A Hennepin County District Court has struck down an early phased-in implementation of a Minnesota law to limit foster care removals of children based on race, poverty, and other factors. In 2024, lawmakers passed the Minnesota African American Family Preservation and Child Welfare Disproportionality Act (MAAFPCWDA) to address long-standing discrepancies in the foster care system.
As written,
(MAAFPCWDA) requires social services to take “active efforts” to prevent out-of-home placement of African American and disproportionately represented children. In the case of removal, social services must take “active efforts” to reunify children with their parents or custodian.
For all other children, social services will apply “reasonable efforts” before removing a child from their home. This “creates two distinct standards of protection based solely on ethnic and socio-economic factors,” making it arbitrarily harder to remove certain children from abusive homes.
For the entire state, the law will take effect in January 2027. However, Hennepin and Ramsey counties began a phased rollout earlier this year under a $5 million grant. The rollout, as the Star Tribune reports, “covered 30% of all new child protection cases involving African Americans and American Indians not protected by the Indian Child Welfare Act.”
In a lawsuit brought to court by three attorneys representing an African-American mother, whose children were eligible for, but did not receive MAAFPCWDA’s extra protections, Judge Matthew Frank ruled that the limited implementation violates equal protection laws under the 14th Amendment.
What does this mean for the law itself? According to the Star Tribune,
In his ruling, Frank wrote that while the Legislature and Department of Children, Youth and Families “had the best intentions” in creating the law and phasing in its rollout, he had to shut it down because there was no constitutional argument for granting legal protections to a percentage of the population based on race.
And though his decision was limited to the legality of the rollout, Frank also signaled that the overall law could be vulnerable to a challenge, writing that MAAFPA in its totality “involves a fundamental right and creates a suspect class” based on race.
As the conversation on this law continues, American Experiment would like to hear from you if you, or someone you know, could be affected. Please email us at [email protected]
