In the spring of 2015, in a Washoe County courtroom, District Judge Egan Walker looked at the woman who was caring for my daughter and reminded her, three separate times, that if she adopted my child instead of becoming her guardian, she would receive six hundred dollars a month.
She had told him she did not want to adopt. She had told me the same thing in a text message that morning. She said guardianship felt like the right path, that she wanted to stand beside everybody, that she wanted what was best for Laila. The judge heard her say it. Then he brought up the money. Then he brought it up again. Then a third time. And when she still would not change her answer, the deputy district attorney stood up and asked the court for permission to begin searching for what they called a "flex family." That is the system's term for strangers who are willing to adopt children out of foster care.
My daughter was not languishing in foster care. She was living with her own grandmother. She was loved, she was safe, and every adult in her family, on both sides, wanted the same outcome: guardianship, which would have kept her exactly where she was while preserving her legal relationship to the mother who was fighting to come back to her.
The court wanted an adoption. It took me years to understand why, and the answer is not hidden in some sealed file. It is written into federal law, in Title IV-E of the Social Security Act, which pays states for adoptions in ways it has never paid them for bringing families back together.
This is the story of how that funding formula played out in one family. Mine.
I. January 24, 2014
I was twenty-three years old and I was an addict. I want that on the record at the start, in my own words, because the system that took my daughter has spent twelve years implying that this fact is the whole story. It is not. I was a heroin addict who kept her addiction walled off from her child. Laila was fed, clean, adored, and surrounded by family. She had never been left with strangers. She had never seen me use. She spent her days with me, her great-grandmother Janice, her grandma Christine, and her aunt Cheyenne. She was three years old and her world was soft.
On January 24, 2014, a friend of mine overdosed on heroin in my garage.
Laila was inside the house with my sixteen-year-old sister, Cheyenne. She never saw anything. When I walked into the garage and found my friend on the ground, I ran back into the house, handed Cheyenne my keys, and told her to take Laila and go, because I was about to call 911 and I knew what that meant.
Then I knelt on a garage floor and tried to keep a human being alive while a dispatcher talked in my ear. At some point Cheyenne walked back into the garage and I asked her where Laila was. She told me Laila was safe at the park with Kate, a family friend. I believed her. I was not thinking clearly. I was counting breaths on a girl who was dying in front of me. If my head had been clear I would have told Cheyenne that she had to leave too, because she was a minor. But my head was not clear. I was busy saving a life.
The paramedics came. The friend survived because I called. And the police came with them, the way they always do, and it turned out Cheyenne had not taken Laila to the park at all. She had told her to hide in a back bedroom. The police found my daughter hiding in her own house, and they called Child Protective Services.
Here is the thing I have turned over in my mind ten thousand times since that day. I did the right thing. I called 911 knowing it would bring police into a house where I had everything to lose. The system has a phrase for what I demonstrated that day. They call it protective capacity. It is supposed to matter. Calling for help when a life is at risk, shielding your child from the scene, those are the exact instincts a child welfare agency claims it wants to see in a parent.
What I got for it was a case file.
II. The Shuffle
Washoe County's Department of Social Services placed Laila with my grandmother, Janice Hill. No formal safety plan was put in place that night. My fifteen-year-old brother and Cheyenne went to my grandmother's too, because my mom, Christine, was out of town.
The next day my brother and sister got into a fight at my grandma's house, the kind of fight teenagers have, and the police were called again, and CPS showed up again. My brother went to his dad's. Cheyenne stayed with my grandmother.
And Laila, my three-year-old, was placed with her father.
Jason Knapp was a convicted felon with a violent record who was using drugs. CPS knew this. They had to stock his refrigerator with groceries because there was no food in the house for a child. That was the placement the agency chose, and that was the first official safety plan in Laila's case. Not her great-grandmother's home, where she had spent half her life. Her father's empty apartment.
