Written by Kathryn Lyon in "The Wenatchee Report" copyright 1995
Do not reproduce without permission
Status with DCFS.
Interviewed Juan Garcia on June 28, 1995 and again on August 15, 1995. Both interviews were videotaped. Mr. Garcia said that he graduated in 1990 from Eastern Washington University with a degree in sociology and a minor in social work. He began his professional employment by working as a migrant farm worker employment coordinator. In 1992, he worked as a case manager for Children's Home Society. He worked there for about a year and then was employed by the CPS office in Wenatchee, under the supervision of Tim Abbey.
Mr. Garcia said that his brother, Jerry had worked for DSHS in Wenatchee previously but became frustrated with the system and practices and resigned after a short time. At the point of leaving Jerry called Juan and told him of the position but warned·him to be careful of Tim Abbey and Dean Reiman and Pat Boggus. Jerry said he was very critical of the work environment, particularly as Juana Vasquez' lawsuit was going on.
Mr. Garcia became immediately critical himself of what he perceived to be discriminatory practices. He felt that services were denied to Hispanic families, or that nearly unattainable court requirements made it close to impossible for such parents to regain custody of their children. He would file written complaints and provide them to Mr. Abbey, but the complaints would subsequently be returned to his desk. Mr. Garcia kept these returned complaints in a drawer in his desk. He also spoke out at staff meetings and individually to other social workers and to Mr. Abbey. There was no positive response. The only other Hispanic employee throughout the DCFS office was Juana Vasquez.
Then Mr. Garcia started to work for Wenatchee CPS, there were no Hispanic foster homes. Yet the Hispanic population that numbered, Mr. Garcia believed, between twenty to twenty-five percent of the population.(86) Mr. Garcia believed that this practice was contrary to the goals and stated policies of the
Division of Children and Family Services. When his suggestions to recruit Hispanic foster homes were rejected by Pat Boggus, who was then in charge of foster care licensing, Mr. Garcia went out and recruited Hispanic foster homes on his own. He successfully recruited several homes, all on his own time and without pay, after 5:00 p.m. He received no involvement or support of the department.
Mr. Garcia completed twenty five foster care packets, each approximately thirty pages long. When he was through compiling the required paperwork, he left the stack of foster care packets on Ms. Boggus' desk. When he hadn't heard from Ms. Boggus about the homes in a few days, he asked her about her progress in licensing the foster homes. She told him that they were "lost." Although Mr. Garcia had already spent between forty and fifty hours on this project, he then redid all of the substantial paperwork. Many foster homes were subsequently licensed, but none of them are currently utilized, to his knowledge.
During the course of Ms. Garcia's lawsuit some of the DCFS caseworkers made a point of appearing friendly toward him and sensitive to Hispanic cultural issues. However, when it became clear that Mr. Garcia was actually supportive of Ms. Vasquez, that practice changed. When it became known to the office that Mr. Garcia would be testifying he was approached by Pat Boggus who asked him to testify that she had supported his Hispanic foster home recruitment. Since she had opposed his efforts every step of the way, Mr. Garcia thought she was trying to encourage him to testify falsely. Then her husband, Dean Reiman, called Mr. Garcia and encouraged him to testify on Ms. Boggus' behalf. He told Mr. Garcia that Ms. Boggus could have prevented him but she hadn't done so. Again, Mr. Garcia felt he was being encouraged to testify falsely. Mr. Garcia testified on Ms. Vasquez' behalf at her trial. He described various discriminatory practices that he had observed. After Ms. Vasquez' legal victory, Mr. Garcia was subjected to harassment and accused by Dean Reiman of not seeing the "big picture." His requests for vacations were repeatedly denied. Mr. Garcia worked at the Wenatchee CPS office for thirty months without a vacation. His caseload became disproportionately large.
A child named Manuel Sanchez was on Mr. Garcia's caseload. Manuel's mother had a brain tumor that disfigured her and left her physically and mentally incapacitated. The woman's condition was not responsive to medical treatment and it was progressive. Without adult supervision of any kind, Manuel became increasingly out of control, skipping school and hanging out on the streets. Mr. Garcia concluded that the mother was incapable of meeting Manuel's needs and the mother agreed. Manuel was placed in foster care in 1992, pursuant to a dependency action.
