For Annette Smith, one final indignity remained for her client, a 17-year-old foster youth in Eugene, Oregon, who died by suicide last year: At the funeral home viewing, he was clad in a hospital gown.

“He was failed even in the end,” said Smith, a public defender. “It’s so easy for these kids to be unseen and unheard.”

Having been in foster care for all but about two years of his life, Jacob Doriety had shuttled through more than 50 placements, a hospitalization after a previous suicide attempt, and, finally, a hotel room.

Despite no one believing that hotels provide the kind of safe and supportive setting for foster youth with mental health issues, across the country, they continue to be sent there — as was Kanaiyah Ward, a 16-year-old girl who died of an intentional overdose of a common antihistamine in a Residence Inn in Baltimore on Sept. 22.

“It’s a systemic problem. It’s a systemic failure,” said Robert Basler, an associate vice-president of Arrow Child & Family Ministries, which provides foster care services in Maryland and Texas. “You don’t have enough resources. There are not enough, or we wouldn’t be in this place.”

‘Not willing to let it go’

The practice of using hotels, once sporadic, grew more common around 10 years ago and surged during the COVID pandemic when fewer foster homes were willing to take in youth and residential treatment facilities restricted admissions.

Whether in the wake of tragic events or to settle lawsuits that advocates have filed against child welfare agencies, Maryland and other states have been working to reduce the use of hotels and address what they say is their root cause — the lack of sufficient placements for youth with the most challenging needs.

Basler is a member of a workgroup created by the Maryland General Assembly and charged with studying the issue of youth staying in hotels, hospitals and even social service agency buildings rather than in a foster home or treatment facility. The group’s work had been delayed by the amount of time it took to vet and seat its members, and they met for the first time on Oct. 2, a day after its final report and recommendations were initially due.

As Kanaiyah’s death casts even more urgency on their work, the workgroup — which includes advocates, treatment providers and representatives of state agencies and medical and social worker associations — hopes to complete an interim report by March and a final one by April, said Ted Gallo, executive director of the Maryland State Council on Child Abuse and Neglect, an advisory body.

“We need to remain invested long-term,” Gallo said. “We’ve got a dedicated group that’s very familiar with this problem, and they’re not willing to let it go.”

The group will be looking at current resources available in the state as well as what other states are doing, he said.

‘Less bad than hotels’

And indeed, multiple states have wrestled with the issue.

In Washington state, two short-term homes, with three or four bedrooms and supervised by child welfare staff, house teenagers who otherwise might be sent to hotels. The kids tend to like the homes, where they share meals and, unlike in other facilities, are allowed to use their cellphones, said Jenny Heddin, deputy secretary and chief of staff of Washington’s Department of Children, Youth & Families.

Still, she said they remain a temporary measure, “sort of a harm reduction approach,” until they can get the youth in a more permanent placement.

“They are less bad than hotels,” Heddin said, “but they’re still not great, right?”

The agency is undergoing reform as part of a 2022 settlement of a suit by advocates who alleged it had failed to provide safe and stable placements for foster youth. According to news reports, one child even spent the night in a car for lack of an appropriate placement.

Jean Strout, senior attorney with the National Center for Youth Law, one of the groups that sued the department, said even before the settlement, the judge in the case ordered the agency to stop housing children in offices, hotels and other unlicensed settings.

“It was not a big battle,” she said. “Where things get more nuanced is, what do you do instead?”

She said she hopes the focus can shift to providing more individualized solutions for the hard-to-place youth and addressing the underlying issues with their families that led to them being removed in the first place.

“You can’t just keep growing the foster system and trying to find more foster families,” Strout said.

Traumatized children

She and other advocates say states need to look at more creative ways of caring for the kinds of youth who tend to end up in hotels — they are generally older, for example, and have physical and mental health needs beyond what a typical foster home can provide.

A child welfare research group, Chapin Hall, which has studied Maryland’s foster care system, said a sampling of the youth who stayed in hotels, offices or hospitals found that all of them had attention deficit or impulse control problems. Nearly all suffered from depression or a mood disorder, and almost 60% of them were deemed at risk of suicide, the researchers found.

“We’re dealing with traumatized children who are acting like traumatized children,” Gallo said.

The Chapin Hall report is just one of many to document failings of the child welfare system, but also the heartbreaking level of needs it faced.