It lasted about a week. Then Jason's girlfriend called my mom and said she was done. She said she did not have time to watch Laila and she was sick of Jason expecting her to raise his daughter while he went out and used. My mother, who had flown home immediately when all this started, drove over and picked Laila up, and then she did exactly what you are supposed to do. She called the social worker and told them Laila would be staying at my grandmother's house, with her and Janice.
This is where the case stopped being about Laila's safety and started being about something else.
CPS informed my mother that she was not allowed to be Laila's primary caregiver. Their first reason was an old CPS report against her for leaving the state for a few days while her teenagers stayed home with me, their adult sister. That case had been opened and closed. Their second reason was a simple battery charge from roughly nineteen years earlier, from a bar fight on the Fourth of July when she was about twenty-three years old. A closed referral and a two-decade-old misdemeanor were enough to disqualify my mother. A violent felon with no food in his house had been approved a week earlier.
During this period I made the mistakes of an honest person. I admitted to CPS that I was addicted to heroin. I let them mouth swab me, more than once, and the tests came back dirty, and I let them do it anyway because I thought cooperation was how you proved you were trying. None of it was court ordered. I was not under any legal obligation to test, to admit anything, or even to leave Laila at my grandmother's. Safety plans in cases like mine are voluntary. I could have picked my daughter up any day I wanted. The agency does not lead with that information, and there is a reason they don't. A voluntary arrangement that a family believes is mandatory gives the agency all of the control and none of the accountability.
III. The Manufactured Emergency
My grandmother Janice was seventy-three years old and still worked weeks that sometimes ran eighty hours. She had a vacation planned, a trip out of the country, and she had earned it several lifetimes over. Our caseworker was a man named Billy Jennings. The question we put to him, over and over, in writing, was simple: Janice is the approved caregiver, you have refused to approve Christine, so what do we need to do so that Laila stays with family while Janice travels?
We have the emails. For weeks the answers came back as variations of don't worry about it, it shouldn't be an issue. The Monday before Janice's flight, my mother emailed Jennings one more time and asked, again, what needed to happen. His written response was that his supervisor, Melony Elam, had been out of the office for two weeks, that the issue would be staffed on Thursday, and that we would have an answer then.
Thursday passed. Friday passed. Nobody called. Nobody emailed. No approval, no denial, no instruction to make other arrangements.
Janice did not want to get on the plane. She had a feeling. We told her to go, that everything would be fine, because the agency had given us no reason to believe otherwise and every reason to believe the matter was being handled. Her flight left Saturday morning. On Sunday night I called my mom and told her I had a bad feeling too, that maybe we should keep Laila home for a couple of days. She told me everything would be fine.
On Monday morning, CPS called my mother with one question: when does Janice's flight leave? My mom told them it had left that morning. The response, nearly word for word, was: okay, because we have an issue, you were not approved to be Laila's primary caregiver, I'm going to have to call you back.
They did not call back. They went to Laila's daycare and took her.
They pulled a three-year-old out of her daycare and placed her with a family of complete strangers for three days, and they classified the situation as imminent danger. Imminent danger is the legal trigger that allows an emergency removal and forces a court hearing within days. It is the mechanism for children found in meth labs and locked closets. Here it was applied to a child whose great-grandmother had gone on a vacation that the agency had known about, in writing, for weeks, and had implicitly waved through by telling the family not to worry.
If the agency had answered any one of those emails, there is no emergency. If they had simply said no on Thursday like they promised, Janice cancels her trip, or Laila goes to another relative, and there is no removal. The emergency did not happen to the agency. The agency scheduled it. And that manufactured emergency is the entire legal foundation of the dependency case that followed, the case I would spend the next year and a half losing.
Even the court saw it. The emergency hearing three days later was handled by a different judge than the one who would preside over the rest of the case, and she was visibly angry at CPS, because I had several other family members Laila could have stayed with, any one of whom would have prevented the emergency placement. She ordered the agency to conduct a home visit at Laila's paternal great-aunt's house that same day, or by the next day at the latest. The house was approved, of course, because there had never been anything wrong with this family except the agency's refusal to use it. Laila was placed with her paternal great-aunt, and her paternal grandmother, Menette Bonnard, moved to Reno from Sacramento to care for her while the case was sorted out.
