Federal Law Aims to Dismantle America’s Family Court System

6 Shocking Ways a Proposed Federal Law Aims to Dismantle America’s Family Court System

The Hidden Crisis in Family Court

To the public, America’s family courts and Child Protective Services (CPS) agencies exist for a single, noble purpose: to protect vulnerable children and act in their best interest. This foundational belief underpins the immense power the state wields to intervene in the private lives of families, a power most people assume is exercised with caution, compassion, and a focus on justice.

However, a sweeping proposed federal law, the “Family Justice and Accountability Act,” presents a dramatically different and disturbing picture. Framed as an emergency response to an “urgent and ongoing crisis,” the Act’s preamble argues that this system, far from being a protector of children, has devolved into an “engine of trauma, injustice, and state-sponsored family destruction.” Congress, it states, “hereby declares this Act to be an emergency measure” not to merely reform the existing structure, but to dismantle and rebuild it from the ground up, holding every actor within it to an unprecedented standard of accountability.

This article explores the six most surprising and radical proposals within the Family Justice and Accountability Act. The goal is not to debate the bill’s political viability, but to understand the profound problems it identifies within the current system and the drastic, and often shocking, solutions it puts forward to fundamentally reshape the landscape of American family law.

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1. No More Immunity: Judges, Lawyers, and CPS Workers Could Be Jailed for Misconduct

It is a bedrock principle of the American legal system that judges have “judicial immunity,” a doctrine that protects them from being sued over their rulings. The Family Justice and Accountability Act, however, argues that this immunity has no basis in the Constitution and was, in fact, “created by the courts themselves.”

The Act proposes a radical solution: the complete elimination of judicial, quasi-judicial, and state immunity for a breathtakingly wide range of actors in the family regulation system. This accountability would extend to judges, attorneys, CPS workers, guardians ad litem, foster parents, licensed mental health providers, and even educators and healthcare professionals who knowingly contribute to a wrongful removal. Under this proposed law, officials who violate the law or cause harm would no longer be shielded. They could face both civil lawsuits from families seeking financial damages for emotional and economic losses, as well as criminal prosecution that could lead to imprisonment.

This represents a revolutionary shift in legal power. It seeks to move powerful figures from a position of near-total insulation to one of direct, personal responsibility for their actions, holding them accountable not just to appellate courts, but to the families they impact and the criminal justice system.

“This self-bestowed immunity has effectively placed judges above the law, contrary to the principles of due process, equal protection, and the accountability mechanisms envisioned in 1776.”

2. The Profit Motive: Exposing Financial Incentives to Separate Families

The Act puts forth a counter-intuitive and deeply unsettling claim: that the child welfare system is not always motivated by a child’s best interest, but by a financial incentive to remove children from their homes. It argues that the system is structured to profit from, rather than prevent, the breakup of families.

The bill identifies specific federal laws, namely Title IV of the Social Social Security Act and the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) of 1997, as the source of what it calls “perverse economic motivations.” It alleges that these laws create a pipeline of federal funding to states that is directly tied to the number of children placed into foster care and, ultimately, adopted out of the system. This creates a financial incentive for states to pursue family separation and termination of parental rights rather than investing in family preservation.

This claim reframes family separations not as last-resort tragedies, but as a potential outcome of a system driven by federal rewards. To dismantle this, the Act proposes the complete repeal of ASFA and a fundamental restructuring of federal funding to “prioritize and reward family preservation, reunification, and in-home support services,” removing the profit motive from the child welfare equation.

“Federal financial incentives… have created perverse economic motivations for the separation of children from fit, loving parents.”

3. The Ultimate Betrayal: When Reporting Abuse Gets Your Child Taken Away

The Act confronts one of the most shocking outcomes in family court: a scenario where a parent who reports abuse risks losing custody of their child to the very person they accused of being an abuser.

According to the bill’s findings, this is a systemic pattern of retaliation, particularly against mothers. It finds that protective parents who come forward with good-faith allegations are often discredited with scientifically debunked theories like “Parental Alienation Syndrome” (PAS). The Act reframes this not just as junk science, but as a specific tool of “litigation abuse”—the malicious use of the courts to harass an opponent. This, it argues, is a form of “coercive control,” a pattern of non-physical abuse designed to dominate and punish a victim.

To combat this, the Act proposes to criminalize the use of PAS and similar theories in court and make it a federal civil rights violation to retaliate against a parent for making good-faith reports of abuse. The implication is profound: it suggests the court system can be weaponized by abusers to punish and silence their victims, a complete inversion of its intended purpose.

