Thank you so much for being here. Please state your name and begin your testimony. We'll start with you.
Thank you, Councilwoman Ahmad and Cindy Bass, for taking up the mantle on this crucial issue. We've heard a lot about moving forward, but I really beg to differ with the previous speaker when he said that the '22 report of the Special Committee on Child Separation was not a roadmap. It is a roadmap and it is the way forward, and they must be implemented without delay, not rewritten, not abandoned, not watered down, but rather used to create a timeline for implementation, define priorities from community input and hold authorities to account. So not only is it a roadmap, but it's also a checklist, as players can say what they have and what they have not done. Now, for us I'm Phoebe Jones. I'm with the Support Not Separation Network. Our number one priority for implementation is the poverty is not neglect recommendation, that any condition that can be remedied through concrete help shall not constitute neglect. The vast majority of removals, especially for mothers and families of color, are due to conditions of poverty, but it must go a step further. DHS dollars must be used to provide that concrete help to family, and I've been thrilled to hear today the calls for Joy Banks, which are basically unconditional cash for mothers. And if there are any federal or state regulations restricting DHS funds from being used to support families, we're asking City Council to please take the lead in advocating for changes in those restrictions at whatever level, like what City Council did when it passed a resolution in support of the expanded child tax credit that Councilwoman Rue Landau put forward, and that made a big difference in relation to child welfare. During the pandemic, the child tax credit was expanded so that work and income restrictions were lifted and it was paid monthly. Child poverty was cut in half and DHS removals went down. This is the direct relationship between the money in the hand and the ability to deal with things. So the services we need is the money, we need the house, you know, as well as whatever the support. So in closing, my testimony, I just wanted to say that severing the bond between mother and child destroys families and harms children. Take away our poverty, not our children.
Thank you. Please state your name and begin your testimony.
And I have Rosemary's also who was on the list. Do you want me to wait for --
What's the rule on reading other people's testimony? Could you submit that to us?
Just because of the interest of time. We still have people waiting. Go ahead, ma'am.
Hi. My name is Kara Carter Jennings. The room is like spinning. I'm having anxiety. Okay. I'm just going to --
Take a deep breath. MS. CARTER JENNINGS. I'm just going to stick to my notes. Okay. It's been a long time coming. I want to thank the panel, everyone here for giving me the opportunity to be here and I'll go right into my notes. Okay. You gave me two minutes, but this is not a talent show. This is trauma. This is truth and I refuse to make my pain perform on your clock. You gave me two minutes, but this trauma doesn't last minutes. It doesn't even last years. It lasts lifetimes. It lives in our DNA. It becomes the silence in the car seat, the ache in the womb, the ache in the child's soul. A no file in your drawer can explain what that moment did to mine. I'm not a case number. I'm a mother. But in that courtroom, love didn't matter, healing didn't matter. What mattered was the paper trail. And the truth is our pain fuels your paperwork. The more we suffer, the more your files grow. The more we cry, the more your stats climb. The hairs which your files never measured. The cost of a bedtime story left untold. The weight of a mother's arms left empty, the grief of a child forced to learn survival before they learned to spell, and you call that protection. I came here from Kentucky back to Philadelphia not for pity, not for vengeance, but for voice, for dignity, for reckoning. Because what was taken from us, our children, our safety, our lineage was never yours to erase. I don't come up here as just one woman. I come as generational legacy interrupted. I was raised by my grandparents in the city of Philadelphia in the very era when DHS was tearing Black families apart at rates the world should have called genocide. In the 1980s and '90s, Philadelphia led the nation in child removals. Today Black children are 65% of youth in foster care, though we are only 42% of the population. That is not coincidence. That is a system. And where did our children go? Their cries now echo through prison walls. Their trauma is locked in institutions, not just behind bars but behind diagnosis, behind case plans, behind broken school systems, behind housing statistics, behind silence. They were funneled from family court to juvenile court to adult court, passed from desk to death like a lost file no one wanted to claim. Marked as trouble before they were even taught how to spell their names. When DHS came for my family, they didn't just take my children, they renamed them, replaced their story, rewrote their history. They broke the very blood lines my grandparents worked for to protect. My wound carried legacy and the system erased it like a typo on paper, as if my children were a clerical error to be corrected instead of souls to be protected. I wasn't a criminal. I didn't have a record. I wasn't abusive. I was just trying to heal. And instead of hell, they gave me a caseworker. I am one of those statistics, but I'm also the exception because I didn't die in addiction, I didn't die in depression, I didn't die in their chains, but many of us do and I'm not the only one. There are fathers, grandmothers, aunties, uncles still fighting in silence, still grieving children who were legally kidnapped. Let's call it what it is, state-sanctioned child trafficking labeled as unfit because we were too poor, too Black, too honest, too human. You want to understand what trauma does? Let me take you there. Imagine baking a cake, you pour the batter into a pan, but the pan has a dent in it. No matter how sweet the batter is, the cake comes out with a dent. It still bakes. It might even rise but the mark is there. That's what trauma does. It imprints. It shapes how we grow. It shows up in courtrooms, classrooms and bedrooms. It gets handed down like a family recipe no one asked for. The child isn't broken. This system is the pan. And if the pan is denied, the outcome comes out damaged every time. So whether -- I'm almost done. So whether you call it progress or policy, if it's baked in racism and bias, it's coming out the same. You traded nooses for legal notices.