So now there was a legal case. And under federal law, the moment a legal case opens, a clock starts ticking. I did not know about the clock yet. I would learn.
I have to be honest about what I did with that time, because this story does not work if I am not. The anger ate me. I had done the right thing in that garage and lost my daughter for it, and the injustice of that fed my addiction instead of breaking it. I knew Laila was safe and loved with her grandmother, and I let that knowledge make me complacent. I should have checked into rehab immediately. I didn't. It took me close to a year to put together real clean time, and by then I was on a waiting list for a bed at Step 2, an inpatient program in Reno built for women with children, the kind of place where kids can come stay the weekend with their mothers. I got there. I was forty days clean, then sixty, then more, living in treatment, doing every single thing the system says it wants.
The system, it turned out, wanted something else.
IV. Six Hundred Dollars, Three Times
By 2015, Laila was living with Menette. Let me say clearly what Menette was at that point: family. Laila's paternal grandmother, a woman who had uprooted her life in Sacramento to come care for her granddaughter. She had also gone through the state's foster licensing process, which entitled her to a monthly subsidy to help with the costs of raising Laila. That paperwork mattered more than any of us understood, because it meant that, in the eyes of the federal funding system, Laila was now formally a foster child. A countable one.
The morning of one particular hearing, Menette sent me a text message. She wrote that she thought guardianship was the best route. Guardianship would have made her Laila's legal guardian, kept Laila in her home permanently, and left my parental rights intact, so that as I got well I could remain Laila's mother in the eyes of the law. Me, Jason, and Jason's mother were all aligned. The whole family wanted guardianship.
In court that day, before Judge Walker, who presided over the case from the dependency petition to its end, the deputy district attorney told the court that Menette wanted to go forward with adoption.
My attorney spoke up and told the court that was not our understanding. The judge asked Menette directly what she wanted to do. Her answer, as I remember it, was that she wanted to be there for everybody, that she wanted what was best for Laila, and that she felt guardianship was the route to go.
Walker's response was to inform her that she would receive a six hundred dollar cash payment every month if she went through with the adoption.
She told him it was not about the money.
He raised the six hundred dollars again. And then a third time, in the same hearing, the judge of a child welfare court, sitting above a grandmother who had just said this was not about money, kept returning to the money. When Menette still would not commit to adoption, the deputy district attorney rose and asked the court, in the event that Miss Bonnard did not wish to adopt, for permission to search for a flex family. Strangers, recruited to adopt a child who was already home, already with her own grandmother, already surrounded by two families who agreed on her future.
Walker granted permission.
The family wants guardianship. The caregiver wants guardianship. The child is safe and placed with blood relatives. And the court's response is to dangle a monthly payment three times and then authorize a search for adoptive strangers as leverage. There is no child-safety logic that explains that hearing. There is a financial logic that explains it perfectly, and I will lay it out plainly in a moment.
V. "I'm Not Willing to Borrow Any More Time"
CPS spent months trying to get me to sign my rights away voluntarily so the adoption could proceed. I refused. I had months of clean time. I was waiting on my bed at Step 2. I told them I was not signing anything, that I was going to fight for my daughter.
While the pressure campaign ran, the case file against me was being curated, and one incident shows exactly how that work gets done. Laila had been sick over a weekend and had a follow-up doctor's appointment. Billy Jennings called and emailed to let me know about the appointment and to say he would like me to attend. The appointment was in twenty minutes. There was no way to get there, and I missed it. At my next visit I told Menette what had happened, and she was stunned. She told me she had informed Jennings on Saturday, four days before the appointment, that she could let me know when it was scheduled, and that he told her not to. So the agency knew about the appointment for days, instructed the caregiver not to tell me, notified me twenty minutes before it started, and then Jennings wrote in his court report that I miss my daughter's doctor's appointments. That sentence went in front of the judge as evidence about the kind of mother I was. Multiply that maneuver across a case file and you understand how a parent who is doing everything right can read, on paper, like a parent who is doing nothing at all.
