of Mining for Gold; Desseray Wright, founder and executive director of Blessings; and Tanesha Grant, founder and executive director of Parents Supporting Parents.³⁴ I also want to uplift Angela Burton, who I have named many times already and whose work has been instrumental in advancing monumental change across the family policing system landscape. There are so many across the country, and if I forgot you blame it on my head and not my heart.

MG: We also have been learning from abolitionists Shira Hassan and Mariame Kaba, Halimah Washington, Erin Miles Cloud, Movement for Family Power, UpEnd Movement, Shannon Perez-Darby and Mandated Reporting is Not Neutral, and Mandated Reporters Against Mandated Reporting to name a few more.³⁵

VG: How do you choose the organizations and people you collaborate with? And how do you decide when to end relationships?

JM: I believe our gut instinct is connected to our integrity. If it feels good and authentic to collaborate, then I move forward with that person or group. Sometimes though there is that feeling that tells you to move on a different path. I have had some tough moments with organizers and organizations and had to go through a healing process. Having a trusted mediator to support the process was really helpful, and I felt so much better. Organizing and working in this field can sometimes push people to stay in relationships that aren’t serving them. I decide to end relationships when they no longer feel fulfilled to me or when both parties are no longer aligned on goals. If there’s too much fighting over vision, it’s a sign we’re not on the same path. I still respect those people, but sometimes we can’t work together.

MG: Disagreement is a part of being in a relationship. Vivianne and I have been learning from movement folks across the world who are proactively building practices to prepare for moments of conflict in their groups. Many have learned from spaces that dissolved because there wasn’t a path to manage the care needed internally. It is how we respond and manage through, that demonstrates our ability to care for one another. It is good to hear that you and the folks you worked with had tools to begin to manage the challenging moments and create common ground to continue the work, whether separately or together. The ability to do this can be an act of care and is hard to sustain but feels necessary to practice a new way outside of carceral systems. 

VG: How do you collaborate with impacted families? How do families come to JMAC? 

JM: I’m proud of JMAC’s Heal, Educate, Advocate, Lead (HEAL) program, a program for parents impacted by family policing, to gain information, tell their story, and advocate. They find us through word of mouth and referrals. It’s about more than just sharing their story — it’s about providing sustainable income, boosting confidence, and expanding their networks and access to resources. HEAL is not a support group; it’s about advocacy and using lived experience to push for change. HEAL strives to keep storytelling for advocacy, and we engage in consent practices when storytelling. 

Into the Future

JM: I do believe there’s been a significant shift in narrative. While there’s still much work to be done to help the general public understand the family policing system, the narrative is changing among more people. Foster agencies and other institutions have begun adopting the language of system-impacted advocates (terms like “mandated supports”), but they’ve largely failed to reflect this language in their actual policies and practices meaningfully. Now advocates are pushing these institutions to ensure their language aligns with real, tangible change.

For me, it’s all about helping impacted people find hope and inner peace. I know how painful being separated from your children is, but I encourage parents to find peace in the present moment, whether their children are with them or not. Though our children are a part of us, their absence — whether by separation or death — shouldn’t stop us from living. Everyone’s experiences can lead to creation, but it’s up to each person to shape that creation. Like Dr. Topeka Sam, who works to provide dignity and safety for those re-entering society, each person can find purpose in their struggles.³⁶

My message is to lean into those challenges with hope and intention because while it’s difficult, those who ride the wave of life rather than fight it will survive and find change. As the world shifts and resources are reduced under the new administration, it’s more important than ever for communities to come together and for philanthropy to stand with them. Communities need real, sustained support to ensure that everyone can meet their basic needs and have their rights protected. Families should never carry the burden of wondering whether they’ll be punished simply for lacking material resources.