“Protective parents, particularly mothers, are frequently penalized or labeled ‘uncooperative’ or ‘alienating’ when reporting abuse, while abusers are often rewarded with custody or unsupervised [visitation].”

4. No More Excuses: Law Enforcement Could Be Held Liable for “Just Following Orders

The Act argues that the foundational purpose of law enforcement—”To Serve and Protect”—has been corrupted, with officers often acting as an unquestioning enforcement arm for unlawful court orders. The bill proposes a radical break from this norm, seeking to return officers to their “original role as protectors of the people.”

Under the Act, police officers and their agencies would be held both civilly and criminally liable for enforcing court orders that are unconstitutional or that result in foreseeable harm to a child. The proposal would require officers to proactively verify the legality and constitutionality of an order before executing it, including checking for a proper warrant and ensuring compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act. Crucially, the defense of “just following orders” would be explicitly eliminated as a shield from accountability.

This is a significant proposal that would fundamentally reorient an officer’s duty. Instead of being an unquestioning enforcer of judicial commands, an officer’s primary obligation would shift to upholding the constitutional rights of the family and actively protecting children from state-sanctioned harm.

“The United States Congress, through this Act, declares that ‘I was just doing my job’ shall no longer shield misconduct.”

5. Radical Transparency: Mandating Body Cameras and Ending Secret Meetings

Much of the work of the family court system, from CPS investigations to in-chambers interviews with judges, often happens behind closed doors. The Act argues that this secrecy enables misconduct and denies families due process. In response, it mandates measures of radical transparency.

First and most fundamentally, the bill would require that “All courtroom[s] shall be public, this includes any virtual court without exception.” This alone would shatter the tradition of secrecy that defines family law. Beyond this, the Act mandates two other key provisions. All personnel involved in the family court system—including CPS workers and guardians ad litem—would be required to wear body-worn cameras. Second, all interviews with a minor child conducted without a parent present must be audio and video recorded and made available to the parents.

The intended effect of these measures is to strip away the secrecy that allows a child’s words to be misrepresented or an official’s actions to go unchecked. By opening the doors and creating a verifiable record of every critical interaction, the Act aims to enforce a new level of accountability.

“All personnel employed by family courts, child protective services (CPS), foster care agencies, guardian ad litem (GAL) offices, child attorneys, and third-party evaluators shall be required to wear body-worn cameras during the execution of their duties.”

6. Reparations for Harm: The State Must Pay for the Lives It Destroyed

Perhaps the most far-reaching proposal in the Act is its assertion that if the state wrongfully destroys a family, the state must pay reparations for the harm it has caused. The bill establishes a “Right to Remedies and Recompense” for victims of family court and CPS misconduct, creating a framework for tangible, lifelong restitution.

The key components of this reparations program include:

• Financial Compensation: For emotional distress, psychological harm, and the lost years of family connection, as well as for economic losses like lost jobs or housing.

• Fully Funded College: For any child who was wrongfully removed from their home or harmed by a court ruling.

• Free Therapeutic Services: Lifelong access to trauma-informed therapy, with the victim having the freedom to choose the type of therapy that works best for them.

• No Statute of Limitations: For claims related to child sexual abuse or for victims who were silenced by coercion or gag orders, ensuring they can seek justice at any point in their lives.

This proposal makes a profound statement. It seeks to legally define wrongful family separation as a form of “state violence” that demands not just an apology or a policy change, but concrete and lasting reparations to acknowledge the catastrophic and lifelong damage inflicted upon its victims.

“Congress finds that decades of misapplication of family court discretion… have resulted in catastrophic harm. These harms include but are not limited to: physical and sexual abuse, wrongful separation from protective parents, psychological trauma, suicides, and deaths of children.”

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Conclusion: A System on Trial

The Family Justice and Accountability Act is more than a list of reforms; it is a fundamental indictment of America’s family court and child welfare systems. Its core theme is that the system is not merely flawed but is broken at a constitutional level, requiring a complete overhaul rooted in accountability, transparency, and the restoration of fundamental rights to the family.

The proposals outlined here are undeniably radical. They would fundamentally change the balance of power between the state and the family, holding public officials to a standard of personal liability that is virtually unheard of in American law today. While this Act is only a proposal, it forces a critical question: If the system designed to protect families requires such a drastic overhaul, what does that say about the state of justice in America today?