Texas Asks a Federal Judge to End 15 Years of Court Oversight of Foster Care
A federal judge opens a multiday hearing in Houston on whether Texas has fixed its foster care system enough to end a lawsuit filed in 2011. The state says it has earned its freedom. The children's lawyers say the reforms are not done.
For 15 years, a federal court has watched over how Texas cares for children the state has taken into its custody. This week, Texas asks to be left alone.
U.S. District Judge Randy Crane on Tuesday opens a multiday hearing in Houston on the state’s bid to dismiss the class action lawsuit against its foster care system, The Texas Tribune reported. It is the first public court hearing in the case in two years.
The question before the judge is simple to state and hard to answer: can the $4.9 billion Texas foster care system keep the roughly 6,800 children in its long-term care safe without a federal court watching?
What the state says
Lawyers for the state, led by Gibson Dunn partner Allyson Ho, argue the job is done. "That ‘micromanagement’ has run its course," they wrote in recent filings. "It’s time to return Texas’s foster-care system to Texas. The State has earned that result."
The state says the Department of Family and Protective Services has largely complied with court orders to improve casework and living conditions, spending hundreds of millions of dollars to do it. "Each of those systems is now built and working," its lawyers argue. "So even if the State did not perfectly comply with every order, the conditions that created the unreasonable risk of serious harm have been remedied."
Recent court monitor reports back up part of that claim, according to the Tribune. Wait times for callers to the abuse hotline dropped. More than 82% of caseloads for children in permanent foster care stayed within a manageable range of 14 to 17 children per worker. The monitors also found "significant" progress in investigations of foster care providers.
What the children’s lawyers say
"Fixing this broken Texas system takes time. We’ve seen welcome improvements. But the court-ordered reforms are in progress, not done. It’s crazy for the state to try to end the remedies now. Children will suffer." — Paul Yetter, attorney for the children, to The Texas Tribune
The monitors still raised serious concerns. One recent report said they had "significant concerns" about children being placed in homes with histories of abuse, neglect or exploitation. They also questioned why HHSC lets some homes stay open when the private agency that runs them disagrees with a closure, and noted that some homes reopened under a new agency after the state had recommended closing them.
"The Texas foster care system is in a period of flux, as it shifts into full privatization, and improvements to the system are too new to conclude they are durable," the plaintiffs wrote.
A smaller, harder caseload
The system looks very different than it did in 2011. About 12,000 children were in long-term foster care then, compared with about 6,800 in 2025. A 2021 law made it harder to remove children for neglect, requiring "immediate danger" rather than "substantial risk" of harm. Removals have fallen by nearly half.
DFPS investigated 581 possible abuse and neglect deaths in fiscal year 2025, down from 997 in fiscal 2022. But the agency’s own self-evaluation says the children who do enter care often carry deeper trauma and need more behavioral and mental health help.
Privatization has been uneven. Just over half of foster children are now placed by private contractors. This summer the state fired EMPOWER, which managed care for about 3,000 children in Dallas and seven other counties, after two children in its care died over two years. The state says that firing proves the system now catches failures. The plaintiffs say it proves the system is still unsettled.
What is at stake
If the case ends, court monitors stop their visits and their public reports. It is not clear the state would keep publishing that level of detail on its own, the Tribune noted. DFPS did not immediately respond to the Tribune’s request for comment.
Both sides have a fair point. Federal judges are not meant to run state agencies forever, and Texans should be able to hold their own government accountable through their own elected leaders. But children in state custody have no vote, no lobby and often no parent to speak for them. Scripture calls it true religion to look after orphans in their distress, and the state that takes a child from his home takes on that duty.
Whatever Judge Crane decides, the test should be the same: are these children safe, and will Texans still be able to see whether they are? Groups like CASA, whose volunteers speak up for abused and neglected children in court, will keep watching either way. So should the rest of us. Our earlier reporting on school police referrals of young children shows how often the state’s systems touch kids who cannot speak for themselves.
