Washington made it harder for CPS to separate families. Critics say kids are less safe

The first time Mariah got pregnant, in 2016, she was 20 years old. She was addicted to heroin and living in motels. When she gave birth at Valley Medical Center in Renton, Child Protective Services told her she couldn’t bring the baby home. Instead, Mariah’s aunt took the baby.

“It was a really hard time,” Mariah said. “[They] took my daughter away. When I was in my addiction, my only way to cope with that was just to dive deeper into my addiction.”

KUOW has agreed not to use Mariah’s last name to protect her children’s identities.

The next time Mariah got pregnant, she was determined to do things differently. She went to a short treatment program for pregnant people at Swedish Hospital and got on methadone, a medication to help her manage withdrawals and stay off heroin.

“I had set up a little area [for the baby] in my mom's house,” Mariah said. “I had done literally everything I needed to do.”

When Mariah’s son was born, he tested positive for methadone, the medication she was taking. In line with policy at the time, the hospital called CPS.

The case worker said she wasn’t sure the baby would be safe with Mariah because she had gotten off drugs so recently, and CPS hadn’t had time to fully evaluate Mariah’s mom. She told her the agency wasn’t going to let Mariah take her second baby home either.

“I left just hopeless,” Mariah said. “I had to go back home and look at my son’s nursery area and he wasn’t there.”

That left Mariah demoralized. She had gotten clean, but the state still wouldn't let her keep her baby.

Within a month, she relapsed.

Research shows that unnecessarily removing a child from their home can harm their emotional wellbeing and intellectual and emotional development, leading to worse life outcomes down the road. And historically, child welfare workers have been more likely to take Black and Native American children away from their birth parents than other kids. Mariah has Native American, Latino, and Filipino heritage.

In recent years, Washington state has made two major policy changes to keep more birth families together.

Before 2022, hospitals generally called CPS if a baby tested positive for drugs or if they tested positive for medications that help people stay off drugs. But now, providers can use an online tool to check if they need to call CPS.

Also, since 2023, child welfare workers now have to prove that a child could imminently suffer physical harm before a judge will approve taking that child from their parents. Judges now have to consider the harms of family separation as well.

Fewer kids in Washington have been taken from their birth families — especially infants — since these policy changes took effect. But over the same time period, more babies and children from families who’ve been investigated by child welfare workers have died.

That’s why critics say those changes have made children less safe and should be reversed.

Family separation and foster care

Tara Urs, a former public defender who has represented parents being investigated by the state, is an advocate for kids staying with their birth parents.

“There’s sort of a widely held idea amongst judges that if we place a child in foster care, they’re going to have a great life,” Urs said. “And we know from a lot of research that even when children are living in a difficult situation with their families, losing connection with those people who love you is incredibly hard for children.”

One researcher, an economist at MIT, has done a lot of work trying to understand how family separation itself — not just the neglect or abuse that led to the family separation — affects children. What he has found is that in cases where social workers disagree about what to do — say, “borderline” cases where it’s unclear what the right answer is — children left with their families do better.

“Children who were removed had lower overall lifetime earnings, higher teen pregnancy, higher rates of youth incarceration — just a lot of negative life outcomes,” Urs said.

When a child is separated from their parents, stress hormones flood their brain, according to researchers at the University of Michigan Law School and the National Center for Grieving Children and Families. That can make their brains permanently more reactive and less able to learn and connect.

They also found that children who are removed from their homes can also experience complex trauma from the stress of removal along with uncertainty about why they are in foster care and how long it will last.

Advocates like Urs also point out that foster care isn’t always safe. One study in New York City found that as many as one in three children in foster care report abuse or neglect, and even more report inadequate clothing or not having enough food. A Casey Family Foundation study found a similar rate of self-reported neglect or abuse in foster care in the Northwest.

Middle-class families struggle with drug use and mental health issues too, Urs said, but CPS rarely separates them because money and social support keep the kids safe and provide for their basic needs despite the parents’ struggles.

That’s what she wants to see happen for families in poverty as well.

“If poverty is the problem, then money is the solution,” Urs said. “If a referral to daycare, a grocery voucher, and driving you to therapy is going to allow you to keep your child safe, that’s a lot cheaper than a court case with lawyers, judges, and social workers that goes on and on and on, plus paying for foster care and family separation. It’s also better for kids.”

