LOST IN LIMBO
A Times investigation
Hillsborough’s foster agency celebrates keeping families intact. It separated hundreds off the books.
The agency says temporary arrangements spare children from foster care. But families are swept into a labyrinth they struggle to escape.
It was nearing midnight when a child protective investigator knocked on the door at the Days Inn, startling Leslie Flora’s daughter and son awake.
The kids needed to pack, the investigator said. She was sending them to live with Flora’s in-laws — right now.
If Flora didn’t agree, she remembers the investigator saying, her kids would be taken into foster care.
Flora protested as her daughter, 8 years old, broke into sobs. Surely this was a mistake. The night before, her husband had been arrested while on a dinner run on the edge of Tampa. He’d been driving on a suspended license when police pulled him over and found drugs. His daughter sat up front, eating a vanilla ice cream cone. But Flora hadn’t been there.
They would sort this out in court, she told herself.
Except Flora would never go to court. She wouldn’t be appointed an attorney. Though investigators said the children were in danger, she would never get to defend her parenting at a hearing.
Instead, that night in November 2023, the family tumbled through a side door in Hillsborough County’s child welfare system — one that reroutes kids potentially bound for foster care into a patchwork of family arrangements. Billed as temporary and voluntary, these agreements, for parents, often feel like anything but.
Flora eventually would be presented with a stack of paperwork she believed she had to sign or risk losing her kids forever. It contained something called a temporary custody transfer. She didn’t understand that it amounted to a contract handing her children over to her in-laws.
Nearly three years later, now 39, she’s still fighting to undo what started when the state showed up.
“They legally kidnapped my children,” Flora said. “That’s how I feel.”
Hundreds of times, Hillsborough County’s lead child welfare agency and its partners pursued temporary custody transfers from parents on the margins, the Tampa Bay Times has found.
The arrangements swept up families facing a child protective investigation or orders to fix problems ranging from domestic violence to drug addiction. In the last four years alone, these cases dictated where more than 370 children would live.
The process is meant to be easier on kids, officials say, offering a chance for parents to fix problems at home and win their children back. But a Times review of court records found that reunion rarely happens. Parents who try to reverse the arrangements often get caught in custody limbo, confronted by a whirlwind of confusing paperwork.
Only 26 of more than 300 cases ended with either a judge directing the return of a child or attorneys filing to drop the case. Even then, some kids went to foster care, or the plan for the child was unclear. Another 46 cases were dismissed for procedural issues — with no record of where kids ended up.
The Children’s Network of Hillsborough, the nonprofit contracted by the state to oversee child welfare in the county, doesn’t track its use of these transfers or how they play out for families. After reporters repeatedly asked for such data, agency leaders said they “recognize (its) importance.”
“In response to your request, we are undertaking a special project to collect and provide aggregate outcomes regarding temporary custody transfers,” said Holly Way, a Children’s Network official, in an email.
The agency declined to answer questions about the Floras or other cases, citing confidentiality, and declined multiple interview requests. In a statement, the agency said keeping kids in familiar homes “helps preserve family connections while reducing trauma” and can avoid the worst scenario of terminating parental rights.
“Temporary custody transfers can help reduce instability and trauma, maintain important family or caregiver relationships, and preserve parent-child relationships while safety concerns are addressed,” the agency’s statement said.
The state Department of Children and Families, which oversees the Children’s Network, did not respond to multiple interview requests.
The Times found a pattern in which parents unwittingly signed away legal protections. Parents across 11 cases told the Times that custody transfers were presented as an ultimatum: agree to relatives taking over, or lose your kids to the foster system. They described meetings with unfamiliar staff, where they were urged to sign paperwork they didn’t know would waive their right to updates about their case.
Meanwhile, their relatives and children went without the financial help or counseling they would have been entitled to had their cases not been diverted.
Case records show no parents were provided their own attorney.
Not the mother trying to leave an abusive relationship when investigators were called.
Not the 17-year-old with a history of running away, a minor herself when she was asked to transfer custody.
Not the Guatemalan immigrants who couldn’t speak English.
