Family members said Monday they were disappointed that the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a case involving their former foster daughter, a girl with Native American ancestry, who was ordered removed from their California home and reunited with relatives in Utah.
Rusty and Summer Page said in a statement that the high court's decision was a 'crushing blow.'
Lexi, who is 1.5 percent, or 1/64 Choctaw, was six years old when she was taken from her foster home near Los Angeles in a tearful parting last March.
She was placed with extended family in Utah under a decades-old federal law designed to keep Native American families together.
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Rusty Page carries Lexi as members of family services arrive to take her away from her foster family in Santa Clarita, California. The Supreme Court has declined to hear the Pages' case, through which the family had hoped to get Lexi back (David Crane/Los Angeles Daily News)
A California appeals court affirmed in July a lower court's decision to remove the girl.
The Pages said they will keep fighting for changes to the law 'and the rights of other children unnecessarily hurt by the Indian Child Welfare Act.'
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Share 13 sharesLexi was 17 months old when she was removed from the custody of her mother, who had drug-abuse problems, and placed in foster care.
Her father has a criminal history, according to court records.
Summer and Rusty Page are disappointed that the U.S. Supreme Court has declined to hear the case involving their Lexi, who was ordered removed from their California home and reunited with relatives in Utah (AP Photo/Nick Ut, File)
Although foster care is supposed to be temporary, the Pages wanted to adopt Lexi and for years fought efforts under the federal act to place the girl with relatives of her father, who is part Choctaw.
Lexi is now living with relatives of her father who are not Native American.
The case was one of dozens brought by foster families since the Indian Child Welfare Act was passed in the late 1970s.
Lawmakers found that Native American families were broken up at disproportionately high rates, and that cultural ignorance and biases within the child welfare system were largely to blame.
Lost: Summer and Rusty Page are heartbroken and angry at the loss of their daughter, who they have fostered since before she was two, making her the only parents she can remember
Lexi had sobbed as she was taken away, begging her father: 'Don't let them take me away.'
She was taken by the Department of Children and Families in Santa Clarita and placed with relatives of her father in Utah.
She was reunited with her biological sister in the home but none of the family members are Native American.
Lost hope: The Page children (from left Maddie, Caleb, Lexi and Zoe). 'Our eldest was completely inconsolable - she was shaking and hyperventilating and screaming at the top of her lungs,' Summer Page said
Previously, Leslie Heimov of the Children's Law Center of California said: 'The law is very clear that siblings should be kept together whenever they can be, and they should be placed together even if they were not initially together.
The case was one of dozens of cases involving foster families have gone to court around the country after the Indian Child Welfare Act was passed in the late 1970s.
INDIAN CHILD WELFARE ACT - POLICIES AND REGULATIONS
ICWA gives tribal governments a strong voice concerning child custody proceedings that involve Indian children, by allocating tribes exclusive jurisdiction over the case when a child is a ward of the tribe.
The tribe also has jurisdiction over non-reservation Native Americans’ foster care placement proceedings
It was enacted in 1978 because of the high removal rate of Indian children from their traditional homes and essentially from Indian culture as a whole.
Before enactment, as many as 25 to 35 percent of all Indian children were being removed from their Indian homes and placed in non-Indian homes, with presumably the absence of Indian culture.
The tribe and parents or Indian custodian of the Indian child have an unqualified right to intervene in a case involving foster care placement or the termination of parental rights .
Source: Cornell University Law School
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