“[The child] was shot … and is paralyzed from his waist down,” a case reviewer wrote of one youth, going on to note that his “mother is deceased, and his father is incarcerated.”

Such needs are beyond what the foster system was initially designed to handle, said Richard P. Barth, a professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, School of Social Work.

“The child welfare system is for protecting children from their parents,” said Barth, who has published widely on foster care. “What happened in many cases was the mental health system let these kids float over to the child welfare system.”

Barth said the trend away from group facilities in favor of a home setting doesn’t work for all foster youth who need more than a bed to sleep in.

“Kids get hospitalized, birth or foster parents don’t want to pick them up because they’re concerned about their safety, so the child welfare system ends up overseeing these cases and trying to find homes for them,” he said. “That’s why we end up with hotels.”

A ‘constellation’ of kids

The search for placements for high-need foster youth has led some states to try a model pioneered by the Mockingbird Society in Washington State, in which foster homes are clustered together in a “constellation.” They support one another, particularly in caring for youth with behavioral health needs. The homes are grouped around a “hub” home, typically an experienced foster care provider that the other families can turn to, especially if they need respite, and they gather frequently.

KVC Kansas, a behavioral health care system, launched two constellations, each with a capacity of 10 homes, to fill a gaping need for foster homes that could provide higher-level, therapeutic care.

“We had a lot of homes that were on the cusp of being able to provide higher care,” said Angela Hedrick, KVC Kansas vice president. “We felt that if they had that additional network of support amongst other foster families, who know what it’s like to do that, they might be able to take that extra step and provide that care.”

Hedrick said the networks have worked so well, KVC hopes to add additional ones. According to the Mockingbird Society, a 25-year-old advocacy organization, five child welfare agencies operate in the U.S. with constellations, and the concept has proved particularly popular abroad, with networks operating in countries including the United Kingdom, Australia and Japan.

Those who work in child welfare say the village concept is an apt one when it comes to the needs of foster children.

“We can’t do this by ourselves,” Heddin said. “We really require other state agencies and systems to step up. So if a young person needs drug treatment…. or if they need residential care of some kind, they should be able to get that.”

If you or someone you know needs help, the national suicide and crisis lifeline in the U.S. is available by calling or texting 988.

Have a news tip? Contact Jean Marbella at jmarbella@baltsun.com, 410-332-6060, or @jeanmarbella.bsky.social.

By TRAVIS LOLLER, Associated Press

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — A federal judge in Tennessee on Monday warned of possible sanctions against top Trump administration officials if they continue to make inflammatory statements about Kilmar Abrego Garcia that could prejudice his coming trial.

U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw filed an order late on Monday instructing local prosecutors in Nashville to provide a copy of his opinion to all Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security employees, including Attorney General Pam Bondi and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem.

“Government employees have made extrajudicial statements that are troubling, especially where many of them are exaggerated if not simply inaccurate,” Crenshaw writes.

He lists a number of examples of prohibited statements as outlined in the local rules for the U.S. District Court of Middle Tennessee. They include any statements about the “character, credibility, reputation, or criminal record of a party” and “any opinion as to the accused’s guilt or innocence.”

“DOJ and DHS employees who fail to comply with the requirement to refrain from making any statement that ‘will have a substantial likelihood of materially prejudicing’ this criminal prosecution may be subject to sanctions,” his order reads.

Earlier this year, Abrego Garcia’s mistaken deportation to El Salvador, where he was held in a notoriously brutal prison despite having no criminal record, helped galvanize opposition to President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown. Facing mounting public pressure and a court order, the Trump administration brought him back to the U.S. in June, but only after issuing an arrest warrant on human smuggling charges in Tennessee. Abrego Garcia has pleaded not guilty to those charges and asked Crenshaw to dismiss them.

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Meanwhile, Trump administration officials have waged a relentless public relations campaign against Abrego Garcia, repeatedly referring to him as a member of the MS-13 gang and even implicating him in a murder. Crenshaw’s opinion cites statements from several top officials, including Bondi and Noem, as potentially damaging to Abrego Garcia’s right to a fair trial. He also admonishes Abrego Garcia’s defense attorneys for publicly disclosing details of plea agreement negotiations.

Abrego Garcia has an American wife and child and has lived in Maryland for years, but he immigrated to the U.S. illegally from El Salvador as a teenager. In 2019, an immigration judge granted him protection from being deported back to his home country, finding he had a well-founded fear of violence there from a gang that targeted his family.