Children and the opioid epidemic

Child welfare workers say they are trying to keep families together. They give parents cribs, gas cards, and grocery vouchers. They drive them to medical appointments and give them lockboxes for their drugs. But case workers say, as hard as they try, some kids still aren’t safe with their birth families.

Danette Scott lives in Burlington, Washington, about an hour north of Seattle. She’s had custody of her two oldest granddaughters, now teenagers, for years.

In 2022, Scott’s daughter had another baby, named Avril, and she decided to let them move in, too.

“I wanted to give [my daughter] every opportunity to redeem herself as a mother to the other girls,” Scott said. “I felt like I could really help with Avril in many ways, just keeping the stress off of [her mom].”

Scott said her daughter was using drugs right up until Avril’s birth, and went into treatment after she was born.

“Avril was just a sweet baby, so spending time with her was just a lot of fun,” Scott said.

But it didn’t last. Avril’s mom relapsed, and Scott called CPS. She wanted custody of Avril.

This was in December 2022 — about six months before a new law took effect and made it harder to take kids from their parents — but child welfare workers say it had already become the de facto policy.

Scott said the social worker told her, “Avril is in a safe home; I have no concern about that. … There’s nothing really that we can do.”

After the case worker left, so did Scott’s daughter, taking baby Avril with her. Scott didn’t hear from them again until nearly six months later, when her daughter called her from a hospital. Avril, at 13 months old, had been exposed to fentanyl and was unconscious, on life support.

Scott rushed to the hospital, where a doctor told her Avril wasn’t going to survive.

“I went in and I just gave her a kiss and told her goodbye and that we love her, and we'll see her soon and it was OK,” Scott said. “She’s not going to have any more pain.”

A state report confirms the details of baby Avril’s story.

Scott blames what happened on Washington’s new child welfare policies.

“This Keeping Families Together Act is what's killing a lot of these babies,” Scott said, “because Avril would still be alive if they would have just that day said [to Scott’s daughter], ‘While you're using, you’re testing positive, we're going to leave the baby under your mom's care.’”

“I could have called the police when she tried to leave, and Avril would still be here,” Scott added.

A lawyer who works with moms who struggle with substance use told KUOW it’s true that under the new law, Avril’s mom could likely keep her — and that under the old law, it would have been more likely for her Scott to get custody.

But, he added, that doesn’t mean the state couldn’t have gotten involved. The case worker could have made a safety plan with the family. That would have put the courts in charge of making sure Avril stayed in her grandmother’s house.

In fact, since June 2025, Washington state has required formal safety planning whenever a parent is addicted to opioids and has a child under 3.

An increase in child deaths

In the last three years, 52 babies and children died after their families had been investigated by child welfare workers. KUOW reviewed the reports for each death.

In some cases, the committee reviewing the case said there was nothing the social worker could have done to prevent the death.

But in other cases, CPS workers saw active safety threats but made no effort to take custody of the children.

And at times, they made crucial mistakes.

Take the case of a 6-week-old baby who died of exposure to fentanyl and meth. The department erroneously said at a decision-making meeting that the newborn had tested negative for fentanyl. And the case worker was told to make a safety plan with the family but never did.

In many of the cases where a worker could have done more or made an error, they were new to the job or overwhelmed by their case load.

“We as a union testified against this legislation because it gave us zero additional case workers,” said Jeanette Obelcz, a child welfare supervisor in King County and chair of the child welfare policy committee of the Washington Federation of State Employees.

Obelcz said the department is short-staffed; burnout is high and people frequently quit, often leaving new hires to manage complicated cases.

A spokesperson for the state’s child welfare agency responded that in 2025, turnover was at its lowest point in five years, and the department has asked the legislature for funding for more case workers.

A new legal standard

Some of the state’s reports about children’s deaths describe extremely troubling situations, but say they didn’t meet the new legal standard of imminent physical harm for the state to intervene.

In one case, a teenage mom in Yakima struggled to understand what to feed her baby and toddler, and how much. The family lived with more than a dozen cats, and the mom couldn’t manage to keep the home clean of cat feces and urine. Whenever social workers came by, her toddler was in her crib, alone in a dark room.

A child welfare worker and a public defender both told KUOW that, in the past, these kids would likely have been separated from their mom. But because of the state’s policy changes, they weren’t.

