Why MN Family Preservation Laws Are Costing Children Lives
The rights of the adults in the room now outrank the right of the child to survive the home they were born into. ICWA, the African American Family Preservation Act, and Family First all moved that line in the same direction.
Eighty-eight children were killed in Minnesota between October 2014 and May 2022. Two a month, every month, for eight years. That is from the Safe Passage for Children study, and it is not the full count. The state told the researchers the real number was 161 and then refused to give them the names.
I have been doing this work for thirty years, and the sentence in that study I keep coming back to is not about a caseworker. It is about a philosophy. The authors found that many of these deaths were preventable and were due to a child welfare philosophy which gave such high priority to the interests of parents and other adults in households, as well as to the goals of family preservation and reunification, that child safety and well-being were regularly compromised.
The interests of the adults in the room outweighed the life of the child in the room.
That is not a scandal. A scandal is a thing that goes wrong. This is the system working the way we built it.
What the adults have and what the children do not
A parent in a child protection case has a lawyer, due process, notice, a hearing, an appeal. They have a statutory presumption that the state will make active efforts to keep the family together before doing anything else.
The child has a guardian ad litem who, as the Safe Passage authors put it, is often a member of the court and social services team first and an independent voice for the child second. In most cases the child has no attorney. No standing to appeal. No right to refuse being sent back into the house.
And no federal floor underneath any of it.
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child was adopted in 1989. Every member state has ratified it except the United States. Somalia ratified in 2015. South Sudan ratified in 2015. We did not.
What that means on the ground is simple. A child in Hennepin County and a child in Pope County do not have the same protection, because there is no federal baseline saying children have enforceable rights at all. There is federal money and there are conditions on the money, but there is no floor. Protection is a state matter, which means it is fifty different things, and some of them are not much.
Women got this a century ago. Not sympathy. Not better programs. Standing. The legal capacity to be a party to the decisions made about your own life. Children in this country still do not have it.
Three laws, one direction
ICWA. Federal, 1978. Created the active efforts standard, a higher bar than reasonable efforts, and gave tribes jurisdiction over their children’s cases (read the article below by Marie Cohen and Naomi Shaefer Riley below)..
The Minnesota African American Family Preservation and Child Welfare Disproportionality Act. Signed 05/21/2024. Extends the ICWA active efforts standard to nearly every child in the state, adds requirements before the state can petition to terminate parental rights. Already in effect in Hennepin and Ramsey. Statewide 01/01/2027.
Family First. Federal, 2018. Redirected foster care money toward prevention services.
Different laws, different authors, different histories. The same effect on the child standing in the kitchen.
Family First lets the family accept services instead of being investigated. There is no penalty if the family does not use the services. There is no further investigation of that child in that home. The report closes. And in rural counties the services often do not exist to accept, because the county cannot fund them. So the family is offered a thing and may decline or ignore it with no impact on the family but a huge impact of the child not being investigated. The file goes away with a child still inside the house.
ICWA and the African American Family Preservation Act raise the bar for removal. Family First removes the reason to look. Three different mechanisms, one result: fewer investigations, fewer removals, longer stays in dangerous homes.
Eric Dean proves the pattern was already there. Fifteen maltreatment reports to Pope County. Nine screened out without any investigation or assessment. One investigation, which did not see the child and found no maltreatment. State law required every one of those reports go to law enforcement, and one of fifteen did. He was four years old when his stepmother killed him in February 2013, five years before Family First existed.
Eric Dean is what the system did when it merely preferred keeping families together. These three laws made that preference a legal requirement.
The part I will not soften, and the part I will not dodge
ICWA exists because this country spent a century taking Native children from their parents and sending them to schools built to erase them. There are people alive today who went to those schools. Minnesota’s own record on transracial placement is its own kind of shameful. The African American Family Preservation Act exists because Black families in this state have been pulled apart because of historical bias, excessive policing, and poverty.
Those harms are real. They are not exaggerated. The people who wrote these laws wrote them for reasons I understand and mostly agree with, and if you came here looking for someone to tell you that history is overblown, you are in the wrong place.
But a law written to stop the state from taking children wrongly also makes it harder to take children rightly. That is not a drafting error. That is the machine doing its job. And when it does its job, some children who should have been removed are not.