Since his return to the U.S. in June, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has announced plans to deport him to a series of African countries, most recently Liberia.

By CLAIRE GALOFARO

CHICAGO (AP) — The 2-year-old boy was so frightened, he stuttered.

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“Mommy, mommy, mommy,” he repeated, clinging to her.

His mother, Molly Kucich, had been grocery shopping when her husband called, panicking. She heard “immigration raid.” Then: “tear gas.”

She abandoned her grocery cart and drove as fast as she could to her toddler and his 14-month-old brother, who, on that warm October Friday, were among the hundreds of Chicago children caught suddenly in the turmoil of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.

Parents, teachers and caregivers have been grappling ever since with how to explain to children what they’d seen: how much to tell them so they know enough to stay safe, but not too much to rob them of their childhood. A toddler shouldn’t know what a tear gas canister is, Kucich said.

“I don’t know how to explain this to my kids.”

Children were playing on the monkey bars outside Funston Elementary School just before noon on Oct. 3 when a white SUV rolled down their street in Logan Square, a historically Hispanic neighborhood that’s been steadily gentrifying for years. Cars followed behind it, drivers laying on their horns to alert neighbors that these were federal agents. A scooter pulled in front of the SUV, trying to block it in. There were no mass protests; some teachers walking to lunch initially didn’t realize what was happening.

Suddenly, tear gas canisters flew from the window of the SUV.

The cloud of gas rose, first white, then green, and the street exploded into pandemonium. Some people ran. Others shouted at agents to leave. Sirens screamed toward them. Parents blew through stop signs and drove on curbs to reach their children.

Kucich’s son was a half-block away, having lunch in the window of Luna y Cielo Play Cafe, where children learn Spanish as they play with pretend food and toy cars. His nanny takes him there most days. He made his best friends at the cafe, and his little brother took his first steps there.

Owner Vanessa Aguirre-Ávalos ran outside to see what was happening, as the children’s nannies hustled them to a back room. Aguirre-Ávalos is a citizen; the nannies, Hispanic grandmothers, are citizens or are legally allowed to work in the U.S.

Still, they were terrified. One begged Aguirre-Ávalos: If they take me, please make sure the children get home safe.

The SUV eventually drove away, the cloud of smoke cleared, and parents arrived. “What’s happening?” a girl cried, over and over.

Kucich’s son, who is white, now worries about his nanny, a U.S. citizen from Guatemala. He asks where she is and when she’s coming. He jumps at the sound of sirens. His mother called their pediatrician for a therapist referral.

The brick buildings of Funston Elementary School, left, stand in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood, with downtown Chicago in the background, Wednesday, Oct. 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)

Andrea Soria, whose daughter plays at Luna y Cielo, overheard her 6-year-old whisper to her dolls: “We have to be good or ICE will get us,” referring to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“These kids are traumatized,” Aguirre-Ávalos said. “Even if ICE stops doing what they’re doing right now, people are going to be traumatized. The damage is already done.”

‘I had to act like nothing was wrong’

It was a beautiful Friday, so fifth grade teacher Liza Oliva-Perez walked to the grocery store across the street for lunch.

She noticed a helicopter circling, then the SUV and its tail of honking cars.

That morning, another teacher gave her a whistle, with instructions to blow it if immigration agents were in the neighborhood.

Oliva-Perez fumbled the whistle to her lips. Just then, the SUV’s window rolled down and she saw a masked man inside throw a tear gas canister.

“I couldn’t fathom that was happening,” said Oliva-Perez. Then he threw another, this time in her direction.

The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that Border Patrol agents were “impeded by protesters” during a targeted enforcement operation in which one man was arrested.

The Chicago crackdown, dubbed “Operation Midway Blitz,” began in early September. Masked, armed agents in unmarked trucks patrol neighborhoods, and residents have protested in ways big and small against what they see as their city under siege. Agents stormed an apartment complex by helicopter in the middle of the night. They’ve detained U.S. citizens, including elected officials. An agent shot and wounded a woman who allegedly used her car to box them in. Protesters have been tear-gassed and shot with pepper bullets. President Donald Trump wants to deploy the National Guard.

