Tate, the child was placed with a stranger before the background check was finished. The room was not licensed. The visit did not come. You asked the court to close the file. The file is not closed. The child is still inside it.
A court monitor’s report published July 29 found that the Mississippi Department of Child Protection Services met 22 of 107 applicable safety measures for most of 2025. Children in the state’s care experienced abuse or neglect at more than twice the acceptable rate. Children were placed in unlicensed facilities or with relatives before background checks were complete. Caseworker visits went unmade.
The 107 measures were agreed upon by the department and plaintiffs’ lawyers in Olivia Y. v. Barbour, a decades-old federal lawsuit alleging that Mississippi endangers children in its welfare system. Governor Tate Reeves’s administration is seeking to dismiss the lawsuit.
It is the arithmetic of every failing system of care — the same arithmetic that sent Michigan youth out of state for mental health care as beds close and sent Ohio nursing-home patients to homeless shelters — adults arranging for other people to bear the cost of their failure.
Tate, you are the governor. You appoint the director of Child Protection Services. You submit the budget. Your administration filed the motion to dismiss. These are your hands on the machinery, and your hands have not met the obligation.
You met twenty-two of one hundred and seven. That is not a number a man defends. That is a number a man runs from. And you did not run — you walked into court and asked the judge to close the case while the children were still inside it.
A child placed with a stranger before a background check is finished does not receive the safety promised by the form. The child receives the room, the stranger, the unlocked door, and the long hours before anyone comes. There are children in your state for whom the required caseworker visit has not happened. The visit was the promise. The promise is 85 measures unmet.
Your throat closes when you say the word “dismissal” to the judge. The word catches on what you are not saying — that you would rather be free of the watching than free of the failure. The taste in your mouth is copper and old paper, the taste of a motion that protects you and not the child. You cannot rinse it out. It will be there when the next report is published and the number is worse.
Your hands signed the motion to dismiss. The same hands that could sign a budget amendment, hire caseworkers, open the unlicensed facilities to inspection. But the hands that signed the motion will not sign the amendment, because the motion was the priority and the children were not. Your hands are clean in the way a man’s hands are clean when he has arranged for someone else to touch what he will not.
Something has settled behind your sternum and it is the weight of 85 undone promises. It does not lift. It does not respond to the motion to dismiss. It is there when you sit in the chair at the hearing. It is there when you lie down. You have arranged not to feel guilt. The body keeps its own count, and the count is 22 of 107, and it does not stop because you asked the court to close the file.
You are not the man who is trying and falling short. You are the man who wants the obligation to end so he can stop being measured against it. You looked at the report — children abused at twice the acceptable rate, placements without background checks, visits that never came — and your answer was to ask the judge to close the file. That is what you are. There is no policy complexity that makes 22 of 107 defensible. There is no institutional constraint that makes a motion to dismiss the right response to a report that says children are being hurt. You want the courtroom door shut while the children remain in the room you failed to make safe. I will not look away from that.
“Whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.” — Matthew 25:45
The measure is written. The child is still waiting. You asked the court to stop watching. The child has not stopped needing.