In the Safe Passage study, Black children were 17.8 percent of the children with child welfare involvement and 26.1 percent of the children who died. White children were about half the caseload and 23.9 percent of the deaths. The authors would not say why. They said the question was whether Minnesota agencies may have tended to leave Black children in high-risk situations longer than other children, and recommended the state hire someone to find out. That was 2023. As far as I can tell, nobody has.
There is a second kind of adult interest here, and I am going to say it plainly because nobody else will. Sovereignty is an adult interest too. A tribe’s jurisdiction over its children’s cases is a real right with a real history behind it, and it is also an institutional interest held by adults. When it conflicts with a child’s safety, the child has no standing to raise it.
Red Lake
Safe Passage could not study ICWA deaths at all. They did not request those reports, because ICWA cases are handled under tribal jurisdiction and are not accessible to the public. Red Lake did not respond to their requests.
Three years later the Bureau of Indian Affairs took over Red Lake’s child welfare program. The federal reassumption notice describes as many as eight child deaths since 2021 and alleges the program’s inaction contributed to five. It says the program’s annual reports to the Minnesota Legislature contained unrealistic data showing maltreatment going down. A child was removed at birth for a positive fentanyl test and returned to the mother, and died of an overdose. After one child died malnourished in July 2026, staff told the FBI and tribal police they would leave the remaining child with the parents in the same house. That child died too.
So the researchers could not see those children. The Legislature was told the numbers were improving. And the children kept dying.
Here is the thing people will say to that: there is no study showing ICWA children die at higher rates. True. There is also no study showing they do not, because nobody can look. That is not evidence of safety. That is the absence of evidence, and it was built on purpose.
The state of Minnesota did the same thing. It confirmed 161 children died and refused to name 73 of them. Red Lake did it with worse data. The state did it with better lawyers.
The ones who do not die
Every child who dies sits on top of a far larger number who do not. Children who are beaten and not killed. Children raped by a relative for years while the file stays open and nothing moves. My own CASA Guardian ad Litem caseload children were starved, burned with 160-degree water, locked out of the home in near zero degree cold repeatedly sexualized as very young children. Twelve to fifteen percent of the Safe Passage Investigation fatality cases showed signs of torture or clearly were torture.
For each of those children there are many more living the same thing right now, in houses we know about, in counties that have the reports, and no one is standing up for them because they have no right to stand on.
That is what a civil right is. Not a program. Not a service. A limit on what can be done to you, and a court that has to hear you say so.
What I want
Not the repeal of anything. The thing that has to come first, because without it we cannot even argue about this honestly.
Publish the data. Every child maltreatment egregious incident, near-fatality and fatality in Minnesota. By county. By race. By whether the family was known to child protection. By which track the case was assigned to. By how many prior reports came in before the last one. Every county fatality report the state already collects and already sits on. Historically, the keeping of records has not allowed the tracking of families coming back into CPS over decades. If we knew this, it would be a powerful indicator of what we are not solving with the programs we have in place and push us to find improvements. Tribal programs included, through whatever mechanism respects sovereignty and still produces the number.
Publish the outcomes. Are children safer this year than last year, and what did we spend to make that true.
Safe Passage asked for exactly this in 2023. Make public the inventory of fatalities and near-fatalities. Put them on the dashboard. Release the county reports. None of it has happened.
If I am wrong and these laws protect children, the data will show it and I will say so in writing. If I am right, children are dying for a theory, and we should know that too.
The Safe Passage report ends by saying the work ahead is to place appropriate limits on the ability of adults in a child’s life to harm them.
Every child should have the right not to die in the home they were born into. Right now, in America, they do not.
Send this to your state representative. Three minutes. Then sign up for KARA’s Friday newsletter at kidsatriskaction.com and do it again next week. That habit is the most effective thing a busy person can do for these children.
