PHOENIX IS WORST AMONG AMERICA'S BIG CITIES FOR SEPARATING CHILDREN FROM THEIR FAMILIES, NATIONAL COALITION FOR CHILD PROTECTION REFORM SAYS

ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 17, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Children are at greater risk of being torn from everyone they know and love and consigned to the chaos of foster care in Phoenix than in any other of America's largest cities, according to data released today by National Coalition for Child Protection Reform (NCCPR).

"The latest data reveal that a long, ugly tradition continues," said Richard Wexler, executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform (NCCPR). "Year after year, the Department of Child Saftey, Arizona's family police agency (a more accurate term than 'child welfare' agency), cuts a swath of destruction through poor families in Phoenix at a vastly higher rate than any other such agency does in any other of America's ten largest cities and their surrounding counties.

"And while it's all done in the name of 'child safety,' the DCS take-the-child-and-run mentality makes all children less safe," Wexler said. "The mentality was revealed to the nation in 2020 when workers in a DCS office thought it would be a laugh riot to wear matching t-shirts emblazoned with the words 'Professional Kidnapper.' The workers were fired, but the data show the mentality remains."

NCCPR's Big City Rate-of-Removal Index compares the number of children thrown into foster care to the impoverished child population in America's ten largest cities and their surrounding counties. Maricopa County (metropolitan Phoenix) is an extreme outlier. Children are taken from their parents in Maricopa County at a rate:

• 50% percent higher than the second-worst region – Santa Clara County, California.
• More than 60% higher than the third worst, Los Angeles County.
• Nearly two-and-a-half times the national average for big cities.
• More than triple the rate of New York City.
• Nearly six times the rate of Chicago.

"There is no evidence that Phoenix is a cesspool of depravity with vastly more child abuse than any other big city in America," Wexler said. "Rather, this is evidence of a take-the-child-and-run mentality, rooted in racial and class bias, that has plagued child welfare in Arizona for decades."

Wexler said the problem is compounded by Arizona's overreliance on the worst, and most dangerous, form of care – group homes and institutions. Arizona institutionalizes 41% of children entering foster care*, a rate more than two-and-a-half times the national average.

"You may be sure that DCS will respond to the facts about its abysmal performance with the Big Lie of American child welfare: the false claim that child removal equals child safety," Wexler said.

Wexler said the Big Lie ignores:

• The mass of research showing that, in typical cases, not the horror stories, children left in their own homes typically fare better even than comparably-maltreated children thrown into foster care. That research includes a stunning recent study showing that, under these circumstances, by age 20, the foster children were more than four times more likely to die.
• The mass of research showing high rates of abuse in foster homes and even higher rates of abuse in group homes and institutions – all those news accounts about the horrors of Arizona group homes and institutions are not aberrations.
• The mass of research showing that poverty is routinely confused with neglect. The research is confirmed by data from Arizona*, where, in 87% of cases in which children were thrown into foster care, there was not even an accusation of sexual abuse or any form of physical abuse. In fact, Arizona took away more children because of inadequate housing than for physical and sexual abuse combined. In 62% there was not even an accusation of any form of drug or alcohol abuse – not just no accusation of meth or fentanyl, no accusation of any drug or alcohol abuse of any kind.

"All this does enormous harm to the children needlessly taken – and also to those who might be spared foster care but still face the enormous trauma of a child abuse investigation – which involves a traumatic interrogation and, sometimes, a stripsearch," Wexler said. Almost always, this trauma is inflicted as a result of a false report or a poverty case. Nationwide, more than half of all Black children will be forced to endure this trauma at some point in their childhoods. But Arizona is different. In Arizona, it's two-thirds.

"But these aren't the only children harmed," Wexler said. "All the time, money and effort wasted harming children in these cases is, in effect, stolen from finding the relatively few children in real danger. That's almost always the real reason such children are overlooked, leading to the horror stories that, rightly, make headlines. That's how the Arizona approach makes all children less safe."

Wexler said actions by Gov. Katie Hobbs have compounded the problems. These actions include:

• Giving a giant rate increase to a politically-connected group home operator.
• Giving a giant pay raise to foster parents – and, in effect, making poor people pay for it.
• Taking away support for the least harmful form of foster care, kinship foster care, in which children are placed with extended family.

"But the governor's political opponents have no cause to gloat," Wexler said. "In a rare example of bipartisanship, governors and legislators from both parties have been failing Arizona's vulnerable children for decades, something we documented in a report we released on Arizona child welfare in 2007."

It doesn't have to be that way. In other states, Wexler said, lawmakers and state leaders have worked across party lines to curb needless removal and make all children safer. In Texas, for example, with strong bipartisan support, lawmakers raised the threshold for coercive intervention into families. In New York and New Jersey, governments bolstered high-quality legal defense for families – "not to get 'bad parents' off but to craft alternatives to the cookie-cutter 'service plans' churned out by agencies like DCS," Wexler said.

"Those are just some of the ways Arizona could turn its system around and make all children safer. All it needs is the will to finally renounce the take-the-child-and-run mentality that has made all of the state's children less safe," Wexler said.

*-Link goes to national figures; use the drop-down menu on the left for data specific to Arizona

SOURCE National Coalition for Child Protection Reform