Why a 6-Year-Old Was Taken From the Foster Parents She'd Lived With for Most of Her Life
At 17 months old, a little girl named Lexi was fostered with Santa Clarita, California, couple Rusty and Summer Page (and their biological children). Lexi's mother is reported to have had a substance abuse problem, and her biological father, who is of Choctaw heritage and an "enrolled member" of the tribe, had an extensive criminal history, according to court records reported in the Los Angeles Daily News. Now 6 years old, Lexi was on Monday taken from her foster family - due to the federal law, the Indian Child Welfare Act, children of Native American descent are supposed to live with Native American families. Lexi, however, is being sent to live with a couple in Utah who are not Native Americans but are related by marriage to her biological dad (and are also caring for Lexi's biological sister).
The Pages had spent the last 2.5 years trying to adopt Lexi to no avail. And on Monday, social workers from the local Department of Children and Families took Lexi from the Pages' home, with local news station KTLA sharing upsetting video footage from the scene:
According to a statement issued by the National Indian Child Welfare Association yesterday:
The foster family was well aware years ago this girl is an Indian child, whose case is subject to the requirements of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), and who has relatives who were willing to raise her if reunification with her father was unsuccessful. In fact, the only surprising turn of events is the lengths the foster family has gone to, under the advice of an attorney with a long history of trying to overturn ICWA, to drag out litigation as long as possible, creating instability for the child in question.
A lawyer for California's Children's Law Center also told The Los Angeles Daily News, "The law is very clear that siblings should be kept together whenever they can be and they should be placed together even if they were not initially together." Lexi, they added, has also been in regular contact with the couple she's being placed with in Utah.
The Pages, meanwhile, have set up a Change.org petition to "bring Lexi home," in which they say she's has been "ripped away from the only family that she has ever known." As of 5:30 p.m., it's been signed more than 70,000 times.
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