Sources:
The Fiddler case
U.S. Supreme Court denies latest challenge to the Indian Child Welfare Act – The Imprint, approximately 10/06/2026
https://imprintnews.org/icwa/supreme-court-denies-latest-challenge-to-indian-child-welfare-act/277540
The end of the road. SCOTUS declined to take the case, leaving the Minnesota ruling in place. The petition was filed 05/04/2026 for foster parents Kellie and Nathan Reyelts, with the Goldwater Institute as co-counsel, seeking to overturn both ICWA and the Minnesota Indian Family Preservation Act. mesabitribune
Minnesota’s highest court rejects latest challenge to the Indian Child Welfare Act – The Imprint, 03/24/2026
https://imprintnews.org/top-stories/minnesotas-highest-court-rejects-latest-challenge-to-the-indian-child-welfare-act/272038
The loss itself. The court ruled the Reyelts lacked standing and did not reach the equal protection question: “We do not address appellants’ equal protection arguments – on which we granted review – because appellants are not parties to the case.” The twins are Red Lake Nation children, placed with an Indigenous relative. url-mediasahanjournal
MPR News version of the same ruling – 03/24/2026
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2026/03/24/minnesota-high-court-upholds-indian-child-welfare-act-rejects-latest-challenge
Sahan Journal, oral arguments – approximately 09/2024
https://sahanjournal.com/news-partners/indian-child-welfare-act-minnesota-supreme-court-red-lake-challenge/
Useful because it shows the argument before the ruling. Red Lake’s attorney Joe Plumer argued the Reyelts had never been granted standing by any lower court and had not established injury. sahanjournal
The Imprint Q&A with Fiddler himself
https://imprintnews.org/top-stories/how-an-indigenous-attorney-in-minnesota-keeps-trying-to-overturn-the-indian-child-welfare-act/247919
Fiddler is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, once worked at the ICWA Law Center, and changed his views dramatically after a case he handled in 1994. If you quote him, quote him from here. imprintnews
A word of caution on this one. The Fiddler case is not a child safety case. It is foster parents arguing their own equal protection rights were violated, backed by the Goldwater Institute. If you cite it as support, you get associated with that effort, and the people you most need to persuade will stop reading.
There is one piece of it that is pure gold for your argument, though, and it is not the part Fiddler was making. The case ran four years, through three courts, over two children. The court’s holding was about who counts as a party. The foster parents were not parties. Neither were the children. Four years of litigation about where these twins should live, and the twins had no standing either. Use that, and leave Fiddler’s claim alone.
Red Lake
Feds took over Red Lake Nation’s child welfare program after series of deaths – Star Tribune, Kim Hyatt, 10/13/2026
https://www.startribune.com/feds-took-over-red-lake-nations-child-welfare-program-after-series-of-deaths/601900782
The FOIA story. Everything in your piece about the eight deaths, the fentanyl case, the July 2026 deaths, the falsified legislative reports, and the convicted sex offender on staff comes from this and the BIA notice it is built on.
Feds say takeover of Red Lake child welfare program was due to pattern of inaction – MPR News, 10/14/2026
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2026/10/14/feds-say-takeover-of-red-lake-child-welfare-program-was-due-to-pattern-of-inaction
MPR got the same notice independently. Useful corroboration and it has the 2024 house fire detail.
Red Lake chair agrees to step down – MPR News, 10/16/2026
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2026/10/16/red-lake-nation-chairman-darrell-seki-to-resign-after-child-welfare-program-probe
Red Lake’s own statement that mistakes have been made and accountability must be part of the path forward. mprnews
BIA Reports: Feds Take Over Red Lake Nation’s Child Welfare Program – Native News Online, 10/14/2026
https://nativenewsonline.net/health/bia-reports-feds-take-over-red-lake-nations-child-welfare-program-after-deaths-of-eight-children/
Worth linking because it is Native-run coverage. It notes the takeover sparked debate across Indian Country about tribal sovereignty. nativenewsonline
Eric Dean
Eric Dean: The boy they couldn’t save – Star Tribune, Brandon Stahl, 09/01/2014
https://www.startribune.com/eric-dean-the-boy-they-couldn-t-save/273325741/
The original. Fifteen reports by the time he died at four, nine of them screened out without investigation or assessment. startribune
Review assails child protection response to Eric Dean’s abuse – Star Tribune, 02/27/2015
https://www.startribune.com/review-assails-child-protection-response-to-eric-dean-s-abuse/294391701
The state mortality review found Pope County violated state law. The county’s own review had found no failures. That contrast is the transparency argument in one paragraph. startribune
Minnesota to review child protection after ‘colossal failure’ – Star Tribune, 09/2014
https://www.startribune.com/minnesota-to-review-child-protection-after-colossal-failure/274694021
Dayton’s “colossal failure” quote and the start of the task force. startribune
Lessons from child abuse deaths go unheeded in Minnesota – Star Tribune, Brandon Stahl
https://www.startribune.com/lessons-from-child-abuse-deaths-go-unheeded-in-minnesota/282031701
Fifty-six children dead since 2005 despite counties knowing the child was at risk. This is Stahl’s version of what Safe Passage did later, and it is the direct ancestor of your argument. startribune
Your own 2014 post – invisiblechildren.org
https://invisiblechildren.org/2014/09/22/thank-you-governor-dayton-shining-a-light-on-minnesotas-child-protection-system/
Link to this from the new piece. It already ranks, and it shows you were saying this twelve years ago.
