Editor’s Note: For the times when Child Protection Services has intervened with timely and positive outcomes, there is also a growing swell of African-American voices telling different stories of their CPS experiences, which affected them adversely as individuals and families. The MSR provides an avenue for the families of our community to be heard.
Bonnie Anderson and Roynell Taylor have been married for over 47 years. They have 35 grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. In the last 20 years, they’ve had to return to their parenting instincts as they’ve had custody of several grandchildren.
Their twin daughters, Tabitha and Tamara Taylor, have struggled with substance abuse, resulting in them losing custody of their children. While Bonnie and Roynell lived in Duluth, Minnesota, they were able to work with the local county office and gain custody as next of kin.
Alonziana Bonita Colbert, 17, Tamara Taylor’s oldest daughter, was just one year old when her grandparents formally adopted her. She has seen her mother over the years but hasn’t had the opportunity to develop a relationship with her.
“I’m at the point where I feel like my grandma has raised me. My granddad and my grandma are my parents,” she said.
Bonnie Taylor, 21, is Tabitha Taylor’s oldest daughter and has lived with her grandparents since she was three. She’s currently studying political science and hopes to become a lawyer to resolve family separation under Child Protective Services (CPS) in the future.
“A lot of what I wanted to do actually did come from what I’ve been through growing up,” she stated.
Initially, Bonnie wanted to become a social worker, but she learned through her family’s struggle navigating CPS and county agencies that social workers can only do so much. She decided that she needed to dream a bit bigger and aim to change the laws that have caused her and her family so much grief.
While living in Duluth, Anderson and her husband, Roynell, had a good relationship with CPS in St. Louis County. However, once they moved to the Twin Cities metro in 2009, they began encountering difficulties trying to maintain custody of their grandchildren.
Things came to a head in 2021 when their family home in Coon Rapids was shot at one evening. Just days before Thanksgiving, the family was gathered together around six o’clock when shots rang out. A few bullets had pierced through their home, but they were left unscathed.
Hearing word of the shooting, CPS investigators came to the home and took the two youngest children, Bryden and Joy Blessing, who were both infants.
At the time, their family was the only Black family in the neighborhood. They felt as though they had been targeted racially for the shooting as they had no other justification.
Roynell expressed his frustration at the time when he suddenly lost his grandchildren. “You just don’t just take nobody’s family out,” he said. “It’s just like slavery.”
Roynell had been weary of being singled out. His grandfather was killed by the Klan, so it wasn’t too far-fetched that his family was now being targeted. According to his wife, Anderson, the family was subject to many CPS reports by the neighbors while living in Coon Rapids because they allowed their grandchildren to play in the backyard where there was no fence.
“They were trying to take the kids out because I didn’t have a gate,” she said. “Bryden used to walk outside all the time, but he was going back to where the swing set was. The white people kept calling in on me.”
Danielle Taylor, the older sister of Tabitha and Tamara, has been working to gain custody of her nephews and nieces but has confronted obstacles in dealing with Hennepin County. She stated that her name had been red-flagged for over 18 years, and she has just recently been granted a foster care license despite having applied over two years ago.
Danielle was working with Family Alternatives, a foster care service based in Minneapolis, to gain custody of her relatives but stated that she had been put under investigation for no [apparent] reason. She believes that Family Alternatives and Hennepin County are working together on her family’s case and have no intention of having her foster her nieces and nephews.
“What really hurts is that they still keep coming at me to block me from getting my family, and this is the same agency that cost me to lose Bryden and Joy,” she said. “I had a good shot, at least I thought, and they’re doing it again with these other children in the system.”
Three of the children are in the custody of a woman named Joanne, a foster parent in Minneapolis with whom the family has built a relationship. They share Sunday dinners with the children in Joanne’s care and constantly communicate.
According to Danielle, Joanne shared that individuals at Hennepin County told her never to contact the children’s biological family and labeled them as dangerous.
When asked for comment regarding the county’s policies regarding relative placement, a Hennepin County Human Services spokesperson replied with the following:
“For children who must be separated from their parents, our goal is to reduce trauma by placing them with relatives. These relatives must go through a licensing process, which can be complex. We support relatives through the process whether they’re being licensed by Hennepin County or another agency.”
A fear among older children is that their younger siblings will grow up estranged from them, and they will become unrecognizable to the younger children.
Colbert was recently celebrating her younger sister Keonna’s fourth birthday. Keonna is under the care of her father’s eldest daughter, so she’s become more familiar with her father’s side than her mother’s.
“I went to her birthday party, and it was just so sad because she didn’t know me,” Colbert said. “She just sat there, looked at me, and asked me my name. My whole chest hurt.”
Colbert fears that her siblings will grow up with a sense of abandonment if they cannot reunite them and have some semblance of a relationship. “I just feel like it’s wrong how they’ll take somebody out of their family and place them with random people and never let them see their family again,” she said.
“Then when they grow up, the kids feel that their family abandoned them, but they really tried.”
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