DHS wrote that its agents are being terrorized: “Our brave officers are facing a surge in increase in assaults against them, inducing sniper attacks, cars being used as weapons on them, and assaults by rioters. This violence against law enforcement must END. We will not be deterred by rioters and protesters in keeping America safe.”

A nanny keeps watch as children play in the window at Luna y Cielo Play Cafe, where they practice and learn Spanish through play, in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood, Wednesday, Oct. 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)

The statement said that in Logan Square, agents deployed tear gas along with pepper balls “after repeated vocal attempts to disperse the crowd.”

Oliva-Perez was feet away on the sidewalk and didn’t hear them say anything. Videos show cars and the scooter trying to block the SUV, and a few pedestrians heckling the officers.

Oliva-Perez ran toward the school, yelling at staff to get the children inside.

“It really shook me,” she said. “Here I am, a U.S. citizen, a teacher, and I got treated like a common criminal.”

She was shaking when she got to her classroom of 25 students, who wanted to know what just happened. All of them are Hispanic. She knows they are having agonizing conversations at home — who they’ll call if their parents disappear, where they’ll go. Oliva-Perez became a teacher six years ago, after her daughter died by suicide at 16 years old. She wanted to help kids feel loved and safe. She never had a harder time than on that afternoon.

“I had to act like nothing was wrong,” she said. “I don’t want them to be like, if Ms. Oliva is scared then I’m going to be scared too.”

She and the other teachers spent the afternoon telling the children that everything was fine. But each dreaded the bell at the end of the day. They’d have to lead the students outside, and they didn’t know what would be waiting: Masked men? More tear gas?

First grade teacher Maria Heavener spread the word in community group chats that the school needed help.

When the final bell rang, she walked her students outside. In every direction, neighbors lined the sidewalk, dozens of them. There were people who’d never considered themselves activists, or even particularly political, standing there, enraged, scanning the streets for unmarked SUVs and masked men. They signed up to come back every morning and afternoon.

“You don’t mess with the kids. You don’t go near the schools,” Heavener said. “Whatever your agenda is, that feels like it’s crossing a lot of lines.”

‘Our skin color defines us’

Two little boys walking by Evelyn Medina’s gift shop next door to the school gripped each other so tightly their fingers dug into each other’s hands.

“They were so scared,” said Medina, who cries when she thinks about how they looked leaving school that day. “It was really hard to see, imagining what’s going on in their little minds.”

Medina, a 43-year-old citizen, understands the fear these children face: She came to the U.S. from Mexico at age 8. As a child, she worried someone would take her parents away.

She noticed people picking up multiple children that day, for their friends and neighbors who were too afraid to leave their houses. One parent packed seven children into a minivan. A 13-year-old girl wept when she saw a neighbor there to get her. Her mother usually comes for her, but not that day.

When that girl got home, she told her mother she thought the house might be empty, that agents might have been there and taken her away.

Her mother does not have permanent legal status and asked that her name not be used out of fear of being targeted for deportation. Her greatest fear is being separated from her children.

This fear coursing through this community is no longer reserved for families lacking permanent legal status.

One mother, whose 12-year-old son was in the school that day, now jolts awake each morning at 4 a.m., her head pounding, her heart racing. She checks social media frequently for reports of people spotting Border Patrol or ICE: another tear gassing; another raid; a 15-year-boy, an American citizen, detained.

She and her son are citizens, but she asked that only her first name, Ava, be used because she’s scared that their citizenship won’t matter.

“Our skin color defines us,” she said.

Her son cries constantly, “I don’t want to lose my grandparents.”

He’s offered to get them groceries so they can stay inside. She’s struggling with how to balance letting him help without burdening him and without making him grow up too quickly.

“Losing them, it would forever break him apart,” she said. “His question is always: why? Why?

“I don’t know why.”

‘We’ll always be targeted’

Vanessa Aguirre-Ávalos keeps the door locked now at Luna y Cielo, and she wears her whistle like a necklace, always at the ready.

When she hears a car horn honk, she panics. Is it happening again?

That day, she ran in and out of her shop, bringing milk and vinegar to help people clean the tear gas and pepper residue from their faces. She coughed for two days.

A bus drops a passenger off, across the street from Funston Elementary School in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood, Tuesday, Oct. 14, 2025. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)

Her neighborhood has become a symbol for what happens when children get caught in the fray of aggressive, sometimes violent federal actions. Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, spoke outside of the school a few days later: “In order to educate children, we have to protect them. We have to create a safe and welcoming environment. That is who we are as educators. That is who educators have always been.”