Two parents told the Times they asked whether they could get a lawyer and were told if they did, their kids would be taken into foster care on the spot.
Called “hidden foster care” by experts because the arrangements don’t show up in official child welfare data, this side-door approach varies across the country. It generally lessens the load on overburdened foster systems, saves child welfare agencies hundreds of thousands of dollars — and leaves a scant paper trail.
The Times found a rare and vivid window into this back channel. Reporters analyzed thousands of pages of court and child welfare records, sharing their findings with more than a dozen attorneys across the U.S. Those experts described the Children’s Network practice as “problematic,” “highly disturbing” and “a violation of due process.”
Rarely, several said, had they seen an agency act so systematically in using custody transfers as alternatives to foster care.
For years, Tampa Bay lawyers, judges and state employees raised alarms.
Kids kept being sent into the shadows.
A shadow system
Parents have a fundamental right to care for their children. If the government is going to intervene, agencies must show a child has been abused, neglected or abandoned.
A typical child welfare case starts with a report of potential mistreatment. Investigators hope to keep families together, but if they believe a child isn’t safe, they can file for the state to take custody. A first hearing happens within 24 hours. A judge determines whether a child should go into foster care and for how long — or, later, can terminate parental rights. Parents are guaranteed the right to an attorney, often at no charge.
In Florida, all of this happens in dependency court, which is set up to handle such cases.
For years, Hillsborough County made headlines for having more foster kids than anywhere in the state. Children bounced around, sleeping in offices amid a severe shortage of beds and staff. One case manager oversaw 154 kids — more than nine times what the Child Welfare League of America recommends.
Foster care provider Eckerd Connects was pushed out in 2022 after reports of mismanagement and a criminal investigation in neighboring Pinellas County. In stepped an agency with a track record of reducing the number of kids in foster care in Southwest Florida: The Children’s Network.
Soon, Hillsborough’s numbers started dropping, too. Kids placed in foster care went down by half.
The Children’s Network credits the decrease to its Intensive Family Services Team.
The diversion team connects families with programs like drug rehab and mental health care — solutions the agency hopes “minimize risk to the home and really keep the family intact,” agency CEO Terri Balliet said last year.
“We are very proud of the things that we have done here,” Balliet said.
Agency leaders said the team has worked with more than 6,000 families, keeping children at home in the vast majority of cases. Sometimes, they seek temporary custody transfers, which they say are used mostly when a parent has died or is incarcerated. They also can be used when children are already living with a relative, and parents want it to stay that way.
Parents “keep control over where their children live and are part of the decision-making process,” said Keith Gold, a Children’s Network spokesperson.
But a pattern of Hillsborough cases more closely resembles hidden foster care systems that have drawn due process challenges nationwide.
Parents end up sacrificing their right to a fair shake in court, said Shanta Trivedi, an attorney and child welfare scholar at the University of Baltimore. The agency can avoid having to prove a case through a long legal process simply by “scaring parents.”
Without court oversight, the Children’s Network directs parents to complete programs such as counseling and anger management, giving it almost unfettered power over families, experts said.
The question is not whether a child should be removed but whether parents get the legal protections they’re entitled to.
“If the government is going to try to take your kid, it is their burden to show that you are an unfit parent and that there is no other way to keep your child safe,” said Josh Gupta-Kagan, a Columbia Law professor and leading expert in hidden foster care.
As many as 175,000 children nationwide are informally removed this way each year, studies estimate. There’s no federal requirement for states to document these placements, making them difficult to track.
“What was intended to be a tool for prevention and family preservation really just became foster care by another name that was done off the books and had no restrictions or limitations on the state,” Andrew Brown, a vice president at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, said of arrangements across the U.S.
Controversy has followed: Parents have sued, saying caseworkers coerced them to sign plans and custody forms. Some of the nation’s highest courts have clashed on the issue, deepening the gray area.
In 2022, the same year the Children’s Network took over in Hillsborough, a North Carolina county shelled out around $50 million to settle more than 20 lawsuits brought by parents and children who were separated outside of the formal foster system.
