Among the most at risk are Indigenous youth, and tribal leaders want an end to complacency for their “stolen relatives.”
A bill moving through the California Legislature takes aim at the urgent problem of youth who go missing from foster care, a problem particularly devastating for the state’s Indigenous populations.
Assembly Bill 2108 would require probation officers and social workers to take hasty action once they learn of a child’s unexplained absence from a foster home, residential care facility or school. Under the legislation introduced in February by Assemblymember James Ramos, notifications would go out to parents, legal guardians, siblings, judges, attorneys, court-appointed special advocates and tribal representatives within a critical 24-hour window.
“The first hours when a youth goes missing — and this isn’t just tribal youth, this is all youth — the data tells us those first hours are so essential to getting the outcome we want, which is to have that child found healthy and safe and secure,” said Kimberly Cluff, legal director of the California Tribal Families Coalition, one of the bill’s sponsors. “The system needs to alert the other parts of the system that a child is missing in those early, early hours.”
The bill authored by Ramos, a lifelong resident of the San Manuel Indian Reservation and member of the Serrano/Cahuilla tribe, would apply to all children in foster care. But specific provisions would better protect Indigenous youth, who are more likely to go missing from the child welfare system than their non-Native American counterparts, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. These missing youth face heightened dangers from drugs, sexual exploitation and other harms.
“What we have now in front of us is a disaster,” said Yurok Tribal Court Chief Judge Abby Abinanti, who helped lead her community’s multiyear research project into missing and murdered Indigenous people. AB 2108 proposes a solution, by notifying tribes and judges as early as possible.
Early notification “is an important element of reuniting families who are suffering from trauma-based behaviors that disrupt our families,” Abinanti said. The proposed legislation “will aid the efforts to curb this problem and allow us to join in efforts to locate our missing members.”
In addition to the new notification requirements, social workers and probation officers would also have to document factors that led up to the child’s absence from foster care. The records would be updated once the child was located, noting what they experienced on the run, including whether they had been sexually exploited or trafficked during that time — a sobering reality for far too many foster youth.
“Tribal and native children are at an especially high risk of exploitation due to poverty, lack of protective services, and geographic isolation,” the bill’s legislative analysis stated. “For this population, going missing or running away while in foster care is a pipeline to the disproportionately high rates of violence and exploitation that are experienced by Native Americans, especially Native American women and youth.”
According to a report by the inspector general for the Department of Health and Human Services, 2,767 California foster children were considered to be missing at the end of 2020, for an average of 41 days. That amounts to 5% of all kids in the system that year. Vermont had no foster children missing in late 2020, the nationwide snapshot found, and other states ranged between 1% and 7% of all foster children.
Some cases are closed due to tragedy. One 15-year-old reported missing from California on Jan. 25, 2019 was found dead of a suspected drug overdose three days later in Texas.
“Every such instance — as well as those that were not recorded or reported — reinforces the fact that the outcomes of some of the missing children episodes can be catastrophic,” the Office of the Inspector General reported. “Outcomes of this nature are unquestionably tragic and underscore the importance of quickly identifying and locating children who go missing from foster care.”
Native American and Black children are the most likely to enter foster care, and they are the most likely to suffer its harms.
The Yurok Tribe set out to find why, and to propose solutions. Over a three-year period, tribal officials examined why so many of their women, girls and Two Spirit people have ended up missing and murdered over centuries. But the problem revealed itself all too quickly. While the reports published in 2020, 2021 and 2022 were being researched, three Yurok teens disappeared from foster care, and suffered exploitation by sex traffickers.
All the more disturbing, the tribe found, was that no one was keeping tabs on the girls who were reported missing from Sacramento, San Francisco and Portland, Oregon.
“In large part due to the compounded trauma of life as an Indigenous child, many Indigenous youth run away or go missing repeatedly,” the Yurok report stated. “Referred to as repeat runaways, many of these children never get entered into state or national databases, or get public bulletins issued on their case.”
The three Indigenous girls who went missing while the Yurok Tribe compiled its report “were known to be actively sexually exploited, and at no point did any local or state agency issue any public information that they were missing.”
When there are data recorded or public bulletins released on missing Indigenous foster youth, they tend to be “riddled with inaccuracies,” according to the recent reports, misidentifying names or birth dates. Social workers are hampered by confidentiality laws, making them unable to go public with the need for a search. And among tribal communities there is deep-seated mistrust of law enforcement and the U.S. government, leading to fewer tips and less likelihood of collaboration in searches for those gone missing. Confusion over which agencies — state, federal or tribal — have jurisdiction over missing-persons cases also leads to foot-dragging on investigations.
“There’s a lack of understanding in how effective tribal communities and tribal governments can be in assisting when we have youth in trouble. … Tribes don’t just know that child from the last three months of their case. They know that child’s last three generations.”
— Kimberly Cluff, legal director of the California Tribal Families Coalition
The bill that has sailed through early-stage committee hearings this month ensures “that the judge would actually be made aware” of the missing child, said Yurok Tribe’s justice policy lead, Katherine Katcher — “which we don’t always think is happening.”
The Yurok Tribe’s reporting identified “dual, sometimes cyclical ways” that the child welfare system intersects with missing and murdered cases — from runaway foster children, to moms who fall prey to abuse because they’re distraught over losing their kids to foster care. Tribal children also enter, or remain in the foster care system — often far from their tribes and kinship networks — because their mothers have gone missing, or have been killed.
The final of the Yurok Tribe’s three reports — titled To’ Kee Skuy’ Soo Ney-wo-chek’, which is Yurok for “I will see you again in a good way” — was published last July. The authors described it as an “emotionally heavy read,” but also “a call to action that inspires tribal leaders, policymakers, law enforcement, service providers, and grassroots communities.”
Among the tribe’s recommendations is legislation such as the bill authored by Ramos, requiring that tribes be notified whenever their children go missing from foster care — the vast majority of whom are placed off tribal lands. The report also recommends stronger collaboration between tribal and non-tribal law enforcement and child welfare agencies. And — while fully describing the somber state of affairs — its authors struck an upbeat note.
“We know that we will see our stolen relatives and community members again,” stated one of the three Yurok Tribe reports. “We are striving to show them and their families that we are honoring them by fighting for justice, building better systems of investigation, and stronger circles of protection so that deaths and disappearances of Indigenous people will be accounted for and someday prevented entirely.”
This year’s version of Assembly Bill 2108 is Ramos’ second attempt to pass a similar law. Previous legislation passed both houses, but was vetoed late last year by Gov. Gavin Newsom due to its $10 million ongoing price tag, citing statewide budget constraints. The governor nonetheless noted that “more can always be done to protect this vulnerable population,” and directed the California Department of Social Services and its partner agencies to evaluate current practice, identify needed improvements and “recommend statutory changes to protect all foster youth, especially tribal youth.”
The current bill is supported by numerous other child advocacy groups, and seven tribes including Yurok, California’s largest tribal nation. They want tribes more involved in tracking down their foster kids who go missing, in the Yurok Tribe’s words, their “stolen relatives.”
“There’s a lack of understanding in how effective tribal communities and tribal governments can be in assisting when we have youth in trouble,” said Cluff of the California Tribal Families Coalition. “Tribes don’t just know that child from the last three months of their case. They know that child’s last three generations. That means that they are better suited to know where that child may be, what the dangers might be.”