Revealing Family Separation’s Deep, Long-lasting Costs:
Urban Matters: First, Courtnie, welcome to the Center for New York City Affairs. Tell us what your work here will be about.
Courtnie McMillan: It focuses on the ‘family policing system’ and its impact on Black and Brown families – especially children, as I was directly affected at a young age. The emotional cost of this system for families is enormous. The trauma children experience isn’t an unfortunate side effect; it’s built into how the system operates. And for many of us, the impact is long-lasting, if not permanent.
At the age of nine, CPS [Child Protective Services, in New York City a function of the Administration for Children’s Services, or ACS], separated me from my mother, and we were kept apart for two and a half years. During that time, I rarely saw her or my newborn younger sister.
For an adult, two or three years can be insignificant. But for a child, that time spans crucial milestones for emotional and psychological development — and that lost time alters you. For me, those years felt like an eternity, and they shaped struggles I carried into adulthood.
Because of the separation, when my family was finally reunited, my younger sister did not recognize me – or our mother. That was devastating. As a child, I was emotionally unequipped and unable to process what had happened. Distressing anxiety became the backdrop of my childhood and teenage years. I know this to be true for many people who have experienced this system as children.
UM: What are the mental health challenges caused by the family policing system for people who were impacted as children or for children currently in the system?
McMillan: Separation from a parent is a profoundly traumatic experience. Even if reunification happens, the mental anguish often lingers. Children may develop a persistent fear of future separation, which creates a deep sense of instability. Common occurrences can come to feel like a forced removal, like being dropped off at school or going to summer camp. The mere awareness that a parent can be taken away at any time leaves children with a lasting sense of uncertainty.
UM: How is the family policing system connected to the broader history of racial systemic oppression in the U.S.?
McMillan: It is an outgrowth of the institution of slavery and the ongoing criminal legal and prison systems. There is an unmistakable likeness between these systems and the 'child welfare system' – each rooted in racial oppression and each disproportionately impacting Black, Indigenous, and Latinx families.
The state has extraordinary power over whether a family is simply allowed to stay together. And while most people think only of the parent-child bond being disrupted, in reality entire family networks are interrupted or broken, sometimes permanently. Children don’t just disappear from families; they are disappeared from their communities.
CPS/ACS operations are overwhelmingly concentrated in low-resourced, predominantly Black and Latinx areas like the South Bronx, East New York, and my own community, Harlem. Their presence in wealthy or predominantly white neighborhoods is minimal, if not entirely absent. Each year, our communities endure thousands upon thousands of CPS/ACS interactions, from investigations to court proceedings. In the process, a child loses their full potential and their growth is stagnated.
UM: Some of your work is done in conjunction with your mother, parent advocate Joyce McMillan [also a CNYCA fellow]. What does this collaboration bring to your advocacy?
McMillan: One of the aims of the work my mother and I are doing together is to show the larger shared experience within families, and to tell a fuller truth about the impact of the family policing system.
Many articles are written about the brutal realities of the system by people who were impacted as youth, and many articles are written by impacted parents. Yet, these stories are told separately. But we know that when the system touches a family, it affects all members of a family – all at once. I remember reading compelling stories and material about system-impacted people’s childhoods, and while it was thoughtful and powerful, I always found myself wondering: What about their parents? What were they going through? What were their siblings feeling, or doing, or losing? The stories felt like they were standing alone, when in reality they’re part of a larger, interconnected experience.
That’s why it’s important to create work that reflects that reality.That’s the gap we’re trying to close by working together, as a family. We want to give the public and policymakers a 360-degree view. You shouldn’t have to read one article about someone’s experience in childhood, then go search for a whole other piece to understand the plight of parents. Those experiences are deeply connected, so the storytelling should be too.
During my time as a visiting fellow at CNYCA, I want to shed light on the ways the 'child welfare system' disrupts and compromises the parent-child bond — not just in the moment of separation, but in a child’s life over time and in the long term. How does a young person learn to navigate the world when the person who should’ve been guiding them is absent, or whose presence in their life is fragmented?
And it’s often overlooked, but I will explore and share how the system affects siblings and extended family relationships, especially through kinship placements. The family policing system is extremely authoritarian. When it comes to kinship placements, families are placed into arrangements that seem supportive from the outside, but are actually full of tension, fear, and pressure because of how the system imposes decisions without true consent, transparency, or support. Under that kind of strain, relationships don’t sustain, let alone flourish.
UM: What can we look forward to during your tenure as a visiting fellow at CNYCA?
McMillan: My background is in marketing, and I’m excited to bring those skills to this work. The family policing system is vast in scope; it harms millions of people, impacting families and communities across generations, but it remains largely invisible in public conversation, especially when placed alongside a related and comparable system like mass incarceration. I see a real opportunity here. Because of this, I want to reach a broader audience through writing, panels, forums, and other public-facing efforts that dive into the system’s inner workings and explore what we can do to create change.
As a visiting fellow, it’s very important for me to zoom in on the outcomes of system-impacted children or people who were impacted as children or youth, to ground the data in lived experience — because those aren’t just numbers, they’re people’s lives.
Earlier this month, Courtnie McMillan joined the Center for New York City Affairs as a Visiting Fellow.
Photo courtesy of Courtnie McMillan.