Endnotes

1. Just Making A Change for Families (JMAC) is a “non-profit organization working to dismantle the family policing system while simultaneously investing in community support that keeps families together.” See “Who We Are,” Just Making A Change for Families, https://jmacforfamilies.org/who-we-are.[↑]
2. Directly-impacted advocates coined the term “family policing system” to replace what courts define as the “child welfare system.” The family policing system includes actions in family courts, actions by child welfare workers and agencies, as well as the criminalization of parents and families through court systems and systems operators. See Dorothy Roberts, Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (Basic Books, 2022).[↑]
3. The Network to Advance Abolition in Social Work (NAASW) is a “grassroots formation working to end carceral social work and to realize a world free of police, prisons and punishment,” from “About the NAASW,” Network to Advance Abolitionist Social Work (NAASW), https://www.naasw.com/about-the-naasw.[↑]
4. “Care,” Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries, https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/care_1.[↑]
5. Premilla Nadasen, Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (Haymarket Books, 2023): 6-7. [↑]
6. Alan J. Detlaff, Confronting the Racist Legacy of the American Child Welfare System: The Case for Abolition (Oxford University Press, 2024); Auditi Guha,“Family Separation Is a US Tradition. Just Ask Native Communities,” Rewire News Group, June 25, 2018, https://rewirenewsgroup.com/2018/06/25/family-separation-u-s-tradition-just-ask-native-communities/; Vanessa M. Holden, “Slavery and America’s Legacy of Family Separation,” Black Perspectives, July 25, 2018, https://www.aaihs.org/slavery-and-americas-legacy-of-family-separation/. [↑]
7. Roberts, Torn Apart; Madison Hunt and Michael Fitzgerald, “Angela Davis Inspires ‘Family Defense Movement’ Activists,” The Imprint, October 17, 2022, https://imprintnews.org/top-stories/angela-davis-inspires-family-defense-movement-activists/234824; Detlaff, Confronting the Racist Legacy of the American Child Welfare System; Angela Burton, “Unjust Termination and the Preservation of Black Families: A Conversation with Angela Burton,” interview by Khadijah Abdurahman, Logic(s), December 13, 2023, https://logicmag.io/policy/unjust-termination-and-the-preservation-of-black-families; and Joyce McMillian and Dorothy Roberts, “Social Work and Family Policing: A Conversation,” in Abolition and Social Work: Possibilities, Paradoxes, and the Practice of Community Care, ed. Mimi E. Kim, Cameron Rasmussen, and Durrell M. Washington (Haymarket Books, 2024), 116-29.[↑]
8. Roberts, Torn Apart, 13-30.[↑]
9. Roberts, Torn Apart, 22.[↑]
10. Talia P. Gruber, “Beyond Mandated Reporting: Debunking Assumptions to Support Children and Families,” Abolitionist Perspectives in Social Work 1, no. 1 (2023): 3-11.[↑]
11. Alan J. Detlaff, “Why we must end mandatory reporting laws”, Critical and Radical Social Work, Early View (2025); 1-17; New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Examining the New York Child Welfare System and Its Impact on Black Children and Families (U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 2024), https://www.usccr.gov/files/2024-05/ny-child-welfare-system-sac-report.pdf; U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Administration on Children, Youth and Families, Children’s Bureau, Child Maltreatment 2024 (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2026), https://acf.gov/sites/default/files/documents/cb/cm2024.pdf.[↑]
12. Vivek S. Sankaran and Christopher Church, “Easy Come, Easy Go: The Plight of Children who Spend Less than Thirty Days in Foster Care,” University of Pennsylvania Journal of Law and Social Change 19, no. 2 (2017): 207.[↑]
13. American Civil Liberties Union, Family Separation in the US Child Welfare System, at the US-Mexico Border, and of Indigenous Communities, Joint Coalition Submission to the UN Human Rights Committee Reviewing the Fifth Periodic Report of the United States, (American Civil Liberties Union, 2023), 3, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/ICCPR-Family-Separation-Submission-Finalized.pdf.[↑]
14. The Annie E. Casey Foundation, “Child Welfare and Foster Care Statistics: Children Entering Foster Care,” Casey Connects, November 2, 2025, https://www.aecf.org/blog/child-welfare-and-foster-care-statistics; Children’s Rights, The Child Welfare System Fact Sheet, (Children’s Rights, 2023), 2, https://www.childrensrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/CR-The-Child-Welfare-System-2023-Fact-Sheet.pdf.[↑]
15. Children’s Rights, The Child Welfare System Fact Sheet, 2.[↑]
16. Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (Seven Stories Press, 2023).[↑]
17. Nadasen, Care.[↑]
18. Nadasen, Care, 189-219.[↑]
19. Nadasen, Care, 203-204.[↑]
20. “About the NAASW.” [↑]