You went from hanging us on trees to hanging our futures and hearings. From slave ships to court slips. From shackles to signatures. Different tools, same terror. Because you don't need literal chains when you got legal documents that bind people in place. You replaced slavery's physical shackles with the binding power of paperwork. You don't need a whip when you have a courtroom. And then you use court orders, adoption papers, termination notices, signatures that destroy families with a pen. It's not rehabilitation. It's not justice. It's professionalized enslavement. You didn't stop the violence. You just did it quietly. But don't get it twisted. It's not just violence. It's murder. Murder to bloodlines, murder of identities, murders of futures, murders of names that were never supposed to be changed. And I came here to put that truth on record and I will no longer be silent about it. We are not your case files. We are not your failures. We are your mirror and your judgment is long overdue. You thought we'd die in your paperwork, but we rose from it. And now, we're speaking and we will not stop, not until the system breaks beneath the weight of every stolen name we remember. So go ahead and cut the mic if you must. But by the time you do, truth will already be in the room and you cannot escort truth out. And if Jehovah says to keep talking, I will keep exposing. I will keep returning to Pharaoh to say, let my people go. I will keep pulling light up beside darkness. I will keep naming what you tried to bury. I will keep calling out what you --
-- claim you can't find. I will keep unveiling every file you hold --
Thank you. I'm sorry, but we've given you a lot more time than anybody else so that's not fair. Thank you.
Hi. My name is Raven Jacobs and I come to you not as a parent but as an auntie, a kinship care provider for five of my nieces and nephews. Me already being a single mom, okay. When I speak, I speak from a place of knowing and being really knowledgeable to children. When this happened, I already had years professionally 16 with working with children within 17 the education system. I had 18 opportunities to work in behavioral 19 health schools such as Wordsworth 20 Academy where I got a chance to experience children that was already in the system. And one thing I used to question is, if they took you from a broken place and put you somewhere else, why are you still angry, why aren't you here, why aren't you healing. And then I got a chance to experience this with the children that I fostered, which are my nieces and nephews. And I seen how the system just tears the lives apart. They say they're helping parents and helping put children into a better situation, but the things that go on in the background, they uproot these children from their homes, from their family, from their loved ones and, no, they do not call family members that try to help out the children, that ask for custody of their children because it was done to my nieces and nephews. Biological parents have stepped up, aunts, uncles. So many people from their family and friends circle that stepped in once these children was illegally removed from my care after 27 months. I got a chance to witness how taken -- I had two adolescents and three toddlers. I went to take them to daycare one day just for them to say, oh, they can't come because they finally cut the mom's benefits. So I basically had to pay out of pocket for them to go to school because all DHS wanted to do was just pick them up and move them to another building, and then to take them from that building where they can stay temporarily, and we're talking about a 1 and two 2-year-olds, and then pick them up and then move them somewhere else. I had to intervene and say, no, we're not going to move them anymore, it's too much mental destruct on the child, on an infant, on a toddler, for you to just pick up and just completely dismantle their whole entire lives. Like I feel as though DHS caseworkers need to all have mental evaluations because a lot of them are moving from their personal experience and perspectives, but they're not always all the way attuned to what the family really needs in the best way to approach each identical situation. I'm hurting to this day, because from 2017 up until now these children have been told that I was in jail -- no, I was dead and their mother was in jail just to prevent them from communicating with me. When they terminated my rights, Judge Lyris Young, she threw me in jail for 21 days without even a reason. If you go to the files, they didn't even say contempt of court or anything. I spent days in jail away from my own child. He had to suffer and deal without having his mom for the first time in life. He had to deal with the same children that was removed from me. That was his family. So they're not just hurting the children that they remove, they're hurting everybody that's attached to these children as far as my son is concerned as well.
14 Well, thank you so much. I'm so 15 sorry you had this -- all of you, 16 have these experiences. And as I 17 said to the panel before, these are 18 all informing us. So thank you for 19 sharing your stories. Thank you so 20 much. 21 Mr. Sham, if you can call the next person.
Yes, Yalonda Houston. And then can we have Skylar Smith and Margaret Robertson. (Witnesses approached witness table.)
