FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE March 12, 2026
When Oregon’s Child Welfare System Fails Its Most Vulnerable — Justice for Kids® Steps In to Fight for the Children and Families Left Behind
Nationally Acclaimed Child Welfare Law Firm Opens Portland Office, Bringing Aggressive Legal Advocacy for Foster Care Abuse, Systemic Neglect, and the Adoptive Families Oregon’s Agencies Have Left Without Answers or Support
PORTLAND, Ore. — Imagine adopting a child — opening your home, your heart, and your family — only to discover that the agency that placed that child with you knew things they never told you. They knew about a diagnosis that would require intensive, specialized treatment. They knew about a history of sexual aggression that put other children in your home at risk. They knew about severe psychiatric conditions, deep trauma responses, and behavioral patterns that no family could manage without preparation, training, and meaningful support. They knew — and they said nothing.
This is not a rare scenario. Across Oregon, adoptive families have lived this experience. Foster parents have faced it. Kinship caregivers have been blindsided by it. And in nearly every case, the agency that withheld that information — whether the Oregon Department of Human Services or a private foster care organization — faces no immediate consequence while the family is left to navigate a crisis alone.
That is one of the injustices that Justice for Kids®, a division of Kelley Kronenberg, has come to Oregon to confront. The firm — one of the only law practices in the country devoted exclusively to children harmed by government care systems — has opened a Portland office under the leadership of nationally recognized child welfare advocate Howard M. Talenfeld and Oregon-licensed trial attorney Justin Grosz. Justice for Kids® arrives as an established Oregon child foster care abuse law firm with a mission that is both straightforward and urgent: hold Oregon’s child welfare systems accountable for the children and families they have failed.
Adoption in Oregon: The Promise That Agencies Too Often Break
Adoption is supposed to represent a new beginning. For many children who have spent years cycling through Oregon’s foster care system — moving from home to home, accumulating losses and traumas — adoption is the first real chance at permanency, stability, and belonging. For adoptive families, it is a profound commitment rooted in love and the belief that they can provide what a child needs to heal and grow.
What makes that commitment possible is trust. Families trust that the agencies placing children with them will be honest about who those children are, what they have been through, and what they will need going forward. That trust is not merely moral — it is legal. Oregon law and federal child welfare standards impose clear obligations on agencies to disclose material information about a child’s background, history, diagnoses, and known behavioral patterns before an adoption is finalized.
Too many Oregon agencies have broken that trust. And when they do, the consequences fall entirely on the family — and on the child.
As an experienced adoption disclosure negligence law firm, Justice for Kids® has worked with families across the country who were placed in exactly this position. The patterns are consistent and heartbreaking. A family adopts a child from ODHS or a private Oregon foster care organization. Within weeks or months, the child exhibits behaviors the family was completely unprepared for — violent outbursts, sexual aggression toward younger siblings, complete inability to form attachments, self-harm, or acute psychiatric crises requiring emergency hospitalization. The family reaches back out to the agency. And only then, in fragments, do they begin to understand what the agency already knew.
Perhaps the child had been diagnosed with reactive attachment disorder years before the adoption was finalized. Perhaps there were documented incidents of sexual aggression in prior placements. Perhaps the child had been prescribed psychiatric medications for conditions that were never mentioned in the pre-adoption disclosure. Perhaps prior foster families had reported serious concerns that were noted in the child’s file — a file the adoptive family was never given full access to, and that the agency never summarized honestly.
In some cases, the withholding was deliberate — agencies eager to close a case, meet placement targets, or avoid the complexity of disclosing difficult information. In others, it was negligent — the result of poor record-keeping, inadequate communication between caseworkers, or a systemic failure to treat pre-adoption disclosure as the critical legal obligation it is. Whether deliberate or negligent, the outcome is the same: a family placed in an impossible situation, a child who did not receive the specialized care they needed from the start, and a placement that may ultimately disrupt — causing yet another devastating loss for a child who has already endured too many.
Justice for Kids® fights to prevent that outcome wherever possible, and to obtain justice when it has already occurred. The firm pursues claims for negligent and fraudulent misrepresentation, fights for substantially increased adoption subsidies, and works to secure the financial resources that families need to access intensive treatment, residential stabilization, therapeutic interventions, and the professional support that can make the difference between a family that stays together and one that falls apart.
