DURHAM – In an effort to accelerate family reunification, Durham County Department of Justice Services has received funding for a Family Treatment Court in the county budget.

Operation Stop Child Protective Services, a grassroots organization in Durham, hosted a teach-in July 11 to educate residents on how the court will operate at The Burrow on North Church Street in downtown Durham. 

OSCPS founder Amanda Wallace, who previously worked for multiple county child welfare services in North Carolina, describes the child welfare system as a “system of carceral control.”

“When you go and say you want to abolish the department of social services, people are like, ‘woah, you want people to lose their food stamps? You want people to lose Medicaid?’” Wallace said. “When we think about the world that we’re trying to build, are we trying to build a world where people have to go to the government to eat? Where people have to go to the government to get their medical needs met? Or are we trying to build a world where people have the resources to live?”

A spreadsheet of DSS data shows that in January, 185 children were in DSS custody, 146 of whom were Black. In June, the agency still had custody of 185 children, 147 of them were Black. There were three documented reunifications last month. Ninety-eight of the children have been in custody over 25 months. 

“Every number is a human being…every number is a child that will grow up with the impact and the trauma of the system,” Wallace said. “It’s not just simply a number or data. It is a life.”

The data also shows that over $2 million in foster care costs have been spent between fiscal years 2025-26, including $1.9 million for room and board and $34,000 for a “miscellaneous” line item. Costs for a line item labeled “personal needs” was $0.

“What could $2.3 million could have gone to the families to keep the child at home to relieve whatever stressors that caused the crisis in the first place?” Wallace asked. 

At the Board of County Commissioners’ budget work session in May, Justice Services Director Roshanna Humphrey said the Family Treatment Court was “a natural fit” under the work the DJS already does to provide mental health support for justice-involved individuals experiencing substance dependence. Humphrey said the FTC would “target high-risk, high-need parents and caregivers involved in the child welfare system for whom substance use impacts parenting.”

After receiving a referral, the caregiver would be required to undergo a comprehensive clinical assessment, which evaluates mental and physical health, and includes social, medical and developmental history. 

The DJS requested $213,665 for personnel, supplies and services for participants. The proposal included a two-year timeline to launch. 

“This is a program that is not going to automatically be able to start on Day 1,” Humphrey said, explain that the first few months would entail hiring and training staff, accepting referrals and formalizing relationships with DSS. 

Durham County previously established a FTC in 2002, but it was later defunded and closed by the Administrative Office of the Courts. Meeting minutes show the Criminal Justice Advocacy Committee had been trying to reestablish the court since 2024, but “a very active Criminal Drug and Mental Health Treatment Court was already staffed by the Justice Resource Center.” 

Jamie Marsicano, an attorney with People’s Law Collective, discussed how family and child welfare court operates. Child welfare cases can go before a judge multiple times over the course of months or years. 

“Family court is even scarier and more intense (than criminal court) in what it requires,” she said. Children do not choose their attorneys but are represented by a guardian ad litem, or GAL, that is appointed by the court. Marsicano said the GAL is “almost never communicating directly with the child.” 

“They’re sort of on the same team as DSS,” she said. “Whereas in criminal court, where you have one sort of opponent, you have two whole institutions that are working together to be your opposition, and it’s just that much harder.”

Parents also are not allowed to speak to their children regarding the case. “You have kids who are not only separated from their parents for all this time, but they also don’t even know why, which can lead to assumptions that are wrong that parents don’t get to control,” Marsicano said. “They can get the kids’ entire medical records, they can take the parents’ entire medical records.”

Courts will recommend parents to complete certain tasks, including parental capacity evaluations, psychiatric evaluations, go-to therapy, take medication, acquire a driver’s license, drug testing, parenting classes, stable employment and proof of “a certain amount of income.” 

“They’ll just pile these things on,” Marsicano said. “They’re saying you need money to get your kids back, you also have to take off work to get the mental health assessment and do the parent capacity evaluation, while they’re handing hundreds of dollars a month to the foster parent.”

Rafiq Zaidi shared his personal experiences being a part of the child welfare system after being funneled through juvenile court in Portsmouth, Virginia. He was transferred between different detention centers. 

“I was caught up in the web of a system that didn’t care whether my mother could find me or my family could locate me,” he said. “They just shifted me around, whether I was guilty or not.”

Zaidi was one of his single mother’s nine children. Working two jobs, Zaidi said his mother wasn’t able to monitor him and his siblings. Through the child welfare system, his siblings were “scattered all over the Southeast” in different facilities and experienced rape and molestation. 

He argued that the current conditions of Durham’s impoverished Black families provide fodder for DSS to surveil and separate them. 

“If you look at what is happening here in Durham, it follows in the footsteps of the Moynihan Report,” Zaidi said, referring to “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” a 1965 report written by U.S. Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan, which Zaidi said set a precedent for family separation.

Moynihan was hired to help with President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty. In the report, he argued that “the Negro family in the urban ghettoes is crumbling” due to lack of employment among Black men and single motherhood among Black women. It received staunch rebuke from both the right and the left.

“At that point, during the Moynihan Report, we were asking for jobs, housing and justice,” Zaidi said. “What are we asking for now? We’re still asking for the same things that we marched for and allegedly were given to us.”

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