[Letter to the Editor] Questions Remain After Durham's Reunification Month Event

Editor,

Thank you for covering Durham County’s Reunification Month event. I’m writing because the story, as published, reflects the county and DSS narrative, but it leaves out the larger reality of family policing, family separation, and the institutional control of the story itself.

This event took place on the final day of a month publicly proclaimed as Reunification Month. For many families and organizers, June was also Stolen Children’s Month. That distinction matters. Reunification cannot be honestly celebrated without also naming the machinery of removal, surveillance, coercion, and legal separation that made reunification necessary in the first place.

Throughout the month, families and advocates were present in county spaces. We met in County chambers. We met with Commissioner Stephen Valentine. We attended the DSS Board meeting on the third Wednesday. In those spaces, we raised the realities of legal kidnapping, family separation by ICE, the foster pipeline, forced treatment, poverty punishment, and family policing. Not one person disclosed that this county-backed reunification event was happening on the last day of the proclaimed month.

That silence is not a small omission. It functioned as narrative containment.

DSS and county leadership were able to stage a controlled, celebratory version of reunification while avoiding the families and advocates who were publicly naming the violence underneath the system. The county celebrated reunification while concealing the politics of removal.

I’m encouraging you to look deeper than the event program and official quotes. The child welfare system is not merely a support system. Many directly impacted families, scholars, and organizers identify it as the family policing system because it surveils, regulates, coerces, and separates families, especially Black, Indigenous, poor, disabled, immigrant, and otherwise systemically excluded families.

Operation Stop CPS, based in Durham, describes itself as a grassroots abolitionist campaign fighting to end the family regulation system, often mislabeled as child protective services. Their work is directly relevant to any honest reporting on Durham DSS and family separation.

Movement for Family Power is another essential source. It is an abolitionist hub working to end family policing and build a world where families can thrive without surveillance and separation. Their research and narrative work can help reporters understand why many families reject the language of “child welfare” and instead use “family policing” or “family regulation.”

This also needs historical context. Today’s family policing system does not exist outside the history of slavery, forced family separation, Black child removal, Indigenous child removal, and carceral control. Dorothy Roberts’ work, especially Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World, is foundational here. Roberts traces how family separation has always been tied to racial control, poverty punishment, and state power. She also connects modern child welfare practices to the post-slavery use of courts to label Black parents “neglectful” and force Black children back into labor arrangements under white control.

The term “neglect” deserves special scrutiny. In practice, “neglect” often operates as a legal container for poverty. Lack of stable housing, transportation, childcare, food, utilities, mental health support, disability accommodations, or safe immigration status can be converted into allegations against parents instead of treated as evidence that families need material support. When poverty is criminalized as neglect, family separation becomes policy violence disguised as protection.

There is also a profit and funding story here. Children in foster care are not just moving through a neutral care system. They move through courts, contracted service providers, foster placement networks, treatment programs, adoption systems, case management structures, and compliance-based service plans. A serious investigation should map who receives public money when children are removed, who benefits from mandated services, who contracts with DSS, how foster-care and adoption funding flows, and how reunification, TPR, guardianship, and adoption outcomes are counted. To get you started I have attached some information about funding and profit mapping. I will point out that I have distributed the same information to the Board of County Commissioners and the DSS Board, months ago in naming the monetization of children and the harm pipelines, as well as speaking to them about this in public forums. They cannot feign ignorance.

This matters even more in Durham because the average amount of time a child spends in foster care is reportedly 677 days, nearly two years. That means annual reunification, adoption, TPR, and foster-care entry numbers cannot be honestly read as if they describe the same children or the same family journeys. A child adopted in 2025 may have entered care in 2023. A child whose parents’ rights were terminated in 2025 may not be adopted until 2026 or 2027, or may never be adopted at all. So if DSS or the county presents one-year reunification numbers without cohort tracking, removal data, TPR data, adoption data, and time-in-care data, the public is not getting the full story.

Some questions I hope you will investigate:

• How many children entered foster care in Durham County in 2025?
• How many Durham County children had termination of parental rights petitions filed in 2025?
• How many TPR orders were granted in 2025?
• How many children exited through adoption in 2025?
• How many children were legally free for adoption but not yet adopted?
• How many children reunified, and how long had they been in care before reunification?
• How many children were removed for allegations categorized as neglect?
• How many neglect cases involved poverty-related conditions such as housing instability, lack of childcare, utilities, food insecurity, disability, immigration status, or lack of access to treatment?
• Who receives county, state, or federal money when children are removed, placed, treated, supervised, transported, evaluated, represented, or adopted?
• Why were families and advocates who attended public county and DSS meetings during Reunification Month not told about the final-day reunification event?
• Who was invited, who was excluded, and who controlled the narrative?

If reunification is such a priority for Durham County DSS, why in FY 2025-26 was .08% ($52k) of the DSS budget for reunification while salaries were 80% of the budget? At the Durham County Budget meetings in June of this year, the BOCC was asked to increase this $52k to 1% of the DSS budget, with .5% going to reunification and .5% going to direct family support and preservation. This ask was from the community NOT from DSS. The answer was to cut the $52k to $50k. There is talk that $100k is going to reunification so we are waiting until the final budget comes out to see how this is allocated. For comparison, Durham County Animal Protection services has a budget of $1.2 million, 23x the budget for reunification.

Reunification should not be reduced to a ceremony. If Durham County wants to celebrate families coming back together, it must also answer for the conditions under which families were separated, the legal mechanisms used to separate them, and the public dollars attached to that separation.

I hope you will consider a follow-up story that speaks with impacted parents, youth, family defenders, Operation Stop CPS, Movement for Family Power, abolitionist family-policing scholars, parent attorneys, and community advocates who have been naming these harms long before the county turned reunification into a controlled public relations event.

Families deserve more than a celebration after state separation. They deserve truth, data, accountability, and material support that prevents separation in the first place.

Peter Eisenmann
Durham

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