By Kiara Doyal, The Seattle Medium
On Monday, people impacted by forced family separation, along with advocates, attorneys, and organizers, held a virtual rally via Zoom to declare June 2025 the first annual Stolen Children’s Month.
According to Ashley Albert, Founder of Stolen Child’s Month, the initiative is an attempt to honor the children stolen and families destroyed by forced separation, to uplift the voices of survivors and to demand urgent changes to law policies that continue to perpetuate the destruction of so many families.
“Stolen Children’s Month was born from my pain, blood, sweat, and tears. I was put on trial for the love of my children to prove if I was safe enough to have my kids, and to prove that I was a mother who loved my children,” says Albert. “I had to watch my daughter’s name be changed and have my name erased off of a birth certificate.”
Systems of forced family separation — including family policing, youth incarceration, and immigrant detention and deportation — have long operated under the guise of child safety. But many of the families and family members that have been impacted believe that the government is not protecting their children; but rather the government is stealing their children. They also believe that the United States systematically and willfully ignores the lifelong trauma of children torn from their homes and the deep, unhealed grief of parents who are forced to live without their children.
“Stolen means gone, dead, missing, and it means never coming home, right?” says Albert. “So, I need for myself, I need for you, and I need for all of our communities to stop softening the truth. What we are witnessing is state-sanctioned family separation violence that is being justified as child protection. It’s not, it’s not protection. It’s genocide.”
Black mothers are burying their grief, while white agencies cash adoption subsidies, poor families are being dismantled, while billion-dollar nonprofits celebrate permanence, and the data proves it,” continued Albert. “Over 70% of child removals are for neglect, which means poverty, not abuse. Black children are taken twice the rate of white children, and Indigenous children are taken at four times that rate.”
To add insult to injury, many advocates claim that the very systems that tear families apart are celebrated. Each year, the United States “celebrates holidays like National Adoption Month, which romanticize, whitewashes, and normalize the destruction of families.” These celebrations, according to some advocates, hide the truth and spread the false idea that family separation is a force for good.
“Every November, we know the world celebrates Adoption Month, especially here in the U.S., but almost no one talks about the families that are torn apart, the children still grieving, and the mothers still praying for another chance,” said Josie Pickens, UpEND Movement. “We want that silence to end. This is a time to break the silence, tell the truth, center the voices of children and their families, and to demand justice.”
According to organizers, Stolen Children’s Month looks to shed light on:
• Children stolen by the foster system, adoption, youth incarceration, and ICE.
• Parents fighting to find, reunify, and heal with their stolen children.
• Black families separated by chattel slavery and modern systems of criminalization.
• Indigenous families separated by family policing, boarding schools, and genocide.
• Immigrant families separated by ICE detention, deportation, and borders.
• Families separated by institutionalization in supposed “care” and “treatment” facilities.
“We’re clear in our call. We demand the abolition of all systems that steal children and separate families. That means the family policing system, the adoption industry, ICE detention and deportation machine, and the prison industrial complex,” said Pickens. “We won’t stop until every family is free, and that is what we’re working towards.”
Throughout June, movement leaders are organizing a range of events, including political education webinars, national vigils honoring stolen children, and healing circles for affected families. Pickens urges the community to truly absorb the stories and videos being shared, and to amplify them as if their very soul depended on it.
“Share those stories you learn, and share those videos, because somebody’s liberation might be dependent on that and somebody being unified might be dependent on that,” said Pickens. “This campaign isn’t just about heartbreak, it is about pushing back against erasure and also putting these systems on notice.”