So a settlement conference was set. By the time it arrived I was living at Step 2 and had been in the program about six weeks. I was clean, in treatment, in a facility specifically designed to reunify mothers with their children, the kind of program where kids sleep over on weekends. If reunification had been the goal, I was standing at the door of it.
At the settlement conference, Judge Walker told me, in substance: I am not willing to borrow any more time from your daughter to give to you. I have already made up my mind in this case. You can risk going to trial and having your rights terminated, or you can relinquish, and then you can help draft the post-adoption agreement.
Understand what that is. That is a judge telling a mother, before any trial, that the outcome is already decided, and offering her one mercy: sign away your child voluntarily and we will let you negotiate the terms of your own erasure.
And understand the lie buried inside the phrase "borrowing time." Laila was already living with Menette. She had been there for months. She was not waiting in limbo for me; she was home with her grandmother, where guardianship would have kept her, in the same house, in the same bed, with the same routines, on the same timeline. Guardianship borrowed nothing from Laila. The only thing guardianship would have cost was the adoption itself, and the adoption was the only outcome the court and the agency had ever pushed.
He backed me into a corner, and I signed.
The day I relinquished my parental rights I was falling apart, and I kept telling my attorney that this was wrong, that it was not what was best for Laila, that the whole thing was about money. I will never forget his answer. He said: you're right, it's a money-making business.
My own court-appointed attorney. On the day I lost my daughter. You're right. It's a money-making business.
VI. The Machine
For years I thought what happened to us was a courtroom full of bad people. It was worse than that. Ordinary people, inside a funding structure that pays them for doing exactly what they did. This is the part of the story that belongs to every family in America, not just mine.
In 1997, Congress passed the Adoption and Safe Families Act, known as ASFA. The law was a response to children languishing for years in foster care, and it rebuilt the system around one word: permanency. Two of its mechanisms shaped my case.
The first is the clock. ASFA requires states, with limited exceptions, to file for termination of parental rights once a child has spent 15 of the most recent 22 months in foster care. That is the deadline a parent is racing whether anyone tells her or not. Recovery from heroin addiction is measured in years. The federal timeline for keeping your child is measured in months. When the judge told me he would not borrow any more time, he was not expressing a personal philosophy. He was reciting the architecture of federal law. Since ASFA passed, courts in this country have terminated the parental rights of more than two million children's parents.
The second mechanism is the money, and the money flows through Title IV-E of the Social Security Act. It has several pipes.
Title IV-E reimburses states for the cost of foster care itself. It also funds the Adoption Assistance Program, an open-ended federal entitlement that matches state spending on subsidies paid to adoptive families, at rates between 50 and 83 percent depending on the state. Those subsidies are the monthly payments to adoptive parents, negotiated case by case, that can run up to the full foster care rate, and children eligible under Title IV-E also receive automatic Medicaid. The six hundred dollars a month that a Washoe County judge mentioned three times in one hearing was not a figure he invented. It was Nevada's adoption subsidy, and the federal government reimburses the state for a substantial share of every dollar of it.
Then there are the bonuses. ASFA created the first performance-based incentive program in child welfare history: direct federal payments to states for increasing the number of finalized adoptions out of foster care above a baseline. The original structure paid states 4,000 dollars per additional adoption, with an extra 2,000 dollars for each adopted child designated special needs, and only finalized adoptions counted. Guardianship did not earn a state one cent under that program for its first seventeen years. In 2014, the year my daughter's case began, Congress reauthorized the program as the Adoption and Legal Guardianship Incentive Payments program and finally added guardianship to the formula, but adoption remained the premium outcome, and the institutional habits of two decades do not reverse because a statute is renamed. Analyses of federal award data have tallied more than a billion dollars in these incentive bonuses paid to states since 1998.
