The Indian Child Welfare Act still stands, with some of its key provisions weakened by a sharply divided U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals this month. The 325-page opinion has no immediate impact on child welfare cases in the Mountain West, but it's likely to be challenged in the U.S. Supreme Court.
Since 1978, ICWA has required that tribal nations have a voice in adoption, foster care and custody proceedings involving their youngest citizens. The federal law was intended to reverse a long legacy of federal and state agencies forcibly removing Indigenous children from their families and communities.
Initially filed in 2017, the lawsuit - Brackeen v. Bernhardt then, Brackeen v. Haaland now - took aim at ICWA's constitutionality, arguing that its preference for placing Indigenous children in Indigenous adoptive and foster homes violated the equal protection clause. Thirty tribal governments in the Mountain West and the states of Colorado, Utah, Montana and Idaho urged the court to reject that argument. Ultimately, the Fifth Circuit's en banc ruling did just that.