Hello. Good afternoon, ladies. Thank you guys for having this as well. My name is Yalonda Taylor and I dealt with DHS on two aspects. When I first started, I started off as a foster so I can speak on a few things on that side just like the gentleman that spoke earlier. I had an incident where the grandmother of the child that was in care asked me to take over care for her grandson. Being that she had suspicions that he was being abused, upon his arrival at my home when I was about to give him a shower, he had knife marks on his back. And when I went to wash him up, he would cringe. You could tell that he's been touched. So being a mandated reporter, I took pictures, I advised the CUA worker at the time of exactly what was said. He said that she would throw him in the trash bag, time him up and so forth. And I mentioned this just because of the gentleman's testimony. Nothing ever became of that. There was no follow-up. There was nothing to be said. So I can see -- I've seen it personally where it's supposed to be a safe haven where, hey, you know, go to your advisor, CUA. And unfortunately, the system, what it's supposed to do and what it actually does are two different things. So I just wanted to mention that portion just as a foster that's a mandated reporter actually doing their job and nothing becoming of it. So I can only imagine from a child's aspect as well. But moving forward as well, I do agree with Cindy that CUA definitely needs to be eliminated. Half of the issues, I've heard you make testaments to the fact that they're overworked, and I believe to a certain point -- but the major problem is if you look at the city as a whole, because we are out in the streets, we interact with the parents, it's always the same baseline story. And it's usually that a worker is they have too much power. Unfortunately, like DHS is not governed I don't think under anyone. This is the closest we will get right here in this moment at a chance to be heard. And even if you're being done wrong, like myself as a foster, one of my babies which is who I was trying to adopt, in the process of adopting she came to me at 2 years old. She wasn't taken from her parent. She was brought to a safe haven. Had her for four years until I had a worker on my case. They gave me a foster child. They gave me no background on the foster child. She became a danger to my to herself as well as the home. I asked for her to be removed, and I was told I have to deal with that situation as long as it is or I will never adopt the baby that I wanted to. So moving forward, I complained about that worker to CAROl, which is supposed to be a complaint system within DHS. And the thanks that I got was that worker coming to my home making a false accusation, which led to the removal -- to be precise, she went as far as to say I pulled a gun out on her, okay, which never happened. And she called the ChildLine and made that direct statement. Fortunately for me, someone within CUA called and gave me a heads-up so I was able to call the police onsite to dismiss that never happened. And based on Christina Ali's previous testimony, that call was -- a screen-out call that should have never been investigated. In return, she was removed from my care for three months and the investigation for local should only be 30 days. So three months passed that. I went above their heads to Harrisburg and she was then awarded back to me in a sense. But what happened was it started I guess a little issue, because I know how to speak up for myself and articulate. And because of that, they came back a year later and took her, which I was told when they returned her, we're giving her back because we have to, not because we want to. So I say all this to say that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And we can sit here and go over the schematics. And I know Christina Ali, you've been in the system for a while. You know you previously testified. You've been there since you were young.
It's a culture, so everyone's going to be aware. Like if we have to attack the elephant in the room, we know what's going on. So where do we go from here? And I feel that one of the issues being with the workers, if a worker lies on the stand, that's perjury which is accountable by time, correct. Why are we not holding them accountable? If a parent could come to you and say, listen, I could have lost my freedom or I did lose my freedom based on false testimony by a worker so the person is now left with the trauma, and this worker is now able to continue and just keep going right back to what they're doing. So I know I got to wrap it up. So my suggestion, I feel that the workers themselves should be able to have to take out some kind of insurance because they'll take the liability away from the city. And if they're taking out a personal insurance themselves and I can hold them personally accountable for the foolishness that they do, I think that would be a way to minimize a lot of the issues that happen.
Thank you so much for your testimony. Did you finally adopt?
No. As it stands, I did meet with Christina Ali last December and I went with a whole booklet of over 100 sheets to prove how I was done wrong. Unfortunately, she said because the court already terminated my rights there was nothing she can do. I further pursued it and someone told DHS to get in touch with me to make it right. How we left that is I needed proof of life for her. Because when they took her the second time, the worker who said they saw her, because they kept calling me every month for that checkup, and I'm like, you know, she's not in my care. And my State Rep was working with me. So while in a room with the State Rep, that worker had to admit eight months later they never laid eyes on her. So this is why we get into situations where we are today, because she didn't have a family prior to. I am her only family. So if I'm not looking and questioning where is she, you know. And then you have a State Rep that has been there from beginning to the end of my entire case. Reach out to you via email and so forth, said something is not copacetic, there has been no 15 response at the end of our meeting. I was promised I would get proof of life so I would also ask you guys to find out if she is safe. Thank you.
Well, thank you for your testimony. Mr. Sham, are there any other speakers on public comment?
4 Thank you everyone for your 5 patience, for sitting through this. 6 This is important. I know we went 7 over time for some of our speakers, 8 but they had deep, you know, 9 speaking from their heart and they 10 needed to let us know their 11 experience. 12 So this concludes the 13 business before the Committee on 14 Public Health and Human Services 15 today. Thank you very much for 16 your attendance and have a great 17 day. Thank you. 18 (Committee on Public 19 Health and Human Services concluded 20 at 4:55 p.m.) 21 22 23 24 C E R T I F I C A T I O N I, hereby certify that the proceedings and evidence noted are contained fully and accurately in the stenographic notes taken by me in the foregoing matter, and that this is a correct transcript of the same. __________________________________ TANEHA CARROLL