Editor’s Note:
This op ed is published anonymously to protect the safety and privacy of the parent and children involved. The account reflects the lived experience of a Dale County family and is shared in the public interest to highlight systemic concerns raised by multiple parents across Alabama.

I am writing as a mother.

I am also writing anonymously, because the system I am describing has a long memory and little tolerance for parents who speak openly about how their children were taken.

In Dale County, Alabama, the Department of Human Resources did not approach my family with care or clarity. They arrived with authority and urgency. They spoke in warnings. They implied consequences. And when hesitation was met, law enforcement was brought into the space.

This is how my children were removed.

There was no moment where I was shown clear evidence that my children were in immediate danger. There was no calm explanation of rights or process. What I was given was fear. Fear of arrest. Fear of losing my children permanently. Fear that any question or pause would be seen as defiance.

In that moment, consent was not real. Compliance was forced.

The presence of police did not make the situation safer. It made it heavier. Louder. Final. It turned a mother into a subject and my home into a place of enforcement rather than care.

Afterward came confusion. Instructions changed. Timelines shifted. Promises were spoken and then quietly withdrawn. I was told cooperation would lead to reunification, yet every step seemed to move my children further away. What was presented as a temporary intervention became an open ended separation with no clear path home.

This experience is not isolated to one county. Other mothers across Alabama describe the same pattern. Pressure. Threats. Escalation through police presence. Silence once compliance is achieved. The system moves on, while families remain suspended in uncertainty.

A system entrusted with children should not rely on intimidation. A system that believes in its own integrity should not need threats to function. And a process that truly prioritizes the best interests of children would not begin by terrorizing the people who love them most.

I am not writing this to assign blame to one individual or one office. I am writing because fear has become a tool, and tools shape outcomes. When fear is used first, trust is destroyed. When trust is gone, families fracture in ways that do not easily heal.

I remain anonymous to protect my children and myself. But anonymity does not make this experience less real. It does not erase the nights of silence, the unanswered questions, or the ache of being separated from the children I carried, raised, and protected.

Parents should not have to choose between their rights and their children. And no mother should have to live with the knowledge that fear, not facts, was what opened the door for the state to step inside her family.