In a statement, the Children’s Network said Florida’s temporary custody laws “have no relationship or similarity” to those in North Carolina. But attorneys who spoke with the Times said the same issue is at play: a subversion of parents’ rights.
Parents struggled to get information about how to regain custody.
Here in Florida, local and state agencies have fielded complaints for years. In one email chain in September 2023, officials from the Department of Children and Families planned to discuss “recent issues” around transfers.
“We must make sure we are not circumventing the dependency system,” wrote Samantha Taylor, then the department’s director of child protection for the Suncoast Region, which includes Tampa Bay. “I do believe there are times when this is a great program but we need to be very careful we are using it on the right families and for the right reasons.”
A paralegal who works on the transfers later acknowledged in an email to higher-ups that people had been questioning the program’s legality.
Tensions spilled into view last October, when child welfare advocates and attorneys in Hillsborough gathered for a presentation about the diversion team. They peppered its director with questions: Who was representing parents’ interests? Who was explaining their rights? Paulette Boone responded to defend the agency and said she’d received no complaints about parents feeling coerced.
“They’re not signing waivers under duress,” Boone said. “I want to clear that up.”
But Boone, a week before, had talked to at least one parent who would vehemently disagree: Leslie Flora.
A pattern of coercion
On paper, Leslie had agreed to this.
But she couldn’t fathom how she had ended up here, not long after that night at the Days Inn, visiting her children twice a week for two hours at a time — all that their plan from the agency allowed. She and her husband, Joe, would meet them at her in-laws’ community pool or a nearby McDonald’s. She asked about school, and the kids asked when they could come home.
Investigators had started visiting the Floras in October 2023, according to a case note that mentions the parents had fought at a school drop-off and that Joe, 41, seemed twitchy. Before that, an anonymous tipster had accused them of selling drugs, according to agency records the Floras provided to the Times. A child protective investigator visited, writing that the kids looked well-cared-for. Joe’s arrest in November prompted authorities to intervene.
The Floras deny selling drugs and have never been charged with doing so, according to state records. In interviews with child protective workers, documents show, the couple talked about past drug use and hanging with the wrong crowd. But the workers twisted their words, they say, making their problems seem more dire.
The pandemic years had been hard. Joe’s handyman work dried up, and their landlord sold the house the Floras were renting. They bounced between hotels. They tried to keep the kids’ lives steady. They rode bikes, watched movies, took trips to the water park.
Once the children were taken, Leslie searched her name on the library computer, scouring the county court website, looking for documentation of what happened to her family. Nothing was filed.
She missed her kids, her daughter’s big brown eyes and love of playing hide-and-seek, her 15-year-old son’s quiet way and how he’d confide in her even as a teen.
Then, in January 2024, a caseworker summoned the Floras to a meeting.
They thought it was a standard check-in. When they arrived, they were introduced to a woman named Jennifer Dages, who started reading from a stack of legal papers.
“Do I need a lawyer?” Leslie remembers asking.
She said she was told she didn’t.
Leslie asked to look at the papers.
She said she was told she didn’t need to.
The document, reviewed by the Times, was a consent for a custody transfer. Leslie knew it would give her in-laws the ability to care for her children, she later said. But she didn’t understand that it would suspend her right to be a parent.
Once papers are signed, Hillsborough judges often approve custody transfers without speaking to a parent. From their vantage, parents have given consent.
The document waived Leslie’s right to be notified of hearings or paperwork in the case. It also noted her right to an attorney. But Leslie wouldn’t know that until months later. She said Dages kept all but the signature line covered with another sheet of paper and instructed her to sign.
Dages did not respond to questions about the case and whether she declined to let Leslie read the form.
Leslie said she wouldn’t have signed if she’d known the details.
“That’s insane,” she said. “No mother would do that.”
In its statement, the Children’s Network said parents “have the right to refuse” a custody transfer and can consult a lawyer at any time.
The agency confirmed it pays attorneys to represent relatives who take custody. Parents, it said, are given a brochure.
The pamphlet outlines the diversion team’s purpose and how it works. It doesn’t mention temporary custody transfers.
