Mimi Laver

At around nine o’clock on a Tuesday morning, two days after giving birth to her second child, Vanessa left a hospital in Queens, New York, and boarded the subway. She was headed to the borough’s courthouse on a mission: to regain custody of her newborn daughter.

An emboldened parent defense movement convened at a Ritz-Carlton near Washington, D.C., last week, intent to capitalize on recent policy victories and public attention. The goal? To reduce the number of parents they believe are unnecessarily separated from their kids by the child welfare system.

Documentarian Karen Grau has been filming dependency court proceedings for decades. In her experience, there’s one variable that makes it easy to know early in a case if justice will be served.