An Augusta District Court wrongly terminated a New Mexico mother’s rights to her child because she couldn’t find affordable housing in Maine, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court ruled Tuesday.
Despite noting the mother had gone “above and beyond” to meet the requirements set by the Maine Department of Health and Human Services, Judge Cynthia Montgomery ruled in 2024 that the mother’s inability to move to Maine made her an unfit parent. The judge terminated her parental rights as a result.
On Tuesday, the Maine Supreme Court disagreed and vacated the termination ruling, writing that the mother’s “failure to relocate was not a willful refusal to accede to a condition imposed by the Department; it simply reflected the practical impossibility of compliance.”
The case was remanded back to the lower court.
The ruling highlights the ongoing debate in Augusta about whether Maine’s child welfare system too often conflates lack of financial resources with abuse or neglect, as well as Maine’s recent history of taking children into foster care at higher rates than other states. It also puts into stark relief the consequences of Maine’s affordable housing crisis.
The mother, who is referred to only as “Karen J.” in court documents due to the confidential nature of child protection proceedings, has lived in New Mexico her entire life. Her child is a boy with autism and “exceptionally high needs,” the court wrote.
Maine opened a child protection case on the mother and her son in 2021, while the two were traveling in Maine. The Maine Department of Health and Human Services placed him in foster care before returning him to the mother in New Mexico a few months later. In 2022, the state followed up with the mother and, believing her to be intoxicated, removed the child to Maine, despite New Mexico authorities’ refusal to put the child in foster care in their home state.
The mother complied with all of Maine’s reunification requirements, which included passing random substance screenings, completing substance abuse and mental health treatment plans, and participating in counseling, parenting classes and a domestic violence support group, the court found. The only element of the plan she was unable to complete was finding housing in Maine.
“The circumstances surrounding the mother’s failure to relocate to Maine that we have described here do not, in any fashion, constitute evidence of parental unfitness,” Justice Andrew Mead wrote for the court.
A spokesperson for the Maine Department of Health and Human Services declined to comment on the case, citing the ongoing court proceedings.
The mother’s appellate lawyer, Katelyn Saner, said in an interview that the decision confirms “that a parent’s lack of resources are not a basis to forever terminate the legal bonds between a child and a parent.”
“Karen did everything that the department asked of her, with just one exception,” said Saner, who was not involved in the lower court proceedings. “She didn’t meet the department’s impossible requirement that she move across the country, coming to a place where she has no connections.”
The case started in 2021 when the mother traveled to Maine with her child to meet a man she met online, who, the court noted, had prior domestic violence assault convictions. Sometime after coming to Maine, she called 911 and requested a ride back to New Mexico. She was found “intoxicated,” the court wrote, and the state removed the child from her care. The court record provides few details about these events, and does not mention where the 911 call occurred or who responded to it.
In November 2021, Maine returned the child to his mother in New Mexico with the approval of the New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department. In March 2022, a Maine caseworker called the mother and, believing she was intoxicated, asked the New Mexico State Police to perform a welfare check.
The New Mexico child welfare agency then took the child into custody but “refused to continue the placement,” the court wrote. Maine’s child welfare agency disagreed with its New Mexico counterpart. It took the child and put him in a foster placement across the country in Maine and thousands of miles away from his mother.
The court did not specify why New Mexico refused to place the child in foster care while Maine did, and the Maine Department of Health and Human Services did not answer questions about the disagreement. Saner did not know the details of the disagreement, and a spokesperson for the New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department did not immediately respond to emailed questions. But federal data shows the two states took children into foster care at vastly different rates in 2022.
Maine took children away from their parents and put them into foster care at triple the rate that New Mexico did in 2022, according to federal data compiled by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. That year, Maine removed children and put them into foster care at the second highest rate in the country and more than double the national average.
As the case continued, and the mother and the department worked toward reunification, as state law requires, housing and distance became a challenge. The state wanted her to come to Maine for in-person supervised visits and a trial placement.
The mother had an $800-a-month federal Section 8 voucher that she used to pay for a “safe, well-maintained apartment” in New Mexico, the court wrote. But she could not find housing in Maine for that price, and a move risked losing her voucher. In April 2024, the Maine Department of Health and Human Services paid for airfare and lodging for her during a two-day trip to Maine to find a place to live. But the mother was unable to find any living arrangement that the voucher could cover in those two days.
In October 2024, Judge Montgomery, who has since retired, found that the mother had “gone above and beyond what she has been asked to do by [the department] to address her own individual issues.”
The mother also remotely attended many of the child’s medical appointments. Despite that, the court ruled she was unwilling or unable to take responsibility for the child, characterizing her inability to move to Maine as a “refusal to engage in trial placement.”
But the Maine Supreme Court noted that the mother tried to have the child placed in New Mexico, “undercutting the notion that she expressly refused to engage in trial placement.” It’s unclear why that effort failed.
The high court reasoned that the mother had faced an impossible “Catch-22”: Either move to Maine, lose her housing voucher and be found unfit because she didn’t have stable housing; or stay in New Mexico with stable housing but be found unfit because she couldn’t be in Maine to take part in in-person supervised visits.
Not only would the mother give up her housing by moving to Maine, she would “leave behind the resources that had provided the support to go above and beyond what was required of her, including professional resources to assist with this child’s special needs,” the court wrote. “And notably, with a critical lack of low-income housing in Maine, she could find herself essentially homeless.”
This story was originally published by The Maine Monitor, a nonprofit and nonpartisan news organization. To get regular coverage from The Monitor, sign up for a free Monitor newsletter here.