The girl known as Lexi was removed from the home of Rusty and Summer Page on Monday after a Friday decision by a California appeals court, report NBC News, CBS News, the Los Angeles Times and the San Jose Mercury News.
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Lawmakers found that Native American families were broken up at disproportionately high rates, and that cultural ignorance and biases within the child welfare system were largely to blame.
On Monday afternoon, social services arrived at the southern California home of Rusty and Summer Page.
They’re asking for support for their petition to “Bring Lexi Home”, which has garnered more than 76,000 signatures in a few short days.
The Pages have fought efforts under the federal Indian Child Welfare Act to place Lexi with relatives of her father, who is part Choctaw.
She said Lexi and the Utah family had traded messages and had monthly visits during the past three years.
The Choctaw Nation has said the girl is being placed with relatives of her biological father for her best interest.
“We appreciate the concern for Lexi and want to assure everyone she is in a safe, loving home with her relatives and her biological sisters”, the Choctaw Nation said in a statement Tuesday.
The Act “sets federal requirements that apply to state child custody proceedings involving an Indian child who is a member of or eligible for membership in a federally recognized tribe”, the National Indian Child Welfare Association outlines.
The Pages are heartbroken at the prospect of losing their foster daughter to people she doesn’t even know.
After efforts to reunify the girl with her birth father failed, the father, the tribe and the L.A. County Department of Children and Family Services recommended the girl be placed in Utah with a non-Indian couple related to the father.
Rusty Page described his former foster daughter as a victim of the Indian Child Welfare Act, which he argued gives “absolute power to tribal leaders who judiciously abduct children at will”.
“How is it that a screaming child, saying, ‘I want to stay, I’m scared, ‘ how is it in her best interest to pull her from the girl she was before that doorbell rang?”
The case somewhat echoes that of Elian Gonzalez, a six-year-old little boy snatched from his foster home in Miami back in 2000 and forced to move to Cuba to live with his father.
Indeed, records show that the Pages were told when they initially tried to adopt Lexi that she was never up for adoption.
“She’s the happiest child you’ll ever meet today”, said Rusty. Matt and Melanie Capobianco then began their fight to have Veronica returned, arguing federal law does not define an unwed biological father as a parent.
“It would be fairly extraordinary for an appeals court to reverse that”, he said.
The lawyer for the foster parents, Lori Alvino McGill, told the Los Angeles Daily Journal that the foster parents would continue to pursue the appeal “and we will press on to the U.S. Supreme Court if that becomes necessary”. According to the Christian Science Monitor, it was enacted in 1978 to ensure Native children can grow up with their own families, or another Native family, to “foster their sense of identity and their understanding of their culture”.
Lexi has celebrated four birthdays with the Page family and “has woken up in their home every Christmas morning she can remember”, the legal team also noted, adding that “Our clients have been the only consistent source of love, nurturing, parenting, and protection she has received her entire life”.
The girl’s sister is living with the couple, and another sister will be living down the street, said Leslie Heimov of the Children’s Law Center of California, Lexi’s court-appointed legal representatives.
The suit asserts that children with American Indian ancestry “are still living in the era of Plessy v. Ferguson”.
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But on Monday, the Department of Children and Family came for Alexandria and her foster father walked her out to the waiting vehicle.