Now, every utility pole is plastered with anti-ICE stickers and instructions for what to do if detained. “ICE TEAR GASSED THIS NEIGHBORHOOD,” reads one. “No one is safe unless we all are.”

Aguirre-Ávalos, who grew up in this neighborhood, was born in Texas to a mother from Mexico, and she’s considering moving there. It’s hard for her to imagine a future in Chicago or anywhere else the U.S. for her children, an 8-year-old son and 14-year-old daughter.

“They don’t want us here,” Aguirre-Ávalos said of her own government. “We’ll always be targeted.”

She opened Luna y Cielo two years ago to be a fun place for children to learn Spanish, to help the next generation learn to love the language. Her business is suffering now; she’s not sure she can make this month’s rent.

People are staying inside, their curtains drawn. Playgrounds are quiet. The vendor who sold ice cream on her corner doesn’t come out anymore. Everyone is scared.

She scheduled a guided journaling session with parents. She’s bringing in a Spanish-speaking therapist to talk to the nannies.

‘This is not living’

One of the nannies, who watches two young sisters, doesn’t wear pajamas to bed anymore. She sleeps in her clothes, unable to get a full night’s rest.

“This is not a life. This is not living,” she said.

She wakes up every morning by 4 a.m., and she drops to her knees to pray.

She is the grandmother of five and great-grandmother to two, and legally allowed to work in the U.S. She spoke on the condition that her name not be used because she worries about what could happen to her and her family, as well as the 2-year-old and 3-year-old she cares for.

A girl touches her grandmother’s hand inside Luna y Cielo Play Cafe where children learn and practice the Spanish language through play in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood, Wednesday, Oct. 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)

“If I’m walking with them and they grab me, what do I do?” she asked. “I can’t leave them alone.”

She has not been this afraid in 31 years, since she fled from El Salvador to escape war and violence.

“We already lived this war once,” said her friend, the nanny who looks after two brothers.

That nanny left Guatemala 33 years ago, also to escape war and the constant threat of danger.

She’s a U.S. citizen and always carries her passport now. She asked that she not be named because some of her relatives aren’t legal residents. She helps pay rent and buy groceries for a second family because they’re too afraid to go to work.

She’s scared that immigration agents could grab her when she has the boys. She didn’t want them to see her cry on Oct. 3. But once the boys were home, she got in her car and wept.

She drove to her church, lit a candle and prayed.

She asked God to protect all the immigrants, and all the children.

Associated Press reporter Sophia Tareen, photographer Rebecca Blackwell and videographer Laura Bargfeld contributed to this report.

The AP’s education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

A St. Paul man faces a federal felony charge for allegedly putting a $45,000 hit on U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi in a TikTok post.

Tyler Maxon Avalos, 29, is charged in U.S. District Court of Minnesota with making a threat with the intent to injure in connection with his alleged post, which included a caption that read, “WANTED: Pam Bondi / REWARD: 45,000 / DEAD OR ALIVE (Preferably Dead).”

It included a photo of Bondi with a sniper-scope red dot on her forehead. Under the photo, Avalos allegedly wrote: “cough cough / when they don’t serve us, then what?”

A TikiTok user from Detroit saw the post and reported it to the FBI National Threat Operations Center on Oct. 9.

Avalos’ TikTok page, which has since been deleted, included an anarchist FAQ book and the spelling of “wacko” with an anarchist symbol for the second letter, the complaint said.

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Avalos was arrested Oct. 16 and went before a judge Oct. 22. He was released the same day on a personal recognizance bond, with conditions including wearing a GPS monitoring device and staying off computers and the internet.

Avalos is “not guilty of any crime,” his attorney Daniel Gerdts said Tuesday, adding he has yet to be indicted by a grand jury, which in federal court is required for felonies to move forward. “Our hope is that the grand jury would reject this frivolous charge.”

When asked about the post, Gerdts said, “No reasonable person would consider that a true threat.”

Minnesota court records show Avalos has been on supervised probation since July 2022 after pleading guilty to felony harassment for assaulting his then-girlfriend in Eagan. In April 2016, he was convicted of misdemeanor domestic assault.