Investigating a shadow child welfare system in Texas required was a huge undertaking, but these strategies helped

I was perplexed when I got a tip in early 2024 about a young woman fighting in a Texas family court to retain her parental rights and regain custody of her son in a case in which there was never any investigation and only minimal contact with state child welfare authorities. 

Having some experience reporting on the Texas’s troubled child welfare system, I have become somewhat accustomed to discovering things that just don’t make sense. But, in the process of trying to understand how a mother could lose her parental rights in a lawsuit filed by people to whom neither she nor her child are related, I learned about a kind of shadow child welfare system that operates outside the purview of state officials, in spaces created by gaps in oversight and the law.

“That’s not possible,” said one of only two Texas legislators who answered my phone calls after I described the case. Not only is it possible, but we also found through speaking with attorneys and family advocates that the outlines of Carmel Swann’s case are not particularly uncommon.

In “The Adoption Trap,” my story for the Texas Observer, we explored Swann’s story as part of our investigation into the private foster and adoption industry, and who gets to decide when someone should lose their right to parent.

According to family advocates and attorneys, women in vulnerable situations are frequently targeted by private foster and adoption agencies who arrive with contracts and promises to help them and their babies. Women, who often feel as if they have nowhere else to turn, sign the contracts without being fully aware of their rights and without legal counsel. 

An attorney I spoke with described the contracts as “magical thinking,” because even well-meaning private agencies can’t guarantee the parties involved will abide by their contractual obligations. While private agencies are supposed to be licensed to operate in Texas, we found that unlicensed out-of-state agencies appear to have operated in the state using third-parties to secure private agreements. 

How big is this shadow foster and adoption system? In some ways, that is difficult to quantify. And while we were told that Texas is one of several state’s with lax oversight and regulation of private foster and adoption agencies, this is a nationwide problem. Advocates worry that in the wake of the Dobbs decision, and states’ bans and restrictions on reproductive rights, the risk that vulnerable pregnant women will become entangled with more predatory private child-placement agencies will increase.

We found some limited data on overall revenue for the private foster and adoption industry, but that data came with caveats. Neither federal nor state authorities track private foster placements. While there is some data on the number of private adoptions by state, experts told us they were concerned about the veracity of that data going forward, given political impacts on data collection and interpretation.

As we worked through the story, we realized the reporting was revealing other potential leads we wanted to follow up on. Now that the story has published both in print and online, we are starting to dig back into those leads to see what we can find. 

There were a number of important reminders and lessons for me in reporting our first story, including:

• Managing an investigation: Create and abide by a logical organizational system starting from the very beginning of your reporting. Not only will you need to account for every note on a napkin, every word in an interview, and every sentence you quote from a court filing, you will want to have a system that makes it easy for you to locate what you need, easily and quickly when it comes time for editing and fact-checking — which in my case was nearly a year after I got the first tip. 

• After about eight months of reporting, I had thousands of pages of documents to weed through. As a freelancer, it was no easy task to read through the mounds of court filings to identify, annotate and organize what we would ultimately include in the story. 

• To maintain control of your project, organize your cache regularly, name and date documents for quick retrieval, and annotate as soon as possible. Keep a running log of documents and information you think you might want to use and refer to it regularly.

• Obtaining court filings: Reporting on systems that operate on the margins is always challenging. In our situation, because these lawsuits are based on contractual agreements being litigated in family courts, access to documents was a huge challenge. While Texas law allows journalists in the courtroom for these cases, accessing court filings themselves is very difficult. 

• I was very fortunate that having reported on child welfare stories previously had allowed me to earn the trust of several people who work in and on the periphery of the system who helped me find and access the documents and information I needed. 

• Tighten up your records requests: Reporting that involves government agencies and public information is growing increasingly more difficult. It just is. Agencies and officials keep finding ways to block access to people and information. 

• We submitted around seven public information requests — one was denied, two required narrowing, and two remain unfulfilled months after filing, including one for which I was charged nearly $300. 

• The experience reinforced the need to submit tightly drafted requests — both expansive enough to obtain useful information and narrow enough to be achievable. It also proved why it is important to have a good way of tracking all your requests.

• Present people in their full complexity: Cultural biases about personal wealth, class and race are omnipresent in stories about child welfare and adoption in the United States. We had to confront those issues early on while reporting this story. People are complicated, and our job as reporters is to truthfully tell their stories, complications and all. We had several substantive conversations about how to present the people in our story with honesty and compassion. 

• Honoring our sources: While the story leans heavily into court filings and interviews with attorneys, I conducted numerous interviews with women who had been traumatized from their experiences with adoption, or with private foster and adoption agencies. 

It’s imperative to remember that no one owes us their story, and we are often asking people to relive extremely painful moments in their lives. It’s especially important to remember that many times, we are interviewing people who not only have no firsthand experience with reporters but, in many cases, they have never really been asked to share their experiences and insights with anyone. 

Setting aside plenty of time for difficult interviews and allowing people the grace to tell their own story in their own words — without frequent interruptions — allows them to feel in control over their own narrative, which often leads to more a more insightful conversation.

Explain the reporting and editing process, and the limits of your ability to protect them once the story is published. Be prepared if they choose not to move forward — at any point in the process. Honor, without arguing, their right to change their minds.

When reporting the stories of vulnerable people, I read them parts of the story where they appear as well as their quotes. I go over the context of the full story to both ensure accuracy and help them feel comfortable.

At its simplest, treat story subjects how you would want your loved one treated. We owe the people who share their experiences with us at least that much.