ICWA, the legal and policy backdrop
Indigenous Minnesotans celebrate U.S. Supreme Court ruling on ICWA – Star Tribune, 06/2023
https://www.startribune.com/indigenous-minnesotans-advocates-celebrate-u-s-supreme-court-ruling-on-indian-child-welfare-act/600282915
Brackeen v. Haaland. This is the Star Tribune ICWA article. Cite it for balance, since it carries the defenders’ case in their own words.
A controversial legacy: the history of transracial placements in Minnesota – Sahan Journal
https://sahanjournal.com/news-partners/history-transracial-placements-minnesota/
This is your empathy section’s source. Minnesota passed its own ICWA version in 1985, and the state Indian Family Preservation Act is stronger than the federal law on active efforts, qualified expert witnesses, and the definition of a child’s best interests. sahanjournal
The African American Family Preservation Act
Will a new law really give Minnesota a gold standard in child protection policies? – Star Tribune opinion, Sarah Font and Emily Putnam-Hornstein
https://www.startribune.com/indian-child-welfare-act-mn-family-reunification/601438206
The most important source you have. Before ICWA, Native children in Minnesota entered foster care at five times the rate of non-Native children. Today it is thirteen times. Two researchers making your argument in your own state’s paper. livescutshort
Minnesota Governor Signs Bill Raising Bar for Taking Children Into Foster Care – The Imprint, 05/21/2024
https://imprintnews.org/top-stories/minnesota-governor-expected-to-sign-bill-raising-bar-for-taking-african-american-or-disproportionately-represented-children-into-foster-care/249509
Minnesota Judicial Branch fast facts on the AAFPCWDA
https://mncourts.gov/_media/migration/scao_library/cji/Fast-Facts-AAFPCWDA.pdf
The official source for the effective dates: Hennepin and Ramsey on 01/01/2025, statewide 01/01/2027. Link this rather than a news story when you cite the date. mncourts
Bill to preserve Black families would now cover most MN foster kids – Sahan Journal, 04/2024
https://sahanjournal.com/democracy-politics/child-welfare-minnesota-legislature-african-american-family-preservation-act/
Minnesota as the first state to raise the active efforts standard to virtually all foster children. sahanjournal
What It’s Like Outstate For At Risk Children – Ogema Today
The Red Lake massacre 13 years ago happened when 16 year old Jeff Weise was ignored and unable to find help after repeatedly talking about homicide…
When children are neglected, tribal sovereignty has limits
Guilt over hurting children in the past does not excuse allowing harm to children today.
By MARIE COHEN and NAOMI SCHAEFER RILEY
Why would the federal government take over the child welfare agency on an Indian reservation? After six weeks without an answer from the FBI and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), we have learned the shocking and ugly truth. The tribal agency was knowingly leaving young children in dangerous homes and they were dying as a result.
On Sept. 10, FBI agents searched the child and family services agency of the Red Lake Nation in northern Minnesota.
An FBI spokesman initially confirmed the search but declined to provide further details. The BIA then took control of child protection services on the reservation, stating only that it acted “to ensure the safety and wellbeing of children and families.”
Before 2021, children’s services on the Red Lake Nation were run by Beltrami County.
In January 2021, the nation assumed control of these services as part of a federal and state initiative. The tribe implemented what it called “a paradigm shift” that was centered on “family preservation rather than child removal” and grounded in tribal values. Leaders renamed the agency Ombimindwaa Gidinawemaaganiaadog or “Uplifting Our Relatives” in Ojibwe.
“Clients” became “relatives,” foster parents became “relative care community service providers,” and investigations became “responses.”
In 2022, the tribe received an award from Minnesota’s Commissioner of Human Services for its approach to child welfare.
