SCOTUS To Decide If American Indian Babies Can Be Ripped From Adoptive Parents On The Basis Of Skin Color

American Indians are the only group of U.S. citizens whose child custody claims are decided solely on the basis of race instead of the best interests of the child.

Under federal law, it doesn’t matter in custody disputes if a child’s home is a crime-infested haven for violent gangs and drug dealers. It doesn’t matter if a child’s home is an avenue of emotional, physical, and even sexual abuse. What does matter is the color of the child’s skin.

In 1978, Congress passed the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) codifying this institutional racism. Passed out of fear that the adoption of American Indian children would erode Indian culture, ICWA mandates that children who are up for adoption with the slightest trace of Indian blood be placed under tribal custody instead of a non-Indian family. In practice, this means adoptive parents can have their children stripped away from the only parents they’ve ever known to live on a reservation hundreds of miles away at the will of a tribe.

While passed with good intentions, the law’s consequences have been devastating. Sage DesRochers was born six months early at an Indian hospital in Phoenix to an abusive and alcoholic mother.

“The reason I was born so early was because she didn’t want me,” DesRochers told The Federalist. “Years later, when I was on the reservation with her, she told me to my face, ‘I never wanted you, I had always wish you died.’”

DesRochers went to live with foster parents at five months old. They eventually tried to adopt her. When she was 4, however, ICWA was invoked and she was ordered back onto the reservation where her birth mother lived as part of Arizona’s White Mountain Apache Tribe.

“I think she was coerced by the tribe to try and get me back,” DesRochers explained. When asked about the conditions on the reservation, DesRochers answered with a question.

“Have you ever seen a Third-World country?” she asked. “We saw a little old Apache lady with a big case of beer and she was drinking it on the side of the road. And when I came back later, she was on the ground and the case was gone. That’s the conditions of the reservation.”

DesRochers and her foster family initially fled to evade the court’s order. She eventually lived on the reservation from ages 13 to 16.

“It was a hard time,” she said. She reported abuse from her alcoholic mother and said her peers on the reservation “called me ‘too white.’” She left in 1991 and now lives with the parents who raised her in Arizona. Her birth mother has since passed away.

Supreme Court to Revisit ICWA

DesRochers’ story is just one of more than a dozen cases outlined in an amicus brief by the Christian Alliance for Indian Child Welfare before the Supreme Court. On Nov. 9, the high court will hear oral arguments in the case Haaland v. Brackeen, where the court will decide

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