Every year, the U.S. government removes ~22,000 newborns and infants from their families and places them in foster care.[AFCARS FY2024]
Then the public record goes dark. The government's own auditors found 69% of missing-from-care episodes were never properly reported.[HHS OIG Audit, 2023]
We are demanding anonymized, public dashboards so that every child can be accounted for.
Every statistic below comes from official federal sources. Click any citation to verify.
Follow the path a child takes when the state intervenes — and see exactly where public visibility ends.
Births are recorded through vital statistics — a public record managed by the CDC.
Child Protective Services receives over 4 million reports of suspected maltreatment annually. Most are screened out or unsubstantiated.
Roughly 200,000 children per year are removed from their families and placed into foster care, kinship care, or group homes.
About 22,000 children under 1 year old are in foster care at any point. Most are removed within days of birth — often placed in emergency or stranger foster homes with accelerated approvals.
No public database exists to track individual outcomes. AFCARS publishes aggregate numbers only. You cannot follow what happened to any child after removal — reunification, adoption, aging out, or worse.
These are not technical limitations. These are policy choices that keep the public in the dark.
AFCARS only publishes aggregate numbers. You cannot follow what happened to any specific child after the state removed them from their family.
No national public database of licensed foster homes, complaints, investigations, or license revocations exists.
Many states fail to report missing foster children to NCMEC within 24 hours — even though federal law requires it.
The national average is 0.9% substantiated maltreatment in care per year. But state-level audits consistently find 40–60% of perpetrators in substantiated cases are the foster parents themselves.
"Privacy should protect children — not shield a failing system."
Four concrete, achievable reforms that would make the system visible for the first time.
Every state must publish annual dashboards tracking children from removal to outcome — reunification, adoption, guardianship, or aging out. Anonymized, but accountable.
Right now, the public cannot verify whether children exiting the system are safe. Aggregate numbers hide individual failures.
Every missing-from-care episode must be reported to NCMEC automatically and immediately — not weeks or months later, not at the state's discretion.
The OIG found 69% of 74,353 missing episodes went unreported. NCMEC estimates 1 in 7 missing foster children is a likely trafficking victim.
A national dashboard comparing every state on the same measures: removal rates, placement stability, time to permanency, missing episodes, and maltreatment in care.
Some states report vastly different rates than others. Without standardized data, there is no way to identify which states are failing and which practices work.
States that fail to report accurately or refuse to publish dashboards lose a percentage of their Title IV-E federal foster care funding.
Voluntary compliance has not worked. The OIG audit proved this. Financial incentives are the only mechanism with a track record of driving state behavior.
Substance abuse, trafficking, racial disparities, and system failures affect every community.
Substance abuse is the leading reason children are removed from homes. As overdose deaths continue rising, so do infant removals — but there's no public way to track the connection in real time.
AFCARS removal reasons; CDC WONDER overdose dataBlack and American Indian/Alaska Native children are removed at dramatically higher rates than white children. Without public data, these disparities remain invisible and unaddressed.
AFCARS demographic data; GAO reports on racial disproportionalityNCMEC reports that 1 in 7 children reported missing from care is assessed as a likely sex trafficking victim. These children are uniquely vulnerable — and the system designed to protect them is losing them.
NCMEC 2024 annual dataEach page builds on the last. Start anywhere — but the truth compounds.
The OIG audit, the 69% gap, and the trafficking link.
From birth to removal — and where the public record goes dark.
What the system legally forbids you from seeing.
Maltreatment rates, foster home turnover, and newborn vulnerability.
Every signature brings us closer to forcing the system open.
This site uses only official federal data. No conspiracy. Just receipts.
See all sources →