NY Court Strikes Down Host Family Homes Program

On May 21, the New York Court of Appeals struck down a proposed state program to evade court oversight in providing an “alternative to formal foster care arrangements.” The case is Lawyers for Children v. OCFS.

In 2022, New York’s Office for Children and Family Services launched a new program called Host Family Homes, creating a new pathway for separating families without using formal foster care. Opponents of the program, including Lawyers for Children, The Legal Aid Society of New York, and the Legal Aid Bureau of Buffalo Inc., argued that the legislature never authorized such a move and that the Office lacked authority to do so on its own initiative.

The Parental Rights Foundation joined an amicus brief expressing concerns that the program’s absence of court oversight fails to protect families’ rights.

The Host Family Homes program was announced in December of 2021, and “the state describes the program as ‘temporarily supporting a family when a parent has made a determination that he/she is unable to care for their child’ and has made an informed agreement ‘to allow a host family to care for his or her child as a way to avert the need for more child welfare intervention’,” according to an April 2022 report from ProPublica.

The problem, critics of the program argue, is that the program doesn’t include the rules and requirements for protecting children and family rights provided by the state’s existing avenues for placement. This includes existing laws allowing families to voluntarily place their children with others, as well as laws allowing the state’s agencies to take custody of children and place them in foster care. 

The Host Homes program provides no judicial oversight, no requirement to provide preventative services, nor any requirement to prioritize placement with kin when a child must be separated from a parent.

The brief we signed onto, penned by Josh Gupta-Kagan of Columbia Law School's Family Defense Clinic, points out that “Hidden foster care is a coercive practice that strips parents of procedural rights and leads to unnecessary separations.” And for all its good intentions, “[t]he Host Family Homes regulation would create a new form of hidden foster care.”

In 2025, the New York Superior Court, which is the state’s appeals court, sided with the agency in a 3-2 decision allowing the program to move forward. The two dissenting justices, though, issued a stinging opinion of their own in which they warned that “OCFS has gone rogue,” creating a program that outs children “in an administrative mousetrap with no way out.”

The litigants immediately appealed to the state’s highest court, the New York Court of Appeals, which ruled unanimously (7-0) in their favor on May 21 (2026). 

Writing for the court, Justice Cannataro pointed out several problems with the program.

“Under the program, courts need not approve placements lasting longer than 30 days, nor are they required to assess the well-being of the child if they have been left in foster care for over eight months. Because the courts are not involved, the State need not provide assigned counsel to the parents or children to advocate for them during these mandatory hearings. OCFS is likewise not required to identify known friends or relatives who might care for the child, nor offer any government-paid preventive services, before allowing parents to access host family care.”

It is precisely this lack of court oversight and legal representation that concerned the Parental Rights Foundation and led us to sign on to the amicus brief.

In the court’s conclusion, Cannataro added, “Respondents created the Host Family Homes program to offer parents an alternative means of temporarily placing out their children in times of difficulty. The governing law does not permit them to do so.”

We are grateful for the opportunity to have weighed in on this case and gratified that the court ultimately heard our concerns and ended the state’s program. 

And I am grateful to each of you for standing with us to protect children by empowering parents in New York and across the country.