A Tampa Bay Times investigation found hundreds of Hillsborough County families handed over custody with no lawyer provided and often no hearing. A bipartisan bill led by two Texas Republicans aims to make states count off-the-books separations like them.
By Michael Phillips | Family & State
Near midnight one night in November 2023, a child protective investigator knocked on the door of the Days Inn motel room where Leslie Flora’s family was living. Her husband had been arrested the night before, pulled over on a suspended license with drugs found in the car. Flora hadn’t been with him. Her children, 8 and 15, were asleep. Flora recalls the investigator telling her they would go live with their grandparents that night, or go into foster care.
The Times reports she was never appointed a lawyer and never got a hearing on the state’s claim that her children were in danger. Two months later, at what she took for a routine meeting, she signed a temporary custody transfer. She says she asked whether she needed a lawyer and was told no. She says the paralegal reading the papers kept everything but the signature line covered. The paralegal didn’t respond to the Times’s questions. Flora, who can’t afford an attorney, has since filed motions herself, riding a bus two hours each way, and was due before a general magistrate in September. Her son turned 18 and came home. Her daughter, now 11, still lives with her grandparents. Flora says the agency “legally kidnapped” her children.
What the record shows
Tampa Bay Times reporters Lauren Peace and Teghan Simonton spent more than a year on the story and built their own database, because the Children’s Network of Hillsborough, the county’s lead child welfare agency, didn’t keep one. It covers transfers filed from July 2022 through June 2026 by Network-paid attorneys in cases involving a child protective investigation or a parent case plan. That is more than 300 cases, deciding where more than 370 children would live. It isn’t every transfer in the county. The Network says most are used when a parent has died or is incarcerated, and the Times filtered those out.
“Case records show no parent was provided an attorney.”
Case records show no parent was provided an attorney. Only 26 of the cases ended with a judge ordering a child’s return or the attorneys dropping the case, and even then some children went to foster care or their plan was unclear. Another 46 were dismissed on procedural grounds with no record of where the child ended up. The Times doesn’t say how many remaining cases are still open. It also found children who went home informally when relatives quietly handed them back without a filing. After The Times asked repeatedly, the Network said it would begin compiling outcome data.
A consent form doing a court’s job
In Florida’s dependency system, removal triggers a shelter hearing within 24 hours, and indigent parents are entitled to appointed counsel. To keep a child in shelter care, the department must establish probable cause that grounds for removal exist and that available services won’t eliminate the need for placement. The transfer route replaces that with a signature.
“The transfer route replaces that with a signature.”
Parents in 11 cases described it to the Times as an ultimatum. Two said they were told that asking for a lawyer meant their kids would go to foster care on the spot. The consent form Flora signed waived her right to notice of hearings and filings, and judges often approved transfers without speaking to the parent. The Network pays lawyers for the relatives who take the children, but not for parents. Parents get a brochure that doesn’t mention custody transfers.
Reversing a transfer was harder still. More than 200 case plans required six months of stable income and housing before a parent could seek reversal, a standard experts said wouldn’t survive in dependency court, which doesn’t remove children over poverty alone. Essence Wright hired her own attorney and won her daughter back after nearly three years, when a judge cited the strict requirements state law sets for a transfer without parental consent.
Court records show one paralegal, not a lawyer, touched nine of every ten transfers. Several parents said she presented herself as a lawyer, and a case manager’s note in Flora’s file describes her as an agency attorney. She discloses on her business website that she isn’t an attorney. In the Floras’ case, she was paid by the attorneys the Network hired for the grandparents. Attorneys who reviewed the records called the practice, among other things, a due process violation.
A plurality of the Supreme Court has ranked a parent’s interest in the care, custody, and control of their children among the oldest fundamental liberty interests it recognizes. The Court has also required clear and convincing evidence before parental rights are severed. Whether those protections follow a parent into a consent form is the live question. The agency says transfers are voluntary, that parents can refuse and consult a lawyer, and that relatives get home assessments and background checks.
The savings
The Network’s website says its family-preservation work has saved taxpayers millions in out-of-home care costs. The line doesn’t mention transfers. The Times estimates that diverting kids this way saves the state hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, because relatives outside the formal system lose the stipends and services that formal placements carry.
Carmen and Joe Flora IV, the children’s grandparents, live on about $32,000 a year with roughly $216 left each month. The Times estimates they missed at least $21,000 in support over nearly three years, and they maxed out credit cards. A Times analysis of fee-waiver filings found more than a third of caregivers in Network-initiated cases were indigent.
“A cost that leaves the state’s ledger and lands on a grandmother’s credit card has been moved, not saved.”
My read, not the Times’s: a cost that leaves the state’s ledger and lands on a grandmother’s credit card has been moved, not saved. Nothing in the published reporting establishes that savings drove the practice, so I’m not claiming a motive. Andrew Brown of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which backed Texas’s hidden-foster-care reforms, told the Times that off-the-books arrangements nationwide amount to foster care under another label.