In 1993, Manuel was returned to his mother, over Mr. Garcia's objections, by Tim Abbey. Mr. Abbey reasoned that the State had already spent too much money on the family and strictly speaking the circumstance wasn't one of abuse or neglect. By then the mother's condition had worsened. Manuel immediately got into problems with truancy and recurrence of runaway behaviors. The school principal called Mr. Garcia in May of 1994 and said that Manuel needed to be placed in foster care. Manuel's mother agreed and was adamant that Manuel shouldn't be bounced around from her home to various foster homes. Finally Mr. Garcia placed Manuel in a culturally relevant Hispanic foster home in Bridgeport, under a voluntary placement agreement.
On a Friday, approximately June 10, 1994, the foster parent left a message for Mr. Garcia to let him know that Manuel and her son had got in a fight. She was not requesting that Manuel be removed, but merely responding to Mr. Garcia's request that she report any problematic situations. Mr. Garcia was not at work that day. The voice mail message was intercepted by Tim Abbey. On that day, two social workers picked up Manuel at the foster home and took him back to his mother's home without explanation. They did not discuss their actions with her or with the foster mother, who was Spanish-speaking. Manuel's mother immediately left several frantic messages on Mr. Garcia's voice mail. She spoke to Mr. Garcia upon his return. She was concerned that she could not cope with Manuel. Her concerns were valid. Manuel was soon back on the streets. In July of 1994 Manuel got into some criminal problems and the juvenile court commissioner ordered that a dependency petition be issued. He requested the assistance of Manuel's public defender to accomplish this. Juan was contacted by the public defender and started the process of preparing the petition. The matter was scheduled for court in August, 1994.
Before the hearing, Tim Abbey asked Mr. Garcia to go to California with a foster family to assist them with a number of teenagers while they took a vacation. Because Mr. Garcia had unsecessfully requested a vacation many times, Mr. Abbey said this was his opportunity.
Immediately upon his return Mr. Garcia was placed on administrative leave by area manager Carol Billesbach. He was told that it was alleged that he had acted inappropriately in regards to one of the foster children, while in California He denies this claim. Mr. Garcia was told he was to have no contact with any care providers, foster parents or anyone from the foster care system. He was told to stay in the house from eight to five and to have no contact with anybody from DCFS expect Mr. Abbey. He was not allowed to return to his office or remove any items from the office. Shortly thereafter, Mr. Garcia learned that while he had been gone Manuel and another twelve-year-old boy had murdered a Hispanic field worker. He learned this from CPS supervisor Tim Abbey who came to Mr. Garcia's house in a panic. Mr. Abbey brought the files of Manuel and his family with him. He said that he wanted Mr. Garcia "to work on the files to make it appear that I'd justified Manuel's removal." Mr. Abbey told Mr. Garcia that he wanted him to remove two pages from the Service Episode Reports, the hand written documentation of individual case activities that a caseworker is required to complete as an ongoing part of his client's file. Mr. Abbey urged Mr. Glassen to replace these pages with falsified and post-dated reports. Mr. Abbey told Mr. Garcia that his failure to do that might impact the results of the OSI investigation into Mr. Garcia's allege misconduct in California. According to Mr. Garcia, Mr. Abbey said, "this can be very difficult for you, if we don't get the cooperation. We can work this out. It's real simple here to do this." Mr. Abbey said that it would be a much more difficult investigation unless Mr. Garcia cooperated. Mr. Garcia recalls that Mr. Abbey said, "I can't promise what is going to happen, but I can tell you that this can be an easy, this can be a one month investigation, or it could be ten months or a year."
Mr. Abbey came to Juan Garcia's home three times in as many days. Each time he asked him to falsify the documents to say that there had been a number of problems in the foster home which might have justified Manuel's removal. It was necessary that Mr. Garcia write this because such reports are handwritten and Mr. Garcia is the guardian of the record.
Mr. Abbey indicated that his actions were motivated by a communication from Roy Harrington, Regional Administrator of DCFS, based in Spokane. Mr. Abbey showed Mr. Garcia the memorandum. The memorandum, dated August 25, 1994, reads:
Why did I have no clue that at least one of these kids were ours until I see the Wenatchee World. This murder is getting statewide attention. If you don't think I and
Oly have an immediate need to know then something is truly, truly wrong over there. I want some info ASAP immediately summarizing our role. Why in the hell you all didn't get me info as soon as you knew we had a history with this (these) kids, is beyond me. Read the goddamn
media policy which Carol referenced to all of you two weeks ago. Get me some info in writing now! Fernandez, Glassen, Garcia and now this? The two of you better get a hold of things over there. I don't want to see or hear, finger-pointing, I want results. Get me some info.(87), attached.
