Lawsuit claims ACS abuses emergency powers to take kids away from NYC parents

New York City’s child welfare agency routinely abuses its emergency power to take children from their parents without a court order, creating lifelong consequences for families, a new class-action lawsuit seeking to end the practice alleged Thursday.

The law requires the Administration for Children’s Services to get a court order when it seeks to remove a child from the home. But if a child is in immediate danger, and there’s not enough time, ACS can exercise its “emergency removal” authority to separate families without approval from a judge.

However, the 94-page complaint, filed in Manhattan federal court, alleged ACS is violating the constitutional rights of mostly families of color by relying on emergency removals in cases that are not true emergencies. More than half of all ACS removals are done without a court order, and 90% of emergency removals involve Black and Latino families, according to agency data.

The coalition of legal and advocacy groups — including the Family Justice Law Center, the Center for Constitutional Rights and The Legal Aid Society’s Juvenile Rights Practice — is seeking to end the regular use of emergency removals, which they say causes irreparable harm even after families are reunited.

“The government exercises profound power when it unilaterally separates a family,” read the complaint. “ACS routinely — multiple times each day — deploys such power, notwithstanding the law’s prescription that it be reserved for only the rarest, most urgent circumstances.”

“Thus, with the City’s knowing acquiescence and deliberate indifference, ACS has claimed the dangerous power to transform extraordinary ’emergency’ removals into a routine government practice of extrajudicial family separation.”

Mayor Mamdani recently appointed a new ACS Commissioner, Rebecca Jones Gaston, who has said keeping families together will be a priority while she’s at the helm of the agency.

“Children should be safe, and families should have the support they need to remain together whenever possible,” Jones Gaston said Thursday during her first City Council hearing, which was on the ACS budget. “As Commissioner, I’m committed to continuing the work of strengthening a child welfare system that is more responsive, more equitable, more preventive, and more humane.”

The proposed class in the lawsuit includes a family identified in the lawsuit as the “Archers,” who are alleging their children were removed from the home without a court order — and without a true emergency. All names are pseudonyms.

In 2023, “Denise Archer,” the mother of a 9-year-old Bronx girl who has autism and ADHD, brought her to the hospital after she sustained an injury during a meltdown. The hospital, which is legally mandated to report suspected child maltreatment, called about the family. The doctor told ACS that the mother’s explanation was consistent with the injury, according to the complaint, but ACS did an emergency removal of the gril and her two brothers anyway. ACS returned the children two days later.

“Archer,” a 36-year-old Black single mom, again came into contact with ACS a few months later during a dispute with her children’s daycare, in which providers charged the kids were not hygienic or properly dressed. In the coming weeks, she called the child abuse hotline to follow up on services ACS had offered. During an investigation, an ACS caseworker saw her son, then a toddler, had a burn on his arm from a clothes iron, which the mother maintained was an accident.

“I tried to go to ACS to seek some type of assistance when my family was going through a hard time,” the mom said, “and it turned into an almost three-year separation where I had to fight every step of the way to get my kids returned home.”

ACS did another emergency removal of all three children, who were placed in foster care until an appellate court sided with the family. But the family was already traumatized, the lawsuit says. While in foster care, the daughter was involuntarily hospitalized and forcibly medicated, while the toddler and his brother started bed-wetting and engaging in self-harm.

Lawyers for the “Archers” and other impacted families maintain their case is not about the “rare, extreme situations” and “outlier cases” in which the law allows ACS to legally remove children from the home for safety reasons.

ACS said it would review the lawsuit alongside the NYC Law Department, while maintaining the agency keeps families together “whenever that is safely possible.” In more than 97% of child protection cases, children are not removed from their homes, ACS data shows.

“Emergency removals are only considered in circumstances where all other options are ruled out, and teams of highly trained child protective staff determine that a child is in imminent danger and that there is not enough time to get a court order,” said Marisa Kaufman, an ACS spokeswoman.

According to ACS data in the lawsuit, more than half of child removals now happen without a court order, some 1,400-1,500 children each year. In more than a quarter of such cases, a judge at the post-removal initial hearing does not find a legal justification for the child to remain in state custody.

The data also shows that emergency removals impact Black and Latino families “almost exclusively,” read the complaint. More than 90% of the children removed from their families on an emergency basis are Black or Hispanic. In 2025, ACS removed 1,397 children as an emergency, and 1,131 were Black or Hispanic.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs also note that ACS can typically obtain a removal order within “just a few hours or less,” providing the agency with plenty of time to seek an expedited judicial approval.

“ACS has perverted a profound but limited government power into a widespread and unconstitutional policy of extrajudicial family separation,” said David Shalleck-Klein, executive director of the Family Justice Law Center. “Today, because of the bravery of the families leading this landmark class action lawsuit, meaningful change is possible.”