A Manhattan appellate court panel found that the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) subjected a mother to months of “extrajudicial” surveillance after she asked for protection against the physically abusive father of her children.
In the year after the city’s child welfare agency issued an order of protection against the father, it placed the mother, referred to as Sasha C. for the sake of privacy, and her children under a “sweeping, overbroad, and unchecked” monitoring order, according to court papers.
Despite the fact that Ms. C faced no allegations of wrongdoing herself, court documents noted, ACS ordered months of invasive home searches as it investigated the allegations against the father and considered a court-ordered plan for the children’s care.
Then, for nearly a year after the court found that the father had been abusive, ACS continued to supervise Ms. C and her children, even after they had moved to Florida — where the agency enlisted armed police officers there to do home inspections and pull the children out of school for interviews.
ACS tried to extend its supervision again nine months after the father consented to the neglect charges, but Ms. C took legal action against the continued surveillance. A family court judge finally denied ACS’s request to extend supervision in April of 2025 — a year and a half after it first began surveilling her.
Though the family court agreed with the mother’s request, she and her legal counsel appealed ACS’s previous order extending her supervision — in effect challenging the validity of the prior orders that ultimately were terminated by the family court.
Neither ACS or the city Law Department responded to a request for comment on the decision, but the court noted that when Ms. C alleged that ACS’s practice of enlisting out-of-state police forces to conduct home inspections is a widespread pattern, the agency did not refute it.
The appellate court issued the decision finding ACS to have violated Ms. C’s rights, and took the step of publicly denouncing the agency’s behavior even though the supervision order was no longer in effect because it felt that ACS’s overreach was an issue of public importance.
“We once again find that ACS’s policy of pursuing supervision in such cases ‘reinforces the coercive control underpinning abusive relationships, turns survivors into suspects, and requires the nonrespondent parent to answer for the respondent parent’s abusive behaviors’ and that adhering to such a policy would permit ACS to continue surveillance of the mother simply because the child’s father committed acts of domestic violence against her,” First Department Associate Justice Llinét M. Rosado wrote in the decision.
The ruling forms an addendum to a landmark decision that the Appellate Division, Second Department issued last year that stopped ACS from surveilling domestic violence survivors when their children were never removed from their care.
The two rulings reflect the notion that ACS inspections can magnify the impact of domestic violence by inflicting invasive searches that aggravate a survivor’s stress. The previous decision, The Matter of Sapphire W., took aim at the section of law that determines the pre-fact-finding stage of a domestic violence proceeding.
In Ms. C’s case, the court found fault with an “extrajudicial pattern” of supervision in the phase after fact-finding, thereby raising the problem to the public’s attention.
Family law advocates say that Ms. C’s experience is symptomatic of a large group of domestic violence survivors who find their lives interrupted by a barrage of home searches.
“ACS itself has admitted that these are routine orders that it seeks, and family courts have been routinely granting supervision orders over non-respondent parents, especially survivors of domestic violence, who make up quite a significant amount of non-respondent parents for years — probably decades,” Amelia Goldberg, a lawyer who represented Ms. C with the Family Justice Litigation Law Center, said.
The court’s ruling made special note of the effect that the inspections had on Ms. C’s children.
When Florida police showed up to her children’s new school, the eldest children “began crying and shaking” so much that the principal of the school asked the mother to take her home early.
“The child was so humiliated by the encounter, which had taken place in view of other students, including her friends, that she did not wish to return to school,” Rosado wrote in the court papers.