Mr. Garcia refused to cooperate. He said that he was frightened. He knew that Mr. Abbey would go to the Office of Special Investigations and make it more difficult. "I basically knew that I was not gonna be able to work at CPS after that." Mr. Garcia was on paid administrative leave for eleven months. He was fired on June 21, 1995, after an OSI investigation substantiated Mr. Garcia's legal wrongdoing. Mr. Garcia was never interviewed by the OSI investigators.
Observation of Discriminatory Practices:
Mr. Garcia told me that he frequently saw examples of discriminatory attitudes towards Hispanics by DCFS staff members. These attitudes included racial insensitivity. "They were real stereotypical type of ideological type of ideas people have about Hispanics. Now, there's differences. Just because we all speak Spanish doesn't mean we're all from the same cultural background....And they believe that everybody's actually from Mexico around here...But there's a lot of people from Honduras, Columbia, Cuba, Puerto Rico, El Salvadore, Guatamala...We're not just talking about migrants. This family's been here twenty or thirty years, but there's no distinction."
Mr. Garcia said that he had observed examples of inadequate services provided to Hispanic families as required by dependency court orders. Many of the services were practically unattainable, given the limitations imposed on these families by virtue of their poverty and language difficulties. Often court ordered services are inaccessible to them. "If they don't get these done, then always the social worker's going to go back into court and say, 'well, we don't have a mother here who's working enthusiastically toward these goals that we have.'...And again they're thrown into the system here that is set up against them, that is stacked so much against them that ultimately the court's gonna give up and terminate this particular mother's rights." According to Mr. Garcia a major barrier to attaining court expectations is language. "A mother shows up at these parenting classes or whatever recommendation they may be...in English. So she would just sit there, even though she's only Spanish-speaking, non interacting with the rest of the group. So then the parenting individual, whoever's running the class, would then write a bad report...because she's not participating. And again, that goes back to the social worker and the social worker then gives that to the judge and you see how the system's set up for them to fail. And it fails pretty rapidly, the way I see it." The consequence of failure is termination of the parent and child relationship by the court.
Interpreter services are sometimes not provided to families. Sometimes children, even the actual alleged victim, are asked to interpret for their parents. Because none of the DCFS staff but he and Juana Vasquez were Hispanic, the intake process often failed to appropriately respond to these cases. Cases of emergent danger, for example, might not be rated high enough to justify a caseworker investigation. Some of these cases were ones with actual high risk factors such as medical evidence. "I believed that families were at risk the whole three years I was there."
Mr. Garcia said that Hispanic professionals such as teachers and day care providers would contact him about Hispanic children whom they had previously reported as being likely abuse victims. He said he would inquire about what these professionals had said to the intake person. He said he "just couldn't believe what information they were giving, the intake worker didn't get it. She or he would then just minimize the information, as to his interpretation of it." Hispanic parents sometimes had difficulty in accessing DCFS services, according to Mr. Garcia. "I would file complaints of the instances of just insensitivity toward clients in a sense where clients were just being ignored at the front (desk) because they didn't speak any Spanish. I mean they would walk by them like they were invisible. That's the funny thing, its like that person was a nonexistent individual. An Hispanic person could be standing up there for a half hour and I mean the people would walk up there, walk around, get stuff right in front of that individual and be kind of uncertain about looking at them in the eyes for the fear of having to communicate with this individual like that person was a statue or a fiend or something, I don't know. And I observed this so many times I finally made a complaint. And I said you need to either hire a receptionist or somebody and people here need to be a bit more sensitive to people up front. She or he might know English, you never know. Give them an opportunity to communicate before you make this presumption, you know, stereotyping them again, that everyone that's brown up there doesn't speak any English." Transportation was another factor in accessing services, according to Mr. Garcia. Mothers of poor Hispanic families may not drive or have access to a car. If their husband were in the fields or in jail these mothers could not access services such as parenting or counseling. They were also obligated to the needs of their children. "You know, those (children remaining at home) are still at home to take care of. They still need diapers, they still need clothing, they still need to get to school, they still need to get bathed. They still need their parental care. She's doing that, but at the same time you give her all these recommendations, she's still has to go and finish anger management, parenting classes, get u.a.'s if they had a concern of drugs. You know, basically it was the kind of stuff that would just make the barriers so high, unreachable expectations." Mr. Garcia said that he was very concerned about the practice of placing Hispanic children in non culturally-relevant homes. "I had trouble seeing that all the time. I had trouble with Anglo foster parents being very derogatory towards Hispanic children, about their culture, about their food, about their habits. they were just not culturally sensitive...or really concerned about their culture." Mr. Garcia said that the Wenatchee juvenile court system may provide little or no equity for certain Hispanics or minority people, especially those who are poor. "Young Hispanic women, those with not a history of problems, are targeted and given such a hard service recommendation that it's an impossible goal to meet. And so they go back to court with low recommendations. They go back to court without the support of the department. They go back to court which then the only evidence the court can rule on...then leads to termination and leads ultimately to adoption. Which the kids are placed in Anglo foster homes, which are eventually adopted out to that particular foster home, being a non-traditional Hispanic home.The child just never leaves your foster home and then within months you can have him adopted if the mother hasn't complied with the court order."
