Black Families and Forced Separation

Why I am writing this

I am not a historian. I am a father who had his children taken from him by a court that did not have to explain itself. But I did not want to write about what happened to my family without being honest about the history it sits inside of. Black families in this country have a specific, documented history of having children taken from them by force, without a hearing, without a finding, and without anyone required to justify it. What happened to Bilal, Jameel, and Maryam did not happen in a vacuum. It happened inside a system with roots that go back further than any of us.

The original family-separation system

Under American slavery, Black children were legal property. Enslavers routinely sold sons and daughters away from their parents as ordinary business -- no court, no hearing, no finding of unfitness, only a bill of sale. Frederick Douglass, born enslaved in Maryland, wrote about this directly in his own 1845 narrative of his life. In his own words:

"My mother and I were separated when I was but an infant. It is a common custom in the part of Maryland from which I ran away, to part children from their mothers at a very early age."

Douglass went further, naming exactly what the practice was for:

"The practice of separating children from their mother, and hiring the latter out at distances too great to admit of their meeting, except at long intervals, is a marked feature of the cruelty and barbarity of the slave system. But it is in harmony with the grand aim of slavery, which, always and everywhere, is to reduce man to a level with the brute. It is a successful method of obliterating from the mind and heart of the slave, all just ideas of the sacredness of the family, as an institution."

Source: Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), Chapter I -- public domain.

From slavery to "family policing"

This history did not end with emancipation. Legal scholar Dorothy Roberts, in her book Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families -- and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (2022), traces a direct line from slavery through the "apprenticeship" laws that returned freed Black children to the households of their former enslavers, and from there into the child welfare system that exists today. Roberts describes the modern system as, in her words, a

"family policing system"

-- a system in which government agents can enter a family's life, investigate them, and remove their children, under a legal standard far lower than what is required to convict someone of a crime, and in family court proceedings where indigent parents often have no attorney at all. Her research documents that this power has fallen disproportionately, and consistently, on Black families since the system's modern form took shape.

Source: Dorothy Roberts, Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families -- and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (Basic Books, 2022).

The numbers today

This is not only history. It is measurable right now, in the federal government's own data. According to AFCARS (the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System), the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' official foster care dataset, Black children made up roughly 24% of all children in foster care nationally in federal fiscal year 2024, while making up only about 14% of the country's total child population. An independent analysis of that same data by Child Trends found that Black children are placed in foster care at more than double the rate of children generally -- about 1 in every 9 Black children will be placed in foster care at some point, compared to roughly 1 in 17 children overall.

Those are not numbers from decades ago. That is last year.

What this means for my case

I am not saying every person involved in what happened to my children set out to be racist. I am saying the tool used against my family -- a family court's near-unchecked power to take a child from a parent, where a judge does not have to explain her reasoning in writing and does not have to be proven right before acting -- is the direct-lineage descendant of a system explicitly built to separate Black families, first by slavery, then by the courts that replaced it. When that power was used against Bilal, Jameel, and Maryam -- without a hearing, without written findings, against documented evidence from two separate clinicians that the transfer itself was a suicide risk, against a father with no substantiated finding ever entered against him -- it did not require anyone in that courtroom to say anything explicitly racist for it to sit inside that history. The harm is the same harm the system has always produced. Only the paperwork changed.