The State Takes Your Child. Then It Runs Out the Clock.

The state removes a child from a parent. The parent is told to wait for a hearing, wait for discovery, wait for services, wait for a ruling, wait for an appeal. Weeks become months. The child settles into a foster home. A new school becomes familiar. A routine forms. Then the same government that created the separation walks into court and announces that changing the child’s placement would be disruptive. The child is doing well, it says. We must maintain the status quo.

But the status quo is counterfeit. The state created it.

That ugly truth sits at the center of two recent developments. In Kentucky, a mother asked an appellate court for emergency relief after being separated from her child for approximately 70 days. According to the court’s order in C.K. v. Hon. Casey Cheesman, she wanted the family court directed to rule on pending motions, enter findings, and move the case forward. The appellate court denied interim relief. It reasoned that she could appeal after a final dispositional order and that, even considering the separation, the alleged injury was not the kind of ruinous harm required for extraordinary intervention.

The allegations against the mother may ultimately prove serious or they may not. That is what hearings, evidence, and judicial findings are supposed to determine. Due process does not exist only for parents who are later declared flawless. It exists because government accusations are not verdicts.

The court’s message was nevertheless unmistakable: wait. Appeal later.

Later is the problem.

A parent who wins an appeal cannot recover the bedtime stories, birthdays, school mornings or ordinary physical closeness lost while the system moved at institutional speed. More perversely, the delay itself changes the evidence. Every month apart weakens the relationship that the court will later evaluate. Every month in placement strengthens the agency’s argument that the child is now ‘stable.’ Government delay becomes evidence against the person injured by the delay.

Now Congress is considering a bill that recognizes part of this procedural void while demonstrating how little urgency Washington attaches to a family’s destruction. The Samier Amer Foster Care Improvement Act of 2026 would make certain placement procedures part of state Title IV-E plans, tying them to the federal funding structure that supports foster care.

That mechanism is important. States pay attention when federal money is involved. The bill would require notice of a placement decision and its reasons to parents, interested relatives, attorneys, and others. It would permit requests for supporting documentation and allow the child’s attorney to seek an on-the-record judicial review.

Then comes the catch: the state could have up to 90 days after a placement decision to provide notice.

Ninety days is not a prompt process. To a five-year-old, it is a season. To a baby, it is a substantial part of conscious life. To an agency seeking to establish a new status quo, it is plenty of time.

The bill also appears to reserve the right to petition for review to the child’s attorney — not the parent, the relative denied placement, or their attorneys. It requires a court to begin review within seven days but establishes no deadline for a decision. It contains no clear burden of proof, no guaranteed evidentiary hearing, no automatic disclosure requirement, and no meaningful remedy when officials ignore the rules.

A deadline without a consequence is a suggestion. A right without standing is decoration. Judicial review that arrives after the government’s preferred arrangement has hardened is not protection; it is paperwork.

Federal law already shows why time is so dangerous. Under 42 U.S.C. § 675, states generally must pursue termination after a child has spent 15 of the most recent 22 months in foster care, subject to statutory exceptions. The same law calls for procedural safeguards when children are removed, moved, or when parental visitation is affected. But the federal clock keeps moving while hearings are continued, services begin late, reports remain undisclosed, and parents wait for rulings.

The government can therefore consume the reunification period through its own delay and later point to the time in care as justification for permanent separation. That is not merely a bureaucratic defect. It is a structural incentive.

The Supreme Court recognized in Santosky v. Kramer that a parent’s fundamental liberty interest in the care, custody and management of a child does not disappear because the parent is imperfect or has temporarily lost custody. When the state seeks to destroy a family bond, the Court said, it must provide fundamentally fair procedures.

Fundamentally fair cannot mean that the government takes first, delays second, and invokes the consequences of its own delay third.

Real reform must treat time as part of due process. Parents should receive counsel and the complete removal record immediately. Placement decisions should be disclosed within 24 to 48 hours, not 90 days. Parents and relatives must have standing to demand review. Emergency removals should receive expedited, evidence-based hearings with written findings of imminent danger and why less restrictive alternatives cannot protect the child. Continuances should require specific findings, and delays attributable to the state should not count toward a termination timeline.

There must also be consequences. Missed deadlines should trigger expedited review, fee shifting, sanctions, and, where safety permits, a presumption favoring return. Knowing fabrication, concealment of exculpatory information, and deliberate obstruction by agency officials should carry an enforceable civil remedy. Judges who repeatedly disregard mandatory procedures should face transparent disciplinary review. Immunity cannot become a government-wide permission slip to violate rights without consequence.

And courts must stop pretending that a child doing well in foster care proves that removal was lawful or that home is unsafe. Children can be resilient in places they never should have been forced to live. They can care about foster parents and still ache for their own. "Doing well" is not a legal finding, and government-created attachment cannot be used to launder an unlawful separation.

The state should never be allowed to manufacture the status quo, run out the clock and then present the wreckage as evidence that the family cannot be put back together.

Because by then, the system has not merely delayed justice. It has used time to defeat it.

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