The Broader Crisis: Oregon’s Foster Care System and the Children It Has Harmed
Adoption disclosure failures do not exist in isolation. They are one manifestation of a broader, systemic dysfunction inside Oregon’s child welfare system — a system that has been operating in crisis for years and that continues to harm children despite years of public promises, legal settlements, and reform initiatives.
Oregon typically has between 5,000 and 6,000 children in foster care at any given time. Tens of thousands more cycle through the Oregon Department of Human Services every year. These children are among the most vulnerable in the state — most have experienced abuse, neglect, or family instability before they ever enter care. They arrive in the system already carrying wounds that demand careful, consistent, and skilled attention.
What they too often receive instead is a system stretched beyond its capacity. Caseworkers managing caseloads far beyond what any person can safely handle. A chronic shortage of qualified foster homes that forces ODHS into placement decisions driven by availability rather than appropriateness. Children with complex behavioral health needs placed with caregivers who have neither the training nor the support to meet those needs. Children separated from siblings, moved away from communities, and disconnected from the schools, therapists, and relationships that represent their only source of stability.
And in the most serious cases documented in Oregon’s own court records and oversight reports — children placed in settings where they face physical abuse, sexual exploitation, dangerous institutional practices, and the kind of cumulative harm that changes the trajectory of a life.
As a dedicated Portland child abuse law firm, Justice for Kids® approaches Oregon’s foster care crisis with a clear-eyed understanding of how these systemic failures translate into individual harm. The firm does not accept that these outcomes are inevitable. It does not accept that overwhelmed agencies should be shielded from accountability because their failures are widespread. The very fact that failures are systemic means the harm done to children is also widespread — and that the legal and moral obligation to address it is correspondingly urgent.
Children who have suffered physical abuse inside foster homes — at the hands of caregivers who were inadequately vetted, inadequately supervised, and whose prior concerning behavior was ignored — have claims that Justice for Kids® knows how to build and pursue. Children who were placed in group homes or residential treatment programs where they were subjected to improper restraints, peer-on-peer violence, overmedication, or staff abuse have claims the firm is prepared to investigate and litigate. Children whose disabilities were ignored, whose IEPs were violated, and whose need for specialized services went unmet while they languished in placements that were fundamentally wrong for them have claims the firm’s attorneys are equipped to advance.
Neglect, Instability, and the Children Who Fall Through the Cracks
Among the most persistent failures documented inside Oregon’s child welfare system is the harm caused not by a single dramatic incident but by chronic, grinding neglect — the slow accumulation of inadequate supervision, inconsistent placement, missed services, and institutional indifference that characterizes too many foster children’s experience.
As an established Portland Oregon child neglect law firm, Justice for Kids® understands that neglect cases are often harder to see than abuse cases, but no less devastating in their impact. A child who has been moved through seven placements in two years has not been hit. But she has been profoundly harmed — by the repeated rupture of attachments, the inability to form trusting relationships, the message repeated over and over that she is not worth keeping. A child whose mental health needs were documented and then ignored for eighteen months has not been punched. But he has been denied treatment during a critical developmental window, and the consequences of that denial may follow him for decades.
Oregon’s oversight reports have documented these patterns in detail: high caseworker turnover that leaves children without consistent advocates, placement disruptions that are more frequent than any child welfare standard recommends, inadequate mental health screening and services, and a system so focused on managing crises that it rarely has the capacity to provide the kind of sustained, thoughtful case management that children actually need to heal.
Justice for Kids® holds ODHS accountable for these failures. The firm investigates placement decisions, reviews case files, consults with child welfare experts, and builds legal arguments that connect ODHS’s systemic failures to the specific harms that specific children have suffered. The goal is not only compensation for the child — though that matters enormously — but accountability that creates pressure for the systemic change that Oregon’s foster children have waited far too long for.
For Children with Disabilities: A System That Consistently Falls Short
Children with disabilities in Oregon’s foster care system face a unique and compounding set of challenges. The same placement shortages and resource constraints that harm all foster children fall with particular force on children who need specialized care, consistent therapeutic support, and placement with caregivers who have specific training.
