And there is something seriously wrong with what happened in Santa Clarita this week to a 6-year-old girl named Lexi and the foster family that has cared for her since she was 2.
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Foster parent, Rusty Page, said 6-year-old Lexi, cried and said, “don’t let them take me”.
Court records show Lexi’s biological father has an extensive criminal record and her mother had a substance abuse problem.
But Lexi is 1.5% Choctaw Native American, which allows the tribe to gain custody of her, under the federal Indian Child Welfare Act.
The extended relatives place above the Pages on the ICWA’s “adoptive placement preferences” and the court said that Lexi was not likely to suffer emotional harm after being taken away from her foster family.
After spending the first year of her life moving from foster home to foster home, Lexi found a stable home with the Page family, according to the change.org account set up to petition congress for assistance.
The Page family then implored authorities to “search deep” into their hearts and souls and do what is best for the child, imploring them to look Lexi “in her eyes and just ask her what she wants”.
The California Court of Appeals ruled in 2014 that the Page family could keep Lexi while they fought for permanent custody.
“The Choctaw Nation desires the best for this Choctaw child”, according to a statement from Lisa Reed, public relations executive director for the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.
But the National Indian Child Welfare Association strongly disagreed, arguing the federal legislation is based on “the unique political status of tribes and Indian people” rather than race.
The foster family has tried to appeal a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge’s decision for Lexi to go to Utah a couple of times, but failed.
The Pages say they will fight to bring Lexi back home.
A photo from the Save Lexi page on Facebook.
Page said that when he and his wife became her foster parents, she “came to us scared and confused”.
Graham Kelly, Lexi’s foster uncle, breaks down on the street after family services came to take Lexi away from her foster family in Santa Clarita, Calif., Monday, March 21, 2016. “The result here is all the more senseless because placing Lexi with her non-Indian extended family members does nothing to further ICWA’s objective of keeping children connected to their tribes”.
Following a legal battle lasting several years the girl, Lexi, was taken away under a law which was meant to keep Native American children in their communities. She is the second child that the Pages have attempted to adopt out of foster care, according to court documents.
“The tribe consented to the girl’s placement with a non-Indian foster family to facilitate efforts to reunify the girl with her father”, court documents state. It requires social workers to make an extra effort to avoid removing Indian children from troubled homes, a greater effort than they would make for non-Indian children.
University of North Dakota Law Professor B.J. Jones has said that 25 to 35 percent of Native American children were moved from their birth families to non-Native homes by government agencies.
She’s visited them regularly in the past three years, they visit California once a month, and Skype once a week.
There is still considerable disagreement over the application of the law and whether it serves children’s best interest, said Ralph Richard Banks, a professor at Stanford Law School.
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The statement continues, “The tribe’s values of faith, family and culture are what makes our tribal identity so important to us”.