A child is reunified with her mother: the case closes, and the incentive program pays the state nothing.
A child exits to guardianship with a relative: for most of the program's history, nothing.
A child is adopted: the adoption counts toward the state's incentive numbers, the federal government shares the cost of the monthly subsidy for the next fifteen years, and the case is a permanency success on every metric the state reports to Washington.
No caseworker receives a literal bounty for an adoption. These are reimbursement and incentive structures operating at the level of state agencies, not envelopes of cash. But agencies are made of people whose performance metrics, departmental budgets, and federal reviews all point the same direction, and that direction is not reunification. Researchers and advocates, including those now calling for ASFA's repeal, have documented for years that the law's incentives fall hardest on poor families and families of color, and that the adoption industry itself helped shape the statute it profits under. When my attorney said it's a money-making business, he was not being cynical. He was being accurate.
This is why a deputy district attorney can stand up in court and ask to recruit adoptive strangers for a child who is already living with her grandmother. This is why a judge can press a reluctant relative about a monthly payment three times in a single hearing. This is why an agency can refuse a fit grandmother over a nineteen-year-old misdemeanor, ignore weeks of emails, and then declare an emergency it created. None of these people needed to be villains. The system pays for permanency, permanency is defined as adoption, and every actor in that courtroom was paid, promoted, and measured inside that definition. Their salaries are not funded by families staying together.
What is best for the child stopped being the question a long time ago. What is countable for the state took its place.
VII. The Paperwork That Disappeared
When I relinquished, the one thing my family salvaged was visitation. In November 2015, my grandmother Janice, my mother Christine, and my sister Cheyenne were awarded visitation rights: one weekend a month, Friday through Sunday, which in practice meant my family driving from Reno to Folsom, California, and paying for a hotel to spend two nights with Laila. They did it. Month after month, year after year, they did it.
I was not part of that order. I had relinquished, and my access to my daughter now lived entirely inside a post-adoption agreement and the goodwill of the woman who had once told me guardianship was the right path.
In November 2015 I left Step 2; living surrounded by other mothers and their children, after losing mine, was more than I could carry. In January 2016 I went to prison. From inside, I called my mom on the weekends my family had Laila, and for a while I got to hear my daughter's voice. In June 2016, my mom had to tell me that Menette had instructed the family not to let Laila speak to me on the phone during visits anymore. When I was released that July, Menette told me I would need to start by writing Laila letters before I could earn phone calls. I wrote the letters. For months I wrote them.
In October 2016 the adoption was finalized, and with it came two things. The first was a name change: Menette changed Laila's middle and last names. The second was an error that would detonate years later. The visitation rights awarded to Janice, Christine, and Cheyenne were never filed with the adoption decree.
About a year before the adoption, during one of my visits, Menette told me she felt this whole thing was her redemption. Menette had struggled with addiction herself when her own children were young, and she had been absent from their lives for a long time. I understood what Laila was to her. A second chance. I just never imagined that my daughter's relationship with me, and with the family that raised her for her first three years, would be the price of someone else's redemption arc.
The cutting began almost immediately and it followed a pattern: an incident, a unilateral decision, no court. In 2017, Cheyenne posted a video on Snapchat of herself out drinking with friends. She was an adult. Menette's daughter saw it and forwarded it to Menette, who claimed Laila and a friend had seen the video. We later learned Laila never saw it. It did not matter. Menette cut Cheyenne's visits, which she had no authority to do without going through the court.
In 2018, Laila's counselor recommended that Laila have no contact with her maternal family until she turned eighteen. Laila was eight years old. Menette adopted the recommendation immediately, again without any court order modifying the visitation schedule.
And when my family went to court to enforce the visitation they had been awarded, they discovered the catastrophe: because the visitation rights had never been filed with the adoption decree, every motion Janice, Christine, and Cheyenne filed was denied for lack of standing. In the court's eyes, they were legal strangers to Laila. The attorneys who had originally drafted the visitation agreement had both since died, taking with them the institutional memory of how the error happened and any easy path to fixing it.
