“CAN YOU TELL the court a little bit about what she was like as a baby?”
It was December 2018, and Robyn Bradshaw sat on the witness stand in the Hennepin County Juvenile Justice Center in Minneapolis, fighting for custody of her granddaughter. The night before, Bradshaw had attended a support ceremony with other members of her tribe, the White Earth Band of Ojibwa, to give her strength through the hearing. But as she answered questions from her lawyer, Bradshaw’s breath was short and her heart raced. The face of her granddaughter, a quick-witted, energetic 7-year-old with big brown eyes and thick black curls, flashed in her mind. So, too, did the thought that had resurfaced countless times over the year: I cannot lose her again.
The girl, who goes by P.S. in court records, was born on a summer day in 2011. P.S. and her mother, Suzanne, moved in with Bradshaw, who cared for the baby while Suzanne worked as a bus driver and bank teller. P.S. turned into a lively toddler who shrieked as she bounced in the crib and chased her grandmother around the kitchen. She loved to swim and play with her cousins who lived nearby. For more than three years, according to court documents Bradshaw later filed, “P.S. was raised in a loving and stable home with Ms. Bradshaw and P.S.’s mother as active, full-time caregivers.”
Everything changed in 2014, when Suzanne plummeted into drug addiction. Without her daughter’s income, Bradshaw struggled to pay rent, and the family was evicted. Bradshaw and P.S. crashed with friends, and then with a cousin. At one point, they were turned away from a shelter because Bradshaw couldn’t prove that she was P.S.’s biological grandmother. As Bradshaw looked for stable housing, she asked P.S.’s father to temporarily care for the 3-year-old. But things went from bad to worse: One August morning, Bradshaw received a call from Suzanne, who was being held in jail. She and P.S.’s father had been arrested on drug charges, and P.S. had been taken into state custody. Bradshaw immediately called the county to ask when she could pick up her granddaughter.
It is easy to imagine an outcome where Bradshaw brought P.S. home and went on to raise her, possibly with some governmental assistance. This would line up with state and federal guidance, which both recommend that children remain with relatives unless those family members pose an immediate safety risk. Bradshaw had additional legal force on her side: the Indian Child Welfare Act, the landmark 1978 legislation aimed at keeping Native families and communities intact. ICWA adds guardrails at every step of a child welfare case, raising the standards needed to remove a child and mandating that, when Native children are removed, states make proactive efforts to place the children with other family or members of the same tribe.
Instead, the county argued that P.S. couldn’t stay with her grandmother because Bradshaw had a 15-year-old felony conviction for receipt of stolen property. Plus, Bradshaw was flagged for having been involved with Child Protective Services before, when Suzanne was 16. For the next two years, P.S. was placed in six different homes. In the summer of 2016, she landed in the home of a couple named Danielle and Jason Clifford, who wanted to adopt her.
The subsequent custody battle for P.S.—with Bradshaw on one side, and the Cliffords on the other—is one of three lawsuits that now form the basis of the Supreme Court case known as . In all three cases, non-Native foster parents wanted to adopt
