Georgia must stop charging parents ‘erroneous’ fees, judge rules
Georgia’s child welfare agency has been wrongly charging parents foster care fees for children no longer in state custody, and the practice must stop, a federal judge in Atlanta has ruled.
In an order Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Tiffany Johnson instructed the state to end the unwarranted fees and establish a simple way for eligible parents to report the “erroneous charges” she said they have been billed.
Johnson further ordered the state to correct the improper debt reported by parents and to cease any associated debt enforcement measures against them, including passport and license revocation.
Her ruling came in a proposed class action lawsuit filed last year against the leaders of the state’s child welfare system by Annalinda Martinez, a Kennesaw mother billed hundreds of dollars a month in foster care fees for children predominantly no longer in foster care.
Martinez alleged there are hundreds of Georgia parents like her, unconstitutionally forced by the state to pay it under the threat of possible punishment, including jail.
The judge’s ruling remains in effect while the case is litigated further.
“While Defendants argue that Martinez’s requested relief would burden the state by forcing it to overhaul its entire child support system, the preliminary injunction would merely require Defendants to correct their past errors and to comply with the law,” the judge wrote. “The state’s purported interest in continuing a child support system that likely violates parents’ constitutional rights is no interest at all.”
A spokesperson for the Georgia Department of Human Services, which oversees the Division of Family and Children Services, said Monday that it will seek to comply with the order while the case is litigated.
“We are reviewing the order and appellate options with the Attorney General’s Office,” the spokesperson told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in a statement. “Given that this matter remains pending, we will respectfully decline to comment further.”
The defendants, including DHS Commissioner and DFCS Director Candice Broce, argued in case filings that the lawsuit should be dismissed.
The judge narrowed the claims in the case Wednesday and ordered the defendants to formally answer them by Oct. 7.
Phil Telfeyan, an attorney for Martinez and the executive director of the legal nonprofit Equal Justice Under Law, said the judge’s ruling is “an enormous step forward in our efforts to create a fairer system.”
“We think that it’s multiple hundreds of parents who would be affected by this,” he told the AJC.
The lawsuit challenges the state’s practice of imposing foster care fees on Martinez and other parents whose children were placed in foster care because they couldn’t afford to look after them.
Citing a report by ProPublica and WABE, the lawsuit alleges that between 2018 and 2022, the state took children from parents solely due to inadequate housing in more than 700 instances, then charged those impoverished parents foster care fees.
Martinez said she sought housing assistance from the state in 2018 after she and her six children at the time left an abusive domestic situation. She said the state took custody of those children because of her poverty, then charged her $472 a month in foster care fees.
She said she tried to get the monthly payment reduced but couldn’t get access to the necessary documents after she gave up her parental rights due to the financial stress she was under.
The state continued to charge Martinez $472 a month after three of her children aged out of foster care and two were adopted, case filings show. Her only child still in foster care turns 18 next year.
In her order Wednesday, Johnson said the defendants secretly reduced Martinez’ monthly foster care fees to $201 in December 2025, four months after she filed her lawsuit, to account for the children no longer in foster care.
Johnson said the defendants didn’t tell Martinez or the court about that modification until May 2026, when they revealed it in the middle of an oral argument hearing. Prior to that, the defendants had “vigorously defended their enforcement” of the higher monthly amount, the judge said.
Johnson chastised the state defendants, warning that “any further incidents of lack of candor or other violations of this Court’s rules may result in sanctions.”
Martinez said her foster care debt grew to more than $13,000 before the Georgia nonprofit Together with Families helped her pay it down. She currently has custody of her two youngest children, born after her six older children were placed in foster care.
In response to the judge’s ruling, Martinez said she felt heard for the first time in a long time. She said she has spent years fearing jail because of her inability to pay foster care fees to the state.
“I hope this is the start of something better for every parent in Georgia who has been punished for struggling to make ends meet,” she said in a statement.
Telfeyan said the case is not an attempt to wipe out the state’s collection of foster care fees entirely, but rather to secure exceptions for those who can’t pay.
“We think if the state takes children knowing the parents are too poor to afford the fees, the fees should either be reduced or waived,” he said.