A sweeping class-action lawsuit filed against New York City on Tuesday argues that the agency that investigates child abuse and neglect routinely engages in unconstitutional practices that traumatize the families it is charged with protecting.
The lawsuit says that investigators for the Administration for Children’s Services deceive and bully their way into people’s homes, where they rifle through families’ most private spaces, strip-search children and humiliate parents.
The agency’s “coercive tactics” include threatening to take children away or call the police, telling parents they have no choice but to let them in and making public scenes in hallways, according to the suit, filed in federal court in Brooklyn.
Marisa Kaufman, a spokeswoman for the agency, said in a statement on Monday that A.C.S. would review the lawsuit. “A.C.S. is committed to keeping children safe and respecting parents’ rights,” she said.
She added, “We will continue to advance our efforts to achieve safety, equity, and justice by enhancing parents’ awareness of their rights, connecting families to critical services, providing families with alternatives to child protection investigations, and working with key systems to reduce the number of families experiencing an unnecessary child protective investigation.”
One of the women suing, Ebony Gould, is a single mother of three in Queens who has been investigated by A.C.S. at least 12 times — each of them found to be baseless. The lawsuit says the investigations, which involved dozens of home visits, were prompted by her abusive ex-partner.
Ms. Gould said that often during the repeated investigations, she was made to feel she had no choice but to let A.C.S. in. During one of the first visits, she said, an A.C.S. worker told her, through the closed door, that she was at risk of having her children taken away.
“I felt forced,” she said. “It almost felt like I was being abused again, but by a stranger.”
Ms. Gould, 35, and the other plaintiffs are represented by the Family Justice Law Center, an organization dedicated to preventing unnecessary family separation. Its executive director, David Shalleck-Klein, said that the suit was not meant to stop A.C.S. investigations altogether, but to focus on illegal searches.
“They open refrigerators, inspect labels in medicine cabinets, tell children to lift up their shirts and pull down their pants,” he said. “And it’s not just a one-and-done — they frequently come back, time and time again.”
There are three legal justifications investigators can use to enter homes: court orders, emergency circumstances or voluntary consent.
The lawsuit says that the agency “chooses to almost never seek” court orders and conducts tens of thousands of searches each year in nonemergency circumstances, coercing consent and violating Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure.
If successful, the lawsuit would require A.C.S. to fundamentally re-envision how it investigates reports of abuse and neglect.
The agency investigates over 40,000 allegations each year. Some are genuine emergencies, and the agency has the difficult task of weighing the civil rights of families against the safety of children.
When tragedies happen, A.C.S. is frequently blamed for not having stepped in more aggressively. Those rare cases where children have died after investigators intervened minimally or not at all can make it difficult to dial back the agency’s powers.
Still, criticism of the agency has risen in recent years, especially over the stark racial disparities in its investigations. Black and Hispanic children in the city are about seven times as likely as white children to be the subject of investigations, according to state data.
While A.C.S. has reported progress in reducing “the disparities that exist at each of the stages throughout the child welfare system,” a Black child still has a nearly 50 percent chance of being caught up in an A.C.S. investigation by his or her 18th birthday, according to one of the agency’s own news releases.
Ms. Gould, who is Black, said her family has been permanently affected by its experience with A.C.S. All three of her children are now in therapy.
She said one investigator asked her 6-year-old daughter if she was suicidal. Her daughter had not previously known the word. “From that day on, she started saying — when they would come — she felt suicidal.”
One night in December 2022, when Ms. Gould’s mother was visiting from California, A.C.S. banged on her door at 3 a.m., she said.
Ms. Gould told investigators that she did not want to let them in. They threatened to come back with the authorities.
“I was shaking so bad, and my mom just started praying and then my kids are like ‘Mommy, what’s going on?’” she recalled in a recent interview.
A veteran A.C.S. employee said that when a family is resistant to home visits and the caseworker has not seen the children for a while, a night-shift caseworker is sometimes sent to assess the children. The employee spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss agency policy.
The plaintiffs are asking a judge to declare the agency’s tactics unconstitutional and order it to halt those practices.
In recent years, A.C.S. has worked to reduce the number of children it removes from their families and places in foster care. There were nearly 40,000 children in foster care in 1999. Now there are under 7,000.
The agency is still required to investigate every allegation of possible child abuse or neglect, and each investigation requires home visits. About 30 percent of investigations result in a finding of abuse or neglect, according to city data. About one in 15 investigations lead to the child being placed in foster care.
A couple in Brooklyn who are among those suing the agency said that A.C.S. left them feeling terrorized after they were investigated in 2022. When investigators showed up at the apartment that Mathew Eng shares with his wife, Marianna Azar, and 5-year-old daughter, Mr. Eng said he panicked.
They’re going to take my daughter away, he thought.
The inquiry was prompted by an anonymous complaint that the couple say they were given only scant details about: Someone had accused them of medically neglecting their daughter.
Mr. Eng and Ms. Azar gathered doctors’ notes and other evidence to show they had not been negligent. Still, for months, different workers showed up at the family’s door, demanding to see their daughter and to inspect their home.
During the investigation, Ms. Azar underwent abdominal surgery. She was told so little about when A.C.S. might visit or what they were looking for, she said, that she declined to fill a prescription for opioids, not wanting the agency to see the drugs on her bedside table. She said she spent the first two nights after surgery in excruciating pain.
One investigator texted Ms. Azar that she was required to let A.C.S. in. Ms. Azar asked if the investigator had a warrant or court order. She was falsely told, according to the suit, that “the agency does not need a warrant or court order to complete a visit.”
Their daughter, once outgoing and cheerful, has been in therapy, her parents said, and blames herself for the investigations.
Ms. Azar explained that her daughter, Y.A. (the children in the lawsuit are identified only by initials), had been asked to write a story about the home investigations. In the story, Ms. Azar said, Y.A. had written, “I am a bad kid” and “I need to behave at school or Mommy and Daddy will be arrested.”
Ms. Azar, who works for the federal government, said she found it infuriating that her family was harmed by a city agency whose mission is to protect families. She said she often wondered while investigators were in her home, “What was happening with all the kids that actually needed your attention?”
