That’s good news, said the Department of Children, Youth and Families and some family advocates who have long criticized the system for the harms caused by separating children from their parents. It’s the most horrific thing many can imagine, said Tara Urs, special counsel for civil policy and practice at the King County Department of Public Defender. And it disproportionately affects people who are poor, as well as black and Native American families.

“It’s wonderful to see a state agency working harder to keep families together,” said Shrounda Selivanoff, who manages welfare contracts for families at the state Office of Public Defense and leads a coalition called Keeping Families Together.

The drop in foster care numbers from 9,171 in 2018 to 4,971 in early August is also a positive trend for DCYF, which has faced intense criticism for its overcrowded youth detention centers and the transfer of 43 young men to an adult prison last month, with a judge ordering their repatriation.

DCYF waited until the number of foster children fell below 5,000 before making an announcement, agency spokeswoman Nancy Gutierrez said.

However, some have expressed concern that DCYF’s practices leave children in unsafe situations and their families without the help they need.

DCYF Secretary Ross Hunter has long said he wants to drastically reduce the number of children in foster care. While he acknowledged cases of “horrific physical and sexual abuse,” he said in a 2021 interview with the Seattle Times that most cases involve neglect.

This is a more vague concept which, as many have pointed out, is often accompanied by a lack of adequate housing, child care, psychological counselling and drug treatment.

The department has enlisted services to address these and other parenting issues to either avoid removing children or to reunite families more quickly after removal, Gutierrez said. For example, DCYF could connect parents with substance abuse or mental health treatment programs or bring a social worker into the home to help resolve problems. The agency can also provide practical items like diapers, car seats and beds.

A law that took effect in July 2023 accelerated the agency’s push in that direction. It raised the court’s standard for ordering a child to be removed from a “serious threat of substantial harm” to “imminent physical danger.” The number of children placed in foster care fell 14% in the year after House Bill 1227 passed.

Gutierrez said the agency is developing safety plans for some of the intact families, which could include unannounced home visits or designating relatives and friends with whom the children can stay in the event of a crisis.

Still, Shannon Anderson, an experienced foster mother from Snohomish, said, “I’m very worried.”

She and other foster parents have found that the children now coming into their care are in worse condition than before, have more serious mental health issues or are more exposed to deadly drugs like fentanyl. She claims that because of the tightening legal standards, they have been left in unsafe conditions for too long.

Anderson, who organized a rally of several dozen people in Olympia last fall to push for changes to the law, also said that children in foster care are being returned to their parents too quickly.

She pointed to a rising number of deaths and near-deaths of children whose families were in contact with the child protection system in the previous year, as reported by the Office of the Family and Children Ombudsman. The number rose from 77 in 2019 to 149 last year.

These figures include children in foster care as well as those who were living with their parents at the time of the incidents.

Ombudsman Patrick Dowd said it was too early to say whether pressure to keep families together, including increased standards for deportation, was driving up the numbers, but he suspected it had more to do with the overall fentanyl epidemic than policy or legal changes.

In fact, lawmakers tweaked that heightened standard a bit this spring, passing Senate Bill 6109, which requires courts to give “great importance” to the presence of opioids in the home.

Some advocates who passionately argue for an end to family separation say the system still needs improvement. One problem, say Taila Ayay and Adam Ballout, attorneys at an Everett family defense firm, is inadequate support for families who don’t meet the requirements for deportation.

When DCYF decides to “stop,” Ballout said, “it doesn’t mean the family no longer needs help.” Sometimes, he said, DCYF withdraws things it has offered – such as housing and child care vouchers – while investigating a case. Parents who made themselves vulnerable by admitting they needed help feel helpless in such situations, Ballout added.

Situations like this “delay the inevitable,” he said, because unsupported families may eventually reach the deportation threshold.

Ideally, Ballout and Ayay added, DCYF would outsource the task of helping the families to outside organizations that do not report to any agency with the power to take the children away from them.

DCYF claims that this is already happening.

“Once a case is closed, DCYF’s involvement ends, but we ensure families are provided with all necessary resources (housing permits, etc.) before we close the case,” Gutierrez said in an email.

Still, DCYF acknowledged in a PowerPoint presentation in July that a lack of “substance abuse treatment services and other community-based family support services puts children at further risk.”