When the tribe opened up an “intergenerational wellness center” at a cost of $15.5 million in federal and state funds, the Ombimindwaa program manager told an NPR affiliate that “The way we did things all these years, being assimilated, following the Western way of doing business, that didn’t work for our families. So here we are today to say, ‘No, we’re owning it. We are the system.’ ”
But tribal “ownership” does not appear to have benefited the tribe’s children. A Sept. 9 letter BIA sent to the tribe, finally obtained by the Minnesota Star Tribune through a Freedom of Information Act request, reveals that the feds had been concerned about the safety of children on the reservation since 2021, when the tribe took over child welfare.
Since that time, BIA wrote that the tribe was continuing to leave children in “dangerous situations where they are subject to abuse and malnutrition, placing them in immediate and significant risk of serious harm, including death.” (The Red Lake Tribal Council said in a recent statement that there were mistakes in the BIA letter, but has not elaborated on them.)
The letter revealed a series of child deaths from abuse or neglect on the Red Lake Nation between 2021 and 2026. In addition to the deaths, the BIA letter recounted multiple instances in which children were left in harm’s way but, thankfully, did not die.
The deaths include two children whose mother was found guilty of stabbing them before setting her home on fire; a third child was found wounded and severely neglected and malnourished.
Ombimindwaa had received two previous reports on the mother but refused to provide the records of those cases to federal authorities.
Another child died after school staff reported that the child was one of 10 living in a house with a lice infestation and no heat or running water.
When the child died, Ombimindwaa staff refused to enter the home because of its condition.
After two months of requesting the removal of the remaining children by the agency, the FBI enlisted the tribal police to do so, the BIA letter said.
After the death of another severely malnourished child living in an unsafe home, tribal police contacted the FBI. Ombimindwaa staff left a sibling in that home. The BIA’s letter counted
this boy among the dead; the Star Tribune later reported that the government had wrongly listed the brother as deceased.
The most recent case discussed in the letter involves a child who was airlifted twice from Red Lake with serious injuries.
The first time, the child was found to have a skull fracture and suspicious bruising. Ombimindwaa returned the child to the home and failed to inform law enforcement of the incident.
When the child was airlifted again with facial injuries, the tribal police informed the FBI, which requested the child be placed outside the home until an investigation could be completed, but the agency refused to do so.
Perhaps none of this should be surprising. According to the BIA letter, Ombimindwaa employed numerous felons, including a convicted sex offender and several convicted murderers.
If anyone had read them, the tribe’s brief annual reports to the Minnesota Legislature would have aroused concern.
The most recent one indicated that the number of maltreatment reports dropped by more than 50% from 2021 to 2024.
The tribe suggested that this may have resulted from a new practice whereby staff contact those reporting abuse and neglect to suggest how they might support the family
themselves, implying the reports would perhaps be deleted after such conversations.
The number of children found to be victims of abuse or neglect dropped from 142 in 2021 to 56 or 68 in 2024, depending on whether one believes the text or the chart in the tribe’s report. Could child maltreatment on the reservation really have dropped so quickly? Did anyone ask? This is not the first time that BIA has taken over child protection services on a reservation.
In 2012, the federal government took over social services from the Spirit Lake Tribe in North Dakota after whistleblowers complained that children were being placed in homes with known sex offenders and other children were dying of child abuse and neglect.
But as in this case, it took years of tragedy before anyone acted. The behavioral health director of the Indian Health Service clinic at Spirit Lake was reprimanded and reassigned when he wrote a letter expressing “grave concern” for the reservation’s children.
It is disturbing that to date there have been no public statements or questions from Congress or state leaders, or a big outcry from the public, about the turn of events at Red Lake.
Perhaps widespread guilt about America’s egregious treatment of tribal children in the past results in a hesitation to criticize tribal administration of child protection, and even a desire to punish those who raise alarms.
But guilt over hurting children in the past does not excuse allowing today’s children to be harmed. Offering tribes greater sovereignty (not to mention millions of dollars) in the name of cultural sensitivity, while ignoring the suffering and deaths of children, is inexcusable.
Marie Cohen writes the blog Child Welfare Monitor. Naomi Schaefer Riley is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of “The New Trail of Tears.”
Safe Passage
Gehrman, R. and Karrow, M., Minnesota Child Fatalities from Maltreatment 2014-2022, Safe Passage for Children of Minnesota, 2023.
KIDS AT RISK ACTION / KARA / INVISIBLE CHILDREN
This article submitted by KARA board member MikeTikkanen