Mr. Garcia said that he believe the practice of placing children for foster care and for ultimate adoption in non culturally-relevant homes to be "cultural genocide."
The extended family is typically not considered as a resource, despite DCFS policy. He stated that there are pressures placed on the Wenatchee DCFS by potential foster and adoptive parents. Foster parents are sometimes dependent on the income they receive from foster children, according to his observations. (88). Adoptive parents also put pressure on the department for financial reasons, since State adoptions are far less expensive than private ones.
Mr. Garcia told me that he knows that a CPS worker, Laurie Alexander, was or is concurrently employed by New Hope, a private adoption agency. He said that poor Hispanic mothers have told him that they were very confused about Ms. Alexander's twin roles. In one case, the woman was told that failure to relinquish the child for adoption through New Hope might lead to her being deported. Mr. Garcia said that the Hispanic mother "couldn't distinguish what role she (Ms. Alexander) was playing at which particular time." Mr. Garcia said that the mother speaks only very limited English and Laurie Alexander speaks no Spanish. The adoption paperwork was in English. Ms. Alexander did not use an interpreter.
Mr. Garcia described another example. A young girl, under eighteen, was approached by Ms. Alexander immediately after giving birth. "At the time she was a minor and didn't have the consent of a mother to do this...And so she couldn't distinguish between her being an adoption social worker or CPS social worker. She just sees Laurie as both."The mother, reminded of her financial limitations, agreed to relinquish her infant for adoption.
Mr. Garcia said that the child's father came into the CPS office before the adoption was complete. Mr. Garcia spoke to him. The father thought the CPS office was an adoption agency. He communicated that he wanted custody of his son. He wanted to talk to Ms. Alexander. Mr. Garcia went back to Ms. Alexander's office and told her this, but she put on her coat and left out the back way. (Note: the child's maternal custody of the child. She was told the agency didn't want the child with her. She was never notified nor did she sign anything before the adoption.) (89)
According to Mr. Garcia, these mothers knew Laurie through previous involvement's with their families. However, in neither case were the infants subject to a dependency action by the state prior to being relinquished for private adoption.
Mr. Garcia said that it was his observation that certain DCFS social workers shared a stereotypical belief that people of low income are naturally abusers. "The expectation is that everyone who is at that level of income is an abuser or a sexual molester or some type of stereotype that the social workers have."
Mr. Garcia said that he has concerns about the way foster care is used as part of investigation. Foster parents would encourage disclosures from children which he felt would contaminate the results. Sometimes they would come to the office with lengthy written "disclosures. " Mr. Garcia would say, "you know you guys are just ruining this case, contaminating everything...So now we're gonna have to filter out this paper this lady gave me and it just really makes our job a lot more difficult." Mr. Garcia said he was especially concerned about the Perez foster home because of the relationship he held as a police officer. He made verbal complaints to Tim Abbey about it. Mr. Abbey told him Perez was a police officer and had a right to question foster children in his care. Mr. Garcia said that his concern was that Detective Perez would not be able to turn off his role of policeman. "Just living with the victim is an interview." ·Mr. Garcia said that he was also concerned about therapy which was a form of investigation. To his knowledge, therapy was frequently discontinued once a disclosure was made. He mentioned particular concerns about the recovered memory therapy of Cindy Andrews. Mr. Garcia said the DCFS office has facilities for videotaping. "We had a one-way mirror there. The child wouldn't even know she was being interviewed."
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