These transfers can work for some families, but if a brochure is all the agency relies on to protect parents’ rights, that’s insufficient, said Robert Latham, the associate director of the Children & Youth Law Clinic at the University of Miami.
The Children’s Network, he said, appears to disregard the power dynamics at play when a parent’s access to their child is under threat.
“That’s why we have due process protections in the court system. They’re not perfect, but at least it’s a very structured process where everybody gets a chance to say their side and a neutral party reviews it,” Latham said. “The way that this is implemented is not that.”
Thirteen parents echoed Leslie’s account of signing forms under pressure. Some said they inked papers between fits of sobbing while their children waited in the hallway.
Each said they felt they had no choice but to sign.
Multiple parents, including the Floras, said Dages presented herself as a lawyer. A note from a case manager in Leslie’s file calls Dages a “Children’s Network Attorney.”
Multiple parents believed Jennifer Dages, formerly Jennifer Mummert, was an attorney.
But Dages is not an attorney — she is a paralegal who assisted with custody transfers for the Children’s Network in Southwest Florida before following it to Hillsborough, where court records show she touched nine out of every 10 transfers. She discloses that she is not an attorney on her business website.
“If you’re not admitted to practice law in Florida, you can’t say that you’re a lawyer,” said Gary S. Lesser, former president of the Florida Bar and chair of its ethics committee. “Period.”
Dages also doesn’t work for the agency. She is paid by attorneys whom the Network tapped to represent Leslie’s in-laws.
Court records often used boilerplate language when describing parents’ alleged issues.
After their meeting with Dages, Leslie and Joe settled into a house in Clearwater. They didn’t have a car, so to see the kids at Joe’s parents in Town ‘n’ Country, they sometimes rode e-bikes 18 miles across the bridge each way.
Leslie kept checking the court website for their case. Nothing appeared for another three months. Only then did she understand the extent of what she’d agreed to.
The scraps of information she was able to glean came in calls and visits with caseworkers, who told her and Joe to sign up for rehab classes. The couple got started but found the process confusing. Both had passed two drug screenings, their case manager noted at one point, but they refused other tests and missed appointments. Leslie said she didn’t understand why she needed rehab if she didn’t use drugs.
Leslie’s messages to the Children’s Network turned increasingly hostile, until she stopped communicating with them at all.
Leslie Flora stopped engaging with Children’s Network staff.
Stripped of support
Leslie and Joe weren’t the only ones confused about how to navigate the custody transfer. Carmen Flora, Joe’s mother, had struggled to get help from the Children’s Network since the night she’d raced to the Days Inn and, terrified, agreed to take her grandchildren on the spot.
Relatives who take in kids at the behest of the Children’s Network are sometimes themselves strapped for time and money.
Florida already offers a way for relatives to take immediate custody through the foster system. When removals are deemed necessary, the state is supposed to prioritize placing children with family members. Those relatives can then get money and other help by becoming licensed foster parents or signing up through a caregiving program.
Taking custody outside the formal system disqualifies them from that help. But relatives don’t always know that’s the case.
In Hillsborough, a grandmother took in five children while she had $27 in her bank account, according to a request she submitted for waived fees. More than a third of caregivers in custody transfer cases initiated by the Children’s Network were determined to be indigent after filing forms like these, a Times analysis found. An aunt took in two children with $40 in her account. A family friend who took in two toddlers while making $780 a week later sought child support from the mother.
Carmen Flora, 63, and her husband, Joe Flora IV, 62, had been living on about $32,000 a year from her work as an assistant at a day care and his disability payments. After bills, they typically had about $216 left each month.
The kids moved into a spare bedroom in their mobile home, splitting the space with a room divider. Each had a twin bed and a plastic set of drawers.
The first year, Joe Flora IV said he spent hours calling state and Children’s Network employees, looking for financial assistance.
Had the grandparents taken custody the formal way, they would have been entitled to approximately $1,300 a month for the first six months with the children. If they became licensed foster parents during that window — by passing home inspections and completing a training — they would get those payments until the kids were at least 18. Even if they didn’t, they could have gotten a smaller sum, about $550 a month for the two children.
