Judge Tells Georgia: Stop Charging Parents for Kids Out of Foster Care

The letter that landed in Annalinda Martinez’s mailbox in 2024 carried a threat: pay up, or face jail time. The debt it demanded was child support — for daughters the state of Georgia was no longer even caring for.

For years, Martinez had been billed nearly $500 every month to cover the cost of her children’s time in foster care. By the time a federal judge stepped in this week, she says the tab had buried her under more than $13,000 of debt — a hole that made getting her kids back, in her words, nearly impossible.

On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Tiffany R. Johnson issued a preliminary injunction ordering Georgia’s child welfare agency to stop collecting foster-care payments from parents whose children are no longer in state custody. The ruling bars the state from taking child support from parents whose children have been adopted or have aged out of the system.

Martinez, a Georgia mother of six daughters, lost custody after her family became homeless in 2018. She had gone to her local child welfare office asking for housing help. Instead, according to the account laid out in her case, her children — then aged 2 to 15 — were removed from her care.

Since 2019, the state charged her roughly $500 a month for their care in foster homes. That continued even after she relinquished her parental rights, and even though only one of her six children remains in state care today. Martinez has said the mounting bills wrecked her finances and undercut the very steps — like securing stable housing — that she needed to take to work toward reunification.

What the Ruling Changes

Judge Johnson’s order does three things at once. It stops the state from collecting child support tied to children who have been adopted or aged out. It requires child welfare officials to build what the judge called a “simple and accessible procedure” for parents to report charges they say were made in error. And it ends the punitive enforcement tools the state used against parents who didn’t pay — including revoking passports and driver’s licenses.

In her order, Johnson wrote that Martinez “plausibly” argues the state’s policies impede “indigent parents’ fundamental right” to their children by “hindering” their ability to work toward getting them back. The judge also noted that the state was “still attempting to collect debt from Martinez that should not have been charged against her in the first place” — and that without intervention, the bills would likely keep coming even after her last child leaves the system.

A spokesperson for the Georgia Department of Human Services said in a statement that the department “will seek to comply with the Court’s order while the remaining claims are litigated.” Earlier efforts by the department to have the lawsuit thrown out were denied.

But the fight is far from one-sided, and the courtroom debate mirrors one playing out far beyond Georgia. Defenders of the practice argue that foster care costs taxpayers real money — caseworkers, foster families, medical care — and that parents, even struggling ones, should contribute what they can rather than leaving the full bill to the public. Child support, in that view, is simply child support, regardless of who is providing the daily care.

On the other side, Martinez’s attorneys call the billing of parents for children no longer in custody “irrational.” Their argument: piling debt onto poor parents doesn’t help children — it traps families, making reunification harder and punishing poverty itself. Phil Telfeyan, the civil rights attorney representing Martinez, said the ruling validates what parents have been saying for years about how damaging the practice is.

Why This Could Go National

The injunction is preliminary — the underlying lawsuit is still being litigated. But the case, a federal civil rights suit filed in August 2025, is being watched well beyond Georgia’s borders. Martinez’s lawyers have described it as one of the first of its kind to directly challenge the practice of collecting foster-care money from parents, and they are seeking to have it certified as a class action.

If that happens, the case could set a legal precedent affecting similar policies in other states — many of which also bill parents for the cost of their children’s time in foster care. For now, the judge’s order only halts the slice of the practice she found most indefensible: charging parents for children the state is no longer caring for.

Martinez said she hopes the ruling can “help some families get their kids back” and ease a burden that makes reunification feel out of reach for parents like her. “This is just the beginning of change,” she said. Whether other states follow Georgia into court — or change their policies before they have to — is the question now hanging over the entire system.