Families rally to keep Lexi Page at her California home (Photo: Twitter)
A couple foiled – so far – in their efforts to adopt a six-year-old child they’ve been caring for since she was a little over a year old spoke out on Monday on the subject of a federal law that gives tribes special rights to dictate the placement of children with even a fractional percentage – in this case 1.5 percent – Native American blood.
“It’s been very hard, very emotional, very confusing,” Summer Page told Fox Business during an interview.
She and her husband, Rusty, have been fighting to adopt Lexi, now 6, for years. The issue is the Indian Child Welfare Act, which gives the Choctaw tribe of Oklahoma unfettered authority to dictate Lexi’s placement after her biological parents were legally removed from her life because of their multiple drug and crime issues.
Rusty Page noted their three other children, who considered Lexi their sibling, have not been doing well.
He noted his son was unable to go to school on Monday because of distress over the issue.
Asked whether they were allowed to talk to Lexi, for whom they have acted as parents since she arrived in their home following earlier unsuccessful foster placements at about 17 months, Rusty said, “Not right now, no.”
He said he hopes for that in the futre.
“If this is about her best interest, they would let us,” he said.
The two emphasized that the decision needs to be based on the best for the child, and that must include what she has expressed that she wants.
“Most of these kids are suffering from very dramatic and difficult pasts,” Rusty said. “That’s how you overcome, by giving them that consistently and love that they haven’t had in the past.”
Summer added, “They need a family. It’s basically just very simple. Our role is to love that child, to be her daddy to be her mommy.”
He said he and his wife knew of the presence of Lexi’s heritage of being 1/64th tribal, but said, “Lexi didn’t know that though. That’s what people need to remember.”
The tribe has required Lexi to be moved to Utah to live with a “step-second-cousin” who is not Native America.
“We’ve been fighting for her to stay because of what she wants, who she sees as mommy and daddy, and her siblings.”
See the interview:
Tribal officials multiple times have declined to respond to WND requests for comment, but on Friday, WND reported that the tribe was blasting the foster family credited in court with restoring an abused little girl to health and happiness for doing “nothing but delay” the case and turning it into a political cause.
“It appears the foster family and their counsel are attempting to turn Lexi’s case into a political call to arms to dismantle ICWA,” the tribe charged in an unsigned statement posted online. “For the Choctaw Nation this case is not about politics. This case is about one of our children, one of our tribal members.”
The tribe said the ICWA “requires Lexi be given the chance to grow up with her family, with her sisters.”
“The California courts, time and again, found that Lexi should live with her family. The Pages have done nothing but delay Lexi’s reunification with her family.”
The tribe has chosen Lexi’s step-grandfather’s niece to have custody of the six-year-old, whose story burst into the headlines a week ago when agents from child protective services took the crying, resisting child away from the foster family, Rusty and Summer Page, with whom she has lived since she was little over a year old.
The state government took the girl from her biological parents because of their drug abuse and criminal histories. Her father later cut off attempts at reunification and her mother reportedly lost custody of at least six other children. The girl was placed with the Pages and initially would use “mommy” and “daddy” for friends and strangers alike, court records show.
Lexi was described in the court records as having signs of a “reactive attachment, the disinhibitive type.”
But social evaluators later told the courts that removing her from the Pages “would be potentially traumatic,” causing her to suffer “depression and anxiety.” She “formed a strong primary bond and attachment with the entire [Page] family, viewing the parents has her own parents and the P. children as her siblings.”
“The tribe and the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services have been vilified and the facts of this case have been warped in an attempt to gain public sympathy for the foster family. This case is not about the foster family – but about a child’s long-term best interest – Lexi’s best interest,” the tribe said in its online statement.
WND previously reported that one of the social workers assigned to the case of Lexi warned in an interview that the little girl is “traumatized” because of the removal from the home where she’s lived for years.
WND originally had reported Lauren Axline of Valencia, California, had spoken out about the case, posting a comment on a page promoting a petition to return Lexi to her foster family.
“I was the foster social worker on this case for 3.5 yrs, and I can speak of the deceptive, crooked, and destructive things the ICWA (Indian Child Protection Act) social workers and lawyers have done that are NOT in the best interest of this child or her future,” Axline wrote. “I can also speak of the amazing Page family and how they have loved on Lexi from day one and how much Lexi is truly a part of their family.
“They took a scared 2-year-old who didn’t know a parent from a stranger and helped form this beautiful, silly, confident, loving, stable little 6 yr old by the love and nurture they provided for her in their home the last 4.5 yrs.”
Then Axline has expanded on her comments in an interview with the London Daily Mail.
What do YOU think? Sound off on the case of Lexi, a 6-year-old girl taken from her family
The Mail reported Axline described the Native American unit of the Los Angeles County’s Department of Children and Family Services as “deceptive” and “crooked.”
Lexi and her biological father reportedly have never lived on a reservation or been subject to tribal law, the report said.
“He even denied that he was Native American when his mother raised the issue with Los Angeles County DCFS, and told them that he was an enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation,” the Mail said.
The Mail identified the father as Jay Ellerforbes, who is now is facing meth and drug-paraphernalia charges in Pasadena, California.
Axline said she believes the agency handling Lexi’s case “hid” key facts and overlooked “damning” visitation reports.
Axline said that as a foster agency, we “report what we find in each child’s case to the county, and the county is supposed to take that information to the courts.”
“But we were reporting the different instances in Lexi’s case that were really concerning us, things that were concerning me as the social worker working the case, but they weren’t passed on. I’m talking visitations with the Utah family during which Lexi was an absolute mess. The DCFS would tell her that she would have to have a visit, and she would go ballistic and she would go crying and crying, and when she would come back from a visit it would take her days and days to get back into her normal routine and behaviors,” she said.