Relatives who take custody through the side door don’t qualify for most financial assistance.
At the lowest end, the state would normally pay around $2,500 a year per kid in a relative’s care — and that’s just in support to those caregivers. That doesn’t include far greater costs for things like therapy, court fees and college tuition that children in the system are entitled to. Diverting kids through the side door, then, would save the state hundreds of thousands of dollars every year.
The Children’s Network touts its savings.
“By investing in families upfront, CNHC has also saved taxpayers millions of dollars in out-of-home care costs,” the agency’s website states.
But families involved in custody transfers say those savings come at their expense. Carmen and Joe Flora IV, at minimum, missed out on around $21,000 over nearly three years. Instead, they maxed out multiple credit cards.
Trivedi, the researcher in Baltimore, said hidden foster care leaves families without support.
“They don’t check in, they don’t provide the stipends that you would usually get, they don’t run the checks that they would usually do,” she said.
Carmen Flora thinks the agency intentionally rushed her into taking the kids.
“I think they did that on purpose because they don’t want to put any more kids in foster care,” she said. “So what they do is they scare grandparents into snatching the kids right away.”
Families strain as relatives are pitted against each other.
Before all this, the Floras had been able to share a meal. The kids attended the day care where their grandmother worked, and they spent some weekends with their Nana and Nano. Carmen and Joe Flora IV wanted to plan trips to the beach and fill the kids up with sugar before sending them home.
Now, the grandparents have become disciplinarians, and the adults don’t talk. After a series of nasty text exchanges, they’ve blocked each other’s numbers.
The grandkids “don’t trust us,” Joe Flora IV said.
“They’re confused,” Carmen Flora added. “It hurts them.”
About a year into the arrangement, Carmen Flora remembers, their caseworker from the Children’s Network said she wouldn’t be visiting anymore. She was closing the case.
The children, she told the grandparents, would likely be in their care until they turned 18.
No way out
Parents in the side-door system often don’t know how to get their kids back.
Interviews and records show several accounts in which parents felt they were scrambling in the dark. Sparse communication from the agency and its partners didn’t help.
Calls went unanswered, parents said. Case managers stopped reaching out. The Times identified 24 cases in which parents tried to reverse the transfer by going to court directly. Some submitted handwritten notes pleading for guidance.
Leslie filed at least three times asking for the return of her kids before the court acknowledged her request. “It has been a long road but my children’s best interest would (be) to be a family again,” she wrote on one form.
Another mother scrawled on a page of printer paper.
“I’m requesting my kids be placed back in my custody,” she wrote. “I’ve got income and housing, plus have completed all requested task required by DCF staff and whoever are a part of our case.”
Attorneys blocked hearings and reunification.
At times, attorneys paid by the Children’s Network actively blocked parents from getting their kids back.
Essence Wright is one such case.
Wright, who otherwise had a clean record, was arrested in 2023 after she punched her mother during an argument. Her baby was there, so child protective investigators got involved. Ultimately, Wright transferred custody to her mother.
“I preferred she be with my mom than in the system, thinking it would have been easier to get her back that way,” Wright said. “But that didn’t happen.”
After six weeks in jail, she sought treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. She found an apartment and got engaged to a fiance with whom she has two other children.
She hired her own attorney and went to court again and again, trying to undo the custody transfer. The process was slowed by attorneys representing Wright’s mother, who wanted to keep the child and said agency staff had instructed her to do so.
“I feel like I’m being punished,” Wright told the Times in late 2025, in tears.
A seven-hour hearing in family court brought the ordeal to a head this spring. Attorneys argued Wright was unfit to care for her daughter in part because she was living in transitional housing.
Like Wright’s, more than 200 case plans required parents to have stable income and housing for six months before they could try reversing the transfer. That’s an argument experts said wouldn’t hold up in dependency court, which doesn’t remove children based on poverty alone.
A judge ruled the girl, now 3, should go back to her mom. She cited strict requirements in state law for a custody transfer to exist without a parent’s consent.
