There are moments in this fight when the truth no longer hides behind fine print. Last week, Baldwin County attorney and minister Yancey Burnett stood before the Baldwin County Commission and said what so many families already know. The system is not just broken. It is incentivized to stay that way.
Burnett, a seasoned attorney with thirty-five-years of experience, accused Alabama DHR of operating under what he called “perverse incentives.” Under Title IV of the Social Security Act, the State receives federal funding for every child in DHR custody. In simple terms, the more children taken, the more money flows.
“In other words, it gives them an incentive to snatch a kid when otherwise you would not,” Burnett said.
His words cut through the silence that has protected this machinery for decades. Just last week, Burnett said he personally secured the return of nine children to their families. Nine children who, by DHR’s own measure, should have never been taken. Burnett says he wins more than 85 percent of his cases in Baldwin County, and that number alone tells a story of systemic overreach.
“How can that be?” he asked. “If DHR is right, my winning percentage should be zero.”
Behind those statistics are living, breathing families. Mothers who are being trampled under the weight of government power. Fathers who are erased from the story before they ever get a chance to fight for their own flesh and blood. Grandparents, aunts, and uncles who are told they are not good enough to care for their own kin, their own blood. The very people who bring life into this world are being stripped of their place in it.
One of Burnett’s clients, Jimmy Fuson, stood before the same commission and pleaded for his daughter. Fuson, the founder of the well-known Facebook group titled “Bringing Home Billyana,” said DHR took his daughter from her mother and never gave him the chance to step in. His story is not rare. It is the quiet chorus of countless families across Alabama, silenced under the weight of bureaucratic control and federal dollars.
For his courage, we applaud Mr. Burnett. He is a rare gem in a legal landscape where too many turn a blind eye to this system’s destruction. Many lawyers will not stand against this machine, a machine operated by men and women who, day after day, month after month, and year after year, choose family destruction over reunification. They boast a 64 percent increase in adoptions across Alabama, yet remain silent on the reunification of families torn apart by their own hands.
This is the truth too many lawmakers avoid because confronting it means confronting complicity. Title IV funding may have been designed to help, but in Alabama and all across this country, it appears to have become a financial trap, a machine that profits when families fall apart.
Through the cracks, people like Burnett are fighting back. Ministers, attorneys, parents, and citizens are standing up to a system that has been both judge and jury for far too long.
According to 1819news, Alabama DHR did not respond to media inquiries. But silence has never meant innocence. It has only ever meant comfort in power.
If the price of a child is now measured in federal dollars, then we have traded compassion for currency. We have replaced protection with procurement. And if that truth makes the system uneasy, it should.
Families deserve better than an agency that measures success by the number of children it removes.
Because as Burnett said, and as this movement continues to prove, when the incentive is removal, justice is no longer the goal. And if justice is no longer the goal, then silence can no longer be our response.
