What We’re Showing This map shows the number of children and young people in foster care in each U.S. state and Washington, D.C., based on federal AFCARS dat…

The purpose of this Information Memorandum (IM) is to inform title IV-E agencies that a final rule was published amending the AFCARS regulations to require state title IV-E agencies to collect and rep...

The federal government has released its annual update to the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS) , a database th...

There is a federal system that knows the exact day a stranger became your mother by law, and cannot tell you the name of the woman who bore you. It is called AFCARS, the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System, and it is the only comprehensive record the United States keeps of every adoption completed with federal money. It logs the date your first parents’ rights were terminated. It logs the date the adoption was finalised. It logs your sex, your race, your ethnicity, close to a hundred and ninety separate facts about the child you became. Not one of them is the name you were born under. Not one of them is a thread you could follow back to the people you came from. The system counts the severance to the day. It keeps nothing of what was severed. I am not American. I was taken in Queensland, half a world and a whole legal system away from Washington. And still I recognised this architecture the moment I read its schema, the way you recognise your own handwriting in the dark, because the shape of it is the same everywhere it appears. Somewhere there is a certificate that says two people who were strangers to my first hours are my mother and father, that names their address as the place I began, that reads, by law, exactly as if I had been born to them. My original certificate sits behind that one, sealed. The state did not lose it. The state replaced it, and kept the replacement where the truth used to be. That is the thing to understand before anything else. This is not a filing error. It is a design. What the schema confesses Read AFCARS not as a form but as an object, and it starts to talk. The current record collects roughly a hundred and eighty-six data points on a child in care, plus a separate file on finalised adoptions. Across all of them, the birth parents appear only as a scatter of demographic characteristics, a race here, a tribal-membership flag there. Never as people. Never as a name a grown adoptee could one day ask for. The federal rulebook then goes further than silence. It encrypts the child’s identifier so the record cannot be linked back to the person. It recodes every child’s day of birth to the fifteenth of the month, blurring the one date a body actually remembers. In small communities it dissolves children into aggregates so none can be picked out. And here is the part they wrote down themselves. In its own rulemaking, the agency states plainly that it strips this information because the data could otherwise reveal a child’s identity. They understood exactly what the record was capable of returning to us. They built it, on purpose, so that it never could. A database with no field for your origin did not misplace your origin. It was constructed with nowhere to put it. That is what a schema is: a set of decisions about what is allowed to exist. The absence of your name in AFCARS is not a gap in the data. It is the data. It is the Architecture of Silence, rendered not as a slammed door or a redacted page but as the quiet grammar of a government spreadsheet, and a spreadsheet cannot be shamed, cannot be appealed to, cannot be asked to remember what it was engineered to forget. The second lock The federal system does not act alone. It is only the first half of a machine that needs two turns to finish. The case record, the living file with the real names in it, sits in state systems. Then the state performs the act that completes the erasure. When your adoption is finalised, your original birth certificate is sealed and a new one is issued in its place, one that names the people who raised you as the people who bore you, that carries no reference to the fact of adoption at all. In every state in the country, the amended certificate is written to be indistinguishable from the record of a child born to its parents. Your history is not annotated. It is overwritten. And then, in most of the country, the state locks the original away from the only person with an unarguable claim to it. As of the first of July this year, seventeen states let an adult adoptee simply ask for their own original birth certificate and receive it. That leaves thirty-three states and the District of Columbia where you cannot get the record of your own birth without a court order, a stranger’s permission, or the luck of having been born inside the right band of years. Thirty-three jurisdictions where an adult must petition a judge to be told their own name. Put the two halves together and you see the whole. The federal layer records that you were cut loose and keeps nothing that would lead you home. The state layer holds the truth and seals it. Between them there is no part of the apparatus whose job is to keep your origin and give it back to you. Not one office in the entire structure is charged with that single, obvious, human task. The design does not merely fail to return us to ourselves. It was never built to. Counted, not known This is the condition I keep circling, ...

AFCARS: Foster Care and Adoption Statistics for the fiscal year 2022. Another consecutive decrease in the number of children in foster care.

Some Washington state lawmakers are pressing the Department of Children, Youth & Families for updated information on critical incidents involving children under state supervision. The Senate &h...

For the first time, tribal data is being included in a federal database that is essential to understanding the nation’s child welfare system.

We’re breaking a little news on the blog today: Apparently with no formal public announcement, the federal Department of Health and Huma...

We’re breaking a little news on the blog today: Apparently with no formal public announcement, the federal Department of Health and Huma...

"Psst - hey bud. Ya wanna see an AFCARS report?" Yesterday (March 13, 2025) was an anniversary of sorts.  It marked the first anniversar...

At long last the federal government has released state and national foster care statistics for the year ending September 30, 2022.  Yes, 20...