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Free the Rikers 7Due process · Civil contempt · Family rights

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Supporting Our Children

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This campaign is not advocating that anyone abandon their children. Children need and deserve support. This page is about something different: how the government enforcement system operates, and what parents are rarely told about it.

Supporting your child
is not the same question as
how the Title IV-D enforcement system operates.

Two different questions

Question one

Should a parent support his or her child?

The campaign's answer is yes. Every man in these files describes wanting to be in his children's lives and to provide for them.

Question two

How does the Title IV-D program operate?

Title IV-D of the Social Security Act is a federally funded state enforcement program. It has its own rules, its own funding incentives, and its own distribution formulas. Parents are rarely told any of that.

Legal authorities

Legal authority

Blessing v. Freestone

520 U.S. 329 (1997)

United States Supreme Court

“not intended to benefit individual children and custodial parents”

The Supreme Court held that Title IV-D's “substantial compliance” requirement was not intended to benefit individual children and custodial parents, and did not itself create an individual entitlement to systemwide Title IV-D services.

Read carefully: this is narrower than saying “child support does not benefit children.” The decision did not abolish child support and does not say a parent owes nothing. It concerns whether individuals can sue to enforce systemwide compliance.

Legal authority

Wehunt v. Ledbetter

875 F.2d 1558

United States Court of Appeals, 11th Circuit

The majority concluded that Title IV-D was not enacted for the “especial benefit” of AFDC families, and discussed the program's governmental objectives, including recovery of welfare expenditures.

The decision contained a dissent disputing the majority's interpretation. The campaign notes the dissent rather than presenting the majority view as uncontested.

Where does the money go?

Collections made through a Title IV-D case are not always passed through to the family. Under applicable public-assistance reimbursement and distribution rules, a family can be struggling enough to need assistance, a parent can be paying support, and yet the government may still retain part or all of those collections.

The child is poor.
The custodial parent is struggling.
The other parent is paying.
Yet the government may still retain part or all of those collections.

That is not simply an accounting policy. It is a public-policy choice—and the public deserves to understand how that choice affects families.

Actual distribution depends on applicable federal and state law and on the family's assistance status. Parents should ask their agency how their own collections are distributed.

Questions to ask the child support agency

  1. 1.Is this a loan?
  2. 2.What law gives you authority over my child?
  3. 3.What did I say, do, or sign that gave you consent over me?

45 CFR 303.5 — establishment of paternity

A caution: the repeated appearance of the word “voluntary” in this regulation does not mean the entire child-support system is voluntary. It is not.

What is a general appearance?

Participation in a proceeding without timely objecting to personal jurisdiction may, depending on applicable law, waive certain personal-jurisdiction or service objections. That is why several of the men in these files describe insisting on the record that they were not conceding jurisdiction.

Personal jurisdiction

A court's power over a particular person.

Subject-matter jurisdiction

A court's power over the type of case.

Service

The formal legal delivery of the papers.

Notice

Actually being informed of the proceeding.

Consent

Agreeing to the court's authority over you.

Waiver

Losing an objection by not raising it in time.

A general appearance does not give a judge unlimited authority. Subject-matter jurisdiction, for example, cannot be created by consent.

Parent-child liberty

Legal authority

Stanley v. Illinois

United States Supreme Court

Recognized that an unmarried father has a protected interest in the children he has raised, and that he is entitled to a hearing on his fitness before they are taken.

Legal authority

Santosky v. Kramer

United States Supreme Court

Recognized a fundamental liberty interest of parents in the care, custody and management of their children, and required a heightened standard of proof before parental rights are terminated.

Legal authority

Smith v. City of Fontana

United States Court of Appeals

Recognized that children have a constitutionally protected interest in the companionship and society of a parent.

These protections are real, but they are not absolute. Courts can and do restrict custody where the required process is followed and the required findings are made. The campaign's question is whether that process and those findings occurred.

Georgia — paternity and legitimation

Georgia distinguishes between paternity, which establishes biological fatherhood and the support obligations that follow, and legitimation, a separate proceeding an unmarried father must bring to obtain legal custody or visitation rights.

CAMPAIGN POSITION

How can government impose the obligations associated with legal fatherhood while requiring a separate proceeding before that same father may seek custody or visitation?

This is a constitutional concern raised by the campaign. Georgia's legitimation requirement has not been declared unconstitutional.

Supremacy Clause

Legal authority

United States Constitution

Article VI, Clause 2

Supremacy Clause

The Constitution and valid federal law are the supreme law of the land. Where a state law conflicts with the Constitution or with valid federal law, the federal provision controls, and state judges are bound by it.

Full Faith and Credit

Legal authority

United States Constitution

Article IV, Section 1

Full Faith and Credit Clause

“The Full Faith and Credit Clause requires every state, as part of a single nation, to give a certain measure of respect to every other state's laws and institutions.”

This clause matters in these files because support and custody orders frequently cross state lines, and because relocation can move a case out of the court a parent has been appearing in.

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