When ODHS places a child with autism, an intellectual disability, or a severe psychiatric condition in a home or facility that cannot meet that child’s needs, the harm is often swift and serious. Behavioral crises escalate without proper intervention. Medical routines are disrupted. Therapeutic progress is reversed. In some cases, children are placed in unnecessarily restrictive settings — institutions, psychiatric hospitals, or residential programs — not because those settings are clinically appropriate but because ODHS has nowhere else to put them.
As a foster care child neglect law firm with specific experience in disability-related child welfare matters, Justice for Kids® pursues claims rooted in both state and federal law when ODHS fails children with disabilities. The firm evaluates how the agency identified and documented the child’s needs, what placement options were considered, what services were ordered versus what services were actually delivered, and what oversight ODHS exercised as conditions in the placement developed.
The Attorneys Who Will Fight for Oregon’s Children
Justice for Kids®’ Oregon practice is built around two attorneys whose credentials, commitment, and combined experience make them exactly the right people to take on Oregon’s most complex and consequential child welfare cases.
Howard M. Talenfeld founded Justice for Kids® with a simple conviction: that children harmed by government systems deserve the same skilled, tenacious legal advocacy available to any other injury victim — and in many ways, they deserve more, because they had no choice about being placed in the system that failed them. Talenfeld has spent decades building and leading one of the country’s most effective child welfare law practices, handling landmark litigation, major class actions, and high-stakes individual cases that have resulted in substantial recoveries and meaningful systemic reform. He serves on the Board of the Youth Law Center (ylc.org), bringing a national perspective and a policy-level understanding of child welfare systems to every case Justice for Kids® pursues.
Justin Grosz is the Oregon-licensed attorney and Co-Business Unit Leader and Partner at Justice for Kids® who brings the firm’s national expertise to Oregon’s specific legal landscape. With more than 230 jury trials to verdict and decades of experience representing children harmed in foster care, residential programs, and institutional settings, Grosz combines exceptional courtroom skill with a deep understanding of how Oregon’s courts, ODHS processes, and dependency system actually operate. He is the attorney Oregon families call when they are ready to stop waiting for answers and start demanding accountability.
“Oregon’s child welfare system has made promises to thousands of children that it has not kept. Families who trusted the adoption process were misled. Foster children who deserved safety were put in harm’s way. Justice for Kids® is here because those children and families deserve someone in their corner who will fight without compromise.” — Howard M. Talenfeld, Founder, Justice for Kids®
Serving Families Across Oregon
Justice for Kids®’ Portland office represents children and families throughout the entire state of Oregon — from the Portland metro area to Salem, Eugene, Bend, Medford, Gresham, Beaverton, Hillsboro, Springfield, Corvallis, and every community in between. Oregon’s child welfare crisis does not stop at city limits, and neither does the firm’s commitment to the children affected by it.
Who Should Contact Justice for Kids®?
Justice for Kids® welcomes calls from any person concerned about a child harmed by Oregon’s foster care system, including adoptive families who were not given complete or accurate information before finalizing an adoption, foster and kinship caregivers who witnessed or suspect abuse or neglect, biological parents whose children suffered harm while in ODHS custody, attorneys and guardians ad litem representing children in dependency proceedings, mental health and education professionals with concerns about a child in state care, and former foster youth who experienced physical, sexual, or psychological abuse while under Oregon state supervision.
All initial consultations are free and completely confidential. The firm handles cases on a contingency basis — families pay nothing unless Justice for Kids® obtains a recovery on their behalf.
About Justice for Kids®
Justice for Kids® is a division of Kelley Kronenberg, one of the largest and most respected law firms in Florida. It is among the very few practices in the United States that limits its representation exclusively to children harmed by government child welfare systems, foster care agencies, residential treatment facilities, disability programs, and institutions entrusted with children’s safety and well-being. The firm has a proven national record of securing significant verdicts, settlements, increased subsidies, and systemic reforms that improve outcomes not only for the clients it represents, but for the children who come after them.
CONTACT INFORMATION
Justice for Kids® | Howard M. Talenfeld 6500 S Macadam Ave., Suite 380 Portland, OR 97239 Phone: 754-888-KIDS (5437) Toll-Free: 844-4KIDLAW (844-454-3529) Email: help@justiceforkids.com Website: https://justiceforkids.com/where-we-protect-kids/oregon/