21. In 2024, Michelle, Vivianne, and Joyce were co-panelists for a session of the 2024 Care, Racial Capitalism, and Social Reproduction Conference at Barnard; this was the first conversations for this interview. “Care, Racial Capitalism, and Social Reproduction,” conference, Barnard Center for Research on Women, Barnard College, New York, NY, April 6, 2024, https://bcrw.barnard.edu/event/care-racial-capitalism-and-social-reproduction.[↑]
22. JMAC for Families, https://jmacforfamilies.org/.[↑]
23. JMAC for Families, “Active Campaigns,” https://jmacforfamilies.org/active-campaigns; “Senate Bill S550A Bill Amendment: 2025-2026 Legislative Session,” Bills & Laws, New York State Senate, https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/S550/amendment/A.[↑]
24. JMAC for Families, “Active Campaigns”; “Senate Bill S551 Bill: 2025-2026 Legislative Session,” Bills & Laws, New York State Senate, https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/S551; “Senate Bill S845: 2025-2026 Legislative Session,” Bills & Laws, New York State Senate, https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/S845; “Senate Bill S5240: 2025-2026 Legislative Session,” Bills & Laws, New York State Senate, https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/S5240/amendment/original.[↑]
25. JMAC for Families, “Active Campaigns.” [↑]
26. New York Senate Bill S2440 “Provides that the statute of limitations for criminal prosecution of a sexual offense committed against a child shall not begin to run until the child turns 23 years of age; provides that a civil action for conduct constituting a sexual offense against a child, shall be brought before the child turns 55 years of age; revives previously barred actions related to sexual abuse of children; grants civil trial preference to such actions.” See also “Senate Bill S2440: 2019-2020 Legislative Session,” Bills & Laws, New York State Senate, https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2019/S2440; and Susanti Sarkar, “New York Lawmakers Reject Bailout for Child Welfare Agencies,” The Imprint, May 21, 2024, https://imprintnews.org/top-stories/new-york-lawmakers-reject-abuse-bailout/249569.[↑]
27. American Bar Association, “Racial Discrimination in the Child Welfare System Is a Human Rights Violation—Let’s Talk About It, https://www.americanbar.org/groups/litigation/resources/newsletters/childrens-rights/racial-discrimination-child-welfare-human-rights-violation-lets-talk-about-it-way/; Children’s Rights, “UN Calls for U.S. Action to Address Racial Injustice in Child Welfare System,” https://www.childrensrights.org/news-voices/un-calls-for-us-action-to-address-racial-injustice-in-child-welfare-system/; Michael Fitzgerald, “Prominent New York Court Official Fired on Eve of Testimony About Child Welfare Issues,” The Imprint, August 4, 2023, https://imprintnews.org/top-stories/prominent-new-york-court-official-fired-on-eve-of-testimony-about-child-welfare-issues/243426.[↑]
28. New York Advisory Committee, Examining the New York Child Welfare System.[↑]
29. Jane M. Spinak, The End of Family Court: How Abolishing the Court Brings Justice to Children and Families (NYU Press, 2023).[↑]
30. “Narrowing The Front Door to NYC’s Child Welfare System,” Narrowing The Front Door to New York City’s Child Welfare System, https://www.narrowingthefrontdoor.org/.[↑]
31. “Narrowing The Front Door.” [↑]
32. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” in Why We Can’t Wait (Harper & Row, 1963).[↑]
33. Cara Page and Erica Woodland describe “healing justice” as a “political strategy of collective care and safety that intervenes in the generational trauma caused by systemic violence and oppression.” See Cara Page and Erica Woodland, Healing Justice Lineages: Dreaming at the Crossroads of Liberation, Collective Care, and Safety (North Atlantic Books, 2023).[↑]
34. “About Us,” Philly Voice for Change, https://phillyvoiceforchange.org/about-us; “Mining for Gold Community,” Mining for Gold Community, https://miningforgoldcommunity.com/; “Our Team,” Blessings in Transformation, https://www.blessingsintransformation.org/our-team; “PSP Team,” Parent Support Program of New York, https://www.pspnyinc.org/psp-team.[↑]
35. Mandatory Reporting Is Not Neutral, https://www.mandatoryreportingisnotneutral.com/; Interrupting Criminalization, https://www.interruptingcriminalization.com/; UpEnd Movement, https://upendmovement.org/; Movement for Family Power, https://www.movementforfamilypower.org/; Mandated Reporters for Mandated Reporting (@beyondreporting), Instagram profile, https://www.instagram.com/beyondreporting/; The authors would like to include another resource that was not published at the time of this interview: Erin Miles Cloud, Erica R. Meiners, Shannon Perez-Darby, and C. Hope Tolliver, eds. How to End Family Policing: From Outrage to Action (Haymarket Books, 2025).[↑]
36. “About,” Topeka K. Sam, https://www.drtopekaksam.com/about.[↑]