The only road left was to sue Menette for breach of contract. My grandmother Janice, the seventy-three-year-old who once worked eighty-hour weeks, spent her retirement on attorneys' fees trying to enforce her right to see her great-granddaughter. By the time Laila was old enough to have a real say in who she spoke to, seven years had passed, and Janice had developed full-blown dementia. The great-grandmother who fought for her does not fully remember the fight.
VIII. What It Cost
The system's theory was that adoption would give Laila permanency, and permanency would give her stability, and stability would give her a good life. Here is the audit.
Laila grew up two hours from a family that loved her and could not legally reach her. She developed serious mental health struggles and a deep fear of abandonment, and from the age of twelve she was harming herself. The permanency the state purchased on her behalf did not protect her from any of it. A guardianship would have given her the same house, the same grandmother, the same bed, and it also would have given her a legal mother in recovery, a great-grandmother with standing, an aunt who could not be cut off over a Snapchat video, and a family court still watching the case. The state had a choice between a permanency that preserved her family and a permanency that erased it, and it chose erasure, and the federal government paid it for the choice.
IX. Home
In 2026, at fifteen, Laila is old enough that the walls have started to come down on their own. She talks to her maternal family now, and to me, whenever she wants. This spring she came to Reno and spent five days at our house. It was the first time since 2014, when she was three years old, that she had been able to do that.
At the end of the five days, she told us she did not want to leave.
She said being with us just feels like home.
Twelve years. That is what the machine took. She was never unsafe. Every person in her family wanted her. It took her anyway, because her adoption was worth money to the state of Nevada and her family was not. A three-year-old who was never in danger became a federal permanency statistic, and a fifteen-year-old had to claw her own way back to the people who never stopped setting a place for her.
I am telling this story because my family had every advantage a family in this system can have. We were organized. We documented everything. We sent the emails and kept the text messages. We had relatives lined up around the block. We had a caregiver who said out loud, in open court, that it was not about the money. And the machine still did what it was built to do.
So think about the families who have less. The mothers with no relatives to call, no one saving the emails, no one to warn them that the safety plan is voluntary and the clock is federal and the judge's mind may be made up before trial. The system is processing their children right now, today, in courtrooms in every county in this country, and it is being paid by the adoption.
Ask your state how much it has collected in adoption incentive payments. Ask what it spends on reunification. Ask why a judge in a child welfare courtroom knows the subsidy amount by heart.
Sources for Part VI
- Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997, Pub. L. No. 105-89 (the 15-of-22-months termination requirement and 12-month permanency hearings).
- U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Program Instruction ACYF-CB-PI-98-07 (original adoption incentive amounts of $4,000 per adoption and $2,000 additional for special needs adoptions, payable only for finalized adoptions).
- Administration for Children and Families, "Title IV-E Adoption Assistance" (open-ended entitlement structure, federal matching of 50 to 83 percent, monthly subsidies and automatic Medicaid eligibility).
- Congressional Research Service, "Child Welfare: The Adoption Incentive Program and Its Reauthorization" (2014 restructuring as the Adoption and Legal Guardianship Incentive Payments program).
- Families Rising, "Eligibility and Benefits for Federal (Title IV-E) Adoption Assistance" (negotiated monthly subsidies up to foster care rates).
- Center for the Study of Social Policy, "ASFA 25 Years Later: Time for Repeal" (more than two million terminations since 1997; disparate impact on poor families and families of color).
- Children's Hospital of Philadelphia PolicyLab, "What We've Learned About the Impact of the Adoption and Safe Families Act 25 Years Later" (adoption industry influence on the statute).
- Analyses of HHS Children's Bureau Adoption and Legal Guardianship Incentive Awards data, FY1998 through FY2024 (cumulative incentive bonuses exceeding $1 billion; no incentive payment for reunification).
— Ciara Mason