“Once they started overnight visitations, that was even worse. It was taking her weeks to get back to normal,” Axline told the Mail.
“I was monitoring a visitation with him and Lexi. It was early on when he was just released from jail, and he was talking about his time inside. He was sharing with me about how tough it was to be there and said that he had to stick around with his white buddies, my white supremacist friends, he said. He said they had to protect each other from the other gangs in jail.”
She told the Mail: “Instead of writing, she was ‘hysterically crying,’ as I told them, they would put, ‘Lexi had such a fun time at Disneyland when they went; she was smiling and laughing.’ It was completely deceptive.”
What do YOU think? Sound off on the case of Lexi, a 6-year-old girl taken from her family
Los Angeles agency officials declined comment. At the same time, multiple rallies have developed in support of the Pages.
Last week the Pages’ lawyers appealed to the California Supreme Court to restore Lexi to her home.
WND also reported the law under which Lexi was taken already was under a legal challenge that contends it is unconstitutional.
The Goldwater Institute has filed a lawsuit challenging the law as racist and unconstitutional because it not only allows but requires different treatment under the law, based solely on race.
“Alone among American children, children with Indian ancestry who end up in state protective custody are treated not in accord with their best interests but given separate, substandard treatment solely because of their race,” the organization explains.
“This separate, unequal treatment results from a well-intentioned but a profoundly flawed and unconstitutional federal law, the Indian Child Welfare Act, the ICWA. The Goldwater Institute is challenging certain provisions of the act in order to vindicate the constitutional rights of off-reservation children of Indian ancestry in Arizona, and their foster and prospective adoptive parents. The civil rights class action is based on the fundamental principles of equal treatment under law, respect for individual rights, and federalism embedded in the federal Constitution.”
Concerned individuals may contact the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma or call 1-800-522-6170.
The Institute’s action contend the law violates the equal protection guarantee of the Fifth Amendment, the due process guarantee, and the due process and equal protection clauses of the 14th Amendment. It also contends the ICWA “exceeds the federal government’s power.”
‘Child sacrifice’
On its website, the Goldwater Institute recounts the case of Laurynn Whiteshield and her sister, Michaela.
“Laurynn spent most of her life in a home where she was loved and protected. From the time she was nine months old, she and her twin sister, Michaela, were raised by Jeanine Kersey-Russell, a Methodist minister and third-generation foster parent in Bismarck, North Dakota. When the twins were almost three years old, the county sought to make them available for adoption. But Laurynn and Michaela were not ordinary children.
“They were Indians.
“And because they were Indians, their fates hinged on the Indian Child Welfare Act, a federal law passed in 1978 to prevent the breakup of Indian families and to protect tribal interests in child welfare cases.
“The Spirit Lake Sioux tribe had shown no interest in the twins while they were in foster care. But once the prospect of adoption was raised, the tribe invoked its powers under ICWA and ordered the children returned to the reservation, where they were placed in the home of their grandfather in May 2013.
“Thirty-seven days later, Laurynn was dead, thrown down an embankment by her grandfather’s wife, who had a long history of abuse, neglect, endangerment, and abandonment involving her own children,” the report says.
It quotes William Allen of the Coalition for the Protection of Indian Children and Families, who is a critic of the law.
“I would go so far as to call the legislation a policy of child sacrifice in the interests of the integrity of the Indian tribes, meaning the end has nothing to do with the children,” Allen said. “It has everything to do with the tribe. To build tribal integrity, tribal coherence, the law was passed in spite of the best interests of the children.”
The damage to a six-year-old ripped from the only parents she’s known can be significant, according to Cheryl Chumley, a court-appointed special advocate and author of the new “The Devil in D.C.: Winning Back the Country from the Beast in Washington.”
“This is a perfect example of the damage that government can do when it gets involved in matters it doesn’t belong,” she said. “Tearing this little girl away from the only home she’s ever known is a travesty – and it’s a big black mark on government.
“As a CASA, a court-appointed special advocate, I help judges make the difficult decision of where abused and neglected children should ultimately live. And I can tell you, ripping children from a home where they’ve grown, where they’ve thrived and where they’ve lived with family is an upsetting process, at best – a mentally and psychologically damaging occurrence at worst. By all accounts, Lexi was thriving in her present home, but now, because of government policy, she may have to go live with strangers, in an entirely new state.
“God help us if this is what government can do, without barely blinking an eye.”
‘Devastated’ family
“Our family is so incredibly devastated,” Rusty Page said in a Facebook statement. “But nobody could possibly be more devastated than our 6-year-old daughter who found herself restrained in a car and driven away to go and live in a foreign place hundreds of miles from her family, friends, teachers, home and life.”
A measure of the public’s interest can be assessed at a GoFundMe page, where more than $41,000 has been raised for the family’s effort in just three days, and Change.org, where more about 112,000 people have signed a petition. On Tuesday for a time, the signatures were coming in at a rate of one per second.
The case has overtones of the “Baby Veronica” case from several years ago.
The infant was placed with foster parents who wanted to adopt her, but an Oklahoma tribe demanded that she be removed and given a single parent. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned the tribal action, and a lower court allowed the foster family to keep custody.
Matt and Melanie Capobianco adopted “Baby Veronica” from an Oklahoma woman and had custody for 27 months in South Carolina before courts ordered custody transferred to Veronica’s biological father, Dusten Brown.
The case involved claims from the Cherokee tribe.
Follow the progress of the case on the GoFundMe and change.org sites.
Concerned individuals may contact the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma or call 1-800-522-6170.
from PropagandaGuard https://propagandaguard.wordpress.com/2016/03/29/lexis-foster-parents-its-been-very-hard/
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