Paris Hilton urges congressional action against ‘criminal’ foster care facilities
Hotel heiress Paris Hilton testified on Capitol Hill Wednesday about the “criminal” treatment that she and other children endured in foster care facilities, following a watchdog report from the US Department of Health and Human Services that found states are failing to track the abuses.
“I am here to be the voice for the children whose voices can’t be heard,” Hilton told members of the House Ways and Means Committee. “The treatment these kids have had to endure is criminal.”
Almost 50,000 children live in foster care facilities, yet more than a dozen states don’t track when multiple abuses occur at the same one, the HHS inspector general’s office report found.
“[M]any states did not have the information they would need to identify patterns of maltreatment in residential facilities,” the document says.
At least 32 states informed the inspector general’s office that they do not record abuses in facilities that are run outside of their borders — even when operated through contracts with companies that they also do business with.
The report follows a Senate Finance Committee probe in June that confirmed children are subjected to abuse in foster care facilities that are operated by a handful of large, for-profit companies and receive US taxpayer funding.
“When I was 16 years old, I was ripped from my bed in the middle of the night and transported across state lines to the first of four youth residential treatment facilities,” Hilton said in her opening remarks.
“These programs promised healing, growth and support — but instead did not allow me to speak, move freely or even look out a window for two years,” she went on.
“I was force-fed medications and sexually abused by the staff. I was violently restrained and dragged down hallways, stripped naked and thrown into solitary confinement,” Hilton added.
“My parents were completely deceived, lied to and manipulated by this for-profit industry about the inhumane treatment I was experiencing,” she said. “So, can you only imagine the experience for youth who are placed by the state and don’t have people regularly checking in on them?”
Taxpayers spend billions of dollars on foster care for thousands of children around the country. Some are placed with families in homes or with their relatives.
The most expensive care, which has recently come under federal scrutiny, places children in residential treatment facilities that cost hundreds of dollars a day or more.
Often, the facilities deal with children who have medical or behavioral needs.
In 2020, for example, 16-year-old Cornelius Fredericks died in a Michigan center after staffers physically restrained him for 12 minutes as punishment for throwing food. Michigan overhauled its care system, prohibiting the facilities from restraining children face down, like Fredericks was.
That same year, a Philadelphia Inquirer report revealed more than 40 children were abused at facilities across Pennsylvania.
The HHS IG recommended that the agency should help states track abuses at facilities, as well as ownership information, and create a location for states to share information about the problems occurring.
“We found that many states lacked important information that could support enhanced oversight of residential facilities for children,” its report said.
HHS said it agreed with the recommendation, but it would not require states to gather such information.
Hilton, who has heavily lobbied state and federal lawmakers in recent years for reform of foster care and other youth treatment facilities, told lawmakers that she shared space “with foster and adopted youth” who gave heart-rending testimony about how they “feel like they were forgotten.”
“I will not stop until America’s youth is safe,” she vowed to the Ways and Means panel members.