Experts who reviewed records from six Hillsborough cases for the Times — including Wright’s — raised alarms about “sloppy lawyering” that they said put children’s safety at risk and created a legal labyrinth for parents.
Attorneys with the Children’s Network sometimes filed paperwork months after parents signed forms. In other cases, parents learned a custody transfer had never actually been granted, but their kids were kept from them anyway.
In one case, four kids were sent to live with their grandmother out of state, court records show. Five months later, their mother hired an attorney to reverse the arrangement, only to learn the transfer was never approved by a judge in the first place. Legally, she’d had custody the whole time. The mother told the Times the experience was traumatizing. The legal fees and cost of flights to get her children home drained her.
The Times found other cases in which kids stayed with parents even after the Children’s Network asserted they were unsafe at home. Relatives had given the kids back without reversing the transfer or notifying case managers. The Children’s Network never followed up.
If child safety is truly a concern, custody transfers are not the right course, said Robin Rosenberg, deputy director of Florida’s Children First, a nonprofit advocacy group.
“If the child welfare provider is using the temporary custody tool to manage physical access to the child,” Rosenberg told the Times, then errors like these are “scary.”
Even when parents felt the transfer was best for their family, they struggled to get clear instructions.
Anna Campbell’s parents took care of her son while she got treatment for alcohol use. Knowing he was with people who love him gave her peace of mind.
“I don’t know if I would have been able to get well if that wasn’t in place,” she said.
Campbell’s case plan included rehab, parenting classes and six months of clean blood tests. After she was sober for a year, she said she called and emailed trying to arrange visitation and start reversing the transfer. She went weeks with no answer.
“We’re talking about a child,” she said, “not, like, missing luggage.”
Campbell took her son back, believing the case was resolved. Only after she relapsed and child welfare investigators visited again did she learn it wasn’t: She still didn’t have custody. Her son went back to his grandparents, and she restarted the process. She’s maintained her sobriety for another year but has once again strained to get clear information.
It took four weeks of repeated calls to get the referral form she needed for her most recent blood test, she told the Times. She also has to pay for each test herself — something she knows is difficult for most parents.
“I wish there was an advocate for me, for the mom,” she said.
That parents have such a hard time reversing custody arrangements is evidence the process warrants more guardrails, said Octavia Brown, an attorney who has represented both parents and the state over two decades in Florida’s child welfare system.
“It is analogous to a removal — it is almost analogous to a termination of parental rights,” she said. “I’m not sure how they can do that legally.”
The quiet casualties
At 15, Jaden Flora had his doubts when the investigator told him the arrangement would be temporary. He’d had friends who spent half their lives away from their parents in foster care. He didn’t trust case managers.
He packed a bag at the hotel and got into his grandmother’s car. Looking back, that night feels like the end of his childhood.
“My body just flew away from me,” he said. “It hurt.”
In the weeks before, investigators had pulled him out of class to ask about his parents’ drug use. He told them the truth: He didn’t know. His sister said the same. It felt like caseworkers were more interested in cornering his family, he said, than in making sure that he and his sister were in a loving home.
“They never really cared about how I felt,” Jaden said.
Three years later, he clings to a slideshow of memories: having friends over, celebrating birthdays, hanging at a backyard picnic table decorated with his family’s painted handprints.
But the separation has taken a toll. He sees his parents, exhausted and crazed. He sees his grandparents, uneasy with their role. He sees his sister, now a preteen and the spitting image of his mother, retreating into separation anxiety.
In the end, for him, it all seems to have been for nothing.
Two days after his 18th birthday, Jaden shoved T-shirts and shorts into garbage bags. He’d been packing for weeks, stacking boxes in the corners.
On a Sunday in April, after the usual two-hour visit with their parents, his sister participated in the ritual of hugging them goodbye. Then she returned to their shared bedroom, now half-empty.
Jaden felt a pang of guilt leaving her behind, but this time, he was going home with his parents.
For him, at least, the state no longer had a say.
• • •
Lauren Peace and Teghan Simonton reported this story while participating in the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s 2025 Data Fellowship, which provided training, mentoring, and funding to support this project. They also were participants in the Center’s engagement initiative.
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