Obelcz, the child welfare supervisor, said that’s now typical in cases of neglect and unsanitary living conditions.

“There is no technically immediate, imminent risk of physical harm,” she said. “But we know from research that a child raised in that kind of very neglectful environment — there are long-term brain development consequences. There are long-term emotional harm consequences.”

In the end, the younger child, a 7-month-old baby, died. Her 2-year-old sister was found near death, suffering from extreme malnourishment, and was life-flighted to Seattle Children’s Hospital.

The state’s child welfare agency declined to comment on this specific case. But according to the state report on this case, since this happened, the region’s child welfare office has changed its policies about what to do when a parent doesn’t want services but is clearly unable to care for her children.

Obelcz said that CPS workers often walk into homes they believe are dangerous for children, but feel that they can’t prove an immediate safety threat, so their hands are tied — they have to leave the child.

“Every single worker goes into this work to keep kids safe, and that’s our job,” Obelcz said. “And most workers around the state, when I talk to them, feel like they’re failing at it.”

Preventing child fatalities

The evidence seems undeniable to many: The law changed and more children have died since, so it must be because of the law.

But proponents of keeping more kids with their birth parents say that’s not quite right.

The state department in charge of child welfare points out that deaths were increasing before the policies changed, and a big part of that has to do with the opioid crisis and the sheer number of parents suffering from addiction.

“Opioid access and use and the entire epidemic is a huge factor,” said Tana Senn, the agency’s secretary, in a press conference in June 2025.

Senn said that in communities where more people are using opioids and dying of overdoses, more children are also dying.

Also, the numbers don’t support that taking more kids out of struggling homes would reduce the number of deaths. The year the most children on CPS’s radar died in Washington was 2012, long before the Keeping Families Together Act. At that time, case workers took nearly twice the number of kids from their families as they do today.

Adam Ballout is a public defender and a founder of the First Legal Clinic, which helps birth parents. He said family separation doesn’t necessarily prevent deaths.

“The solutions for this crisis aren’t necessarily very sexy,” Ballout said. “They involve funding resources. They involve funding housing, making treatment available for families that need it, and expanding access to treatment, safe storage.”

Ballout also said that someone who has the power to take a person’s kids away isn’t necessarily the best person to offer help. When parents are being investigated by CPS, they often don’t feel safe to admit what their problems and needs are.

“That parent might say, ‘I need nothing’ to the social worker, fearing that giving an honest explanation of what they do need could be weaponized against them,” Ballout said. “Who is approaching families and offering help matters.”

'I’m going to bring my baby home'

Back in Renton, after Mariah lost custody of her second baby, she said, “I kind of just gave up. I lost all hope.”

She went back to using, got pregnant for a third time, and lost custody of that baby, too. In 2023, her aunt adopted all three of her children.

Then, in late 2023, Mariah found out that she was expecting her fourth baby. Just like with her second baby, she was determined to do things differently — and this time, the law was on her side.

“I went in there with the mindset of, ‘I’m going to bring my baby home. Like, I’m going to be his mom. He’s going to know me. I’m going to raise him,’” Mariah said.

She went into treatment, and when she got out, she set up a home with her partner — the father of all four kids — who had gotten sober shortly before she had.

After she delivered, a hospital social worker asked her about her living situation and how long she’d been clean. Then the social worker told Mariah everything seemed fine, and she wasn’t going to call CPS.

“I think I cried, actually,” Mariah said. “I’m like, ‘I get to walk out of the hospital with my baby?’”

“I had prayed to God multiple occasions asking to have another chance to be a mother,” she added. “When the social worker was like, ‘Yeah, there’s no problem here,’ I was like, ‘Wow, that’s God answering my prayers.’”

These days, Mariah and her partner clean houses for a living, and they’re saving up to buy a car.

Their youngest son is one and a half now. Mariah said she does it less these days — but at first, whenever her baby made an unexpected noise in his sleep, she’d rush to go check on him.

“My dad’s like, ‘You baby him so much,’” Mariah said. “I’m like, ‘Because he’s my baby! I have to! I have to make sure he’s safe.’”

Eilís O'Neill reported this story while participating in the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s 2025 Child Welfare Impact Reporting Fund, which provided training, mentoring, and funding to support this project.