The agency’s case
The Network says its intensive family-services team has worked with more than 6,000 families and kept children home in most cases, and the Times reports foster placements in the county have roughly halved since it took over in 2022. CEO Terri Balliet declined repeated interview requests but said the agency welcomes appropriate oversight. A local child welfare advocate told the Times the Network has outperformed its predecessors and that he doesn’t presume wrongdoing. Foster care has its own harms, and Florida already directs placements toward relatives. The dispute is over process, not whether kin should take the children. The state Department of Children and Families didn’t respond to the Times.
“The dispute is over process, not whether kin should take the children.”
A counting law, and what it might miss
“The data gap isn’t unique to Hillsborough.”
The data gap isn’t unique to Hillsborough. Federal funding statutes don’t require states to count or report these arrangements, and no official national count exists. Estimates vary widely. Josh Gupta-Kagan’s 2020 Stanford Law Review analysis put the practice at tens or even hundreds of thousands of cases a year, and he cites a study whose extrapolation reaches 250,000 or more. The Times cites estimates reaching roughly 175,000, and Cornyn’s office says a few hundred thousand.
Texas moved first, in a bipartisan 2023 overhaul led by Republican Rep. James Frank. Under the state’s Family Code as amended by HB 730 and a companion bill, SB 614, a voluntary safety-placement agreement automatically ends after 30 days and can be renewed no more than twice. The department may not keep a child in such a placement past 90 days unless both the parent and the parent’s attorney sign, or a court orders otherwise. Before anyone signs, the department must tell parents they can consult an attorney and give them reasonable time to do so, and the agreement must state that it is entirely voluntary. The department must also, where appropriate, include children in these placements in its reports of children removed from their homes, including reports to federal agencies. One of the bill’s Democratic joint authors, Rep. Gene Wu of Houston, warned during the 2023 debate that time limits could force the agency’s hand and push more children into formal removal. The comparison to Hillsborough is loose: the Texas limits govern safety-placement agreements made without a court, while Hillsborough’s transfers run through the courts.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) introduced S. 2902 on September 18, 2025, and Rep. Nathaniel Moran (R-TX) introduced the House companion, H.R. 5507, on September 19. Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) was an original cosponsor in the Senate. Both were referred to committee: Senate Finance and House Ways and Means. As of September 28, 2026, both remained there with no further action, and H.R. 5507 had one cosponsor, Rep. Gwen Moore (D-WI), who signed on July 14.
The bill ties compliance to federal foster care funding. States would have to report how many children are separated, how the arrangements end, and how long they run. They would also have to report how many parents were provided counsel or referred to a legal services provider, and how many were actually represented within 72 hours. States would report how many children reunify and how many later face substantiated abuse or neglect. HHS would publish an annual report.
“Hillsborough’s transfers are ultimately filed in court, so it’s unclear whether the bill’s definition would capture them.”
Hillsborough’s transfers are ultimately filed in court, so it’s unclear whether the bill’s definition would capture them. The bill expressly covers arrangements in which an agency suggests, implies, or insists that a parent let a child live elsewhere during an investigation. But its general definition also turns on separations occurring without a court order or court oversight.
The Times series didn’t create this bill. It produced a Florida Republican asking to sign on: Rep. Gus Bilirakis said in a statement that he submitted a request to cosponsor. State Rep. Dana Trabulsy (R-Fort Pierce) said it is lopsided that the Network pays lawyers for caregivers but not for parents. State Sen. Barbara Sharief (D-Miramar) said DCF told her it can fix problems without legislation, and that she’ll file a bill if it can’t.
What to watch
The outcome of Flora’s scheduled September magistrate hearing, whether the Network releases its promised outcome data, whether DCF acts on its own, and whether the federal bill moves.
Sources: This piece draws on the Tampa Bay Times investigation by Lauren Peace and Teghan Simonton (“Lost in Limbo,” August 27, 2026), its methodology note, its August 28 explainer, and its September 4 follow-up, plus the reporters’ September 25 WUSF interview. Case, child, outcome, and cost figures come from the Times’s database of Hillsborough court records, which covers only Network-attorney filings in cases with an investigation or case plan. The bill discussion uses the introduced text of H.R. 5507, Sen. Cornyn’s September 19, 2025 release, and Congress.gov status, action, and cosponsor records for both bills checked on September 28, 2026. Texas law is described from Tex. Fam. Code §§ 264.902 and 264.907 as amended in 2023 by HB 730 (Acts 2023, ch. 391) and its companion SB 614 (ch. 1078), read through the Legislature’s published bill texts and statutory mirrors. The Wu comment comes from The Imprint’s May 2023 coverage of the bill. Florida’s shelter-hearing rules come from Fla. Stat. § 39.402. National estimates come from Josh Gupta-Kagan, “America’s Hidden Foster Care System,” 72 Stan. L. Rev. 841 (2020), and from Sen. Cornyn’s office. The constitutional paragraph rests on the Supreme Court’s decisions in Troxel v. Granville, 530 U.S. 57 (2000) (plurality), and Santosky v. Kramer, 455 U.S. 745 (1982). The savings comparison and the reading of the bill’s scope are analysis, and no motive is asserted.
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