Thread: Valley Latino leaders demand dependency-court reforms

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Valley Latino leaders demand dependency-court reforms
By Karen de Sá
Mercury News
Article Launched: 03/01/2008 01:54:13 AM PST



Latino leaders of the South Bay on Friday decried the poor handling of dependency court cases, and demanded improvement of the system designed to protect children from abuse and neglect.

La Raza Roundtable Chairman Victor Garza said many of his members wanted immediate action to correct the problems of the overloaded system identified in the February Mercury News series, "Broken Families, Broken Courts."

"The Latino community is extremely concerned with the allegations made about the lack of proper representation for the parents and lack of voice for the children in court proceedings," Garza told a small gathering in the Santa Clara County administration building. "Now, it is clear that one of the principal reasons for this over-representation in the child welfare system is the lack of equal protection for the parents."

Supervising Dependency Court Judge Katherine Lucero, responding to Garza's announcement, said the fact that local Latino and African-American families are disproportionately impacted by the child welfare system is "an issue that is very, very important to me personally and to the court."

Garza, whose organization has about 800 members, said, "The contention that Santa Clara County has a model child welfare system has been defended by the court leadership, but the facts are refuted," Garza said. "Yes, the county stands out, but for the wrong reasons."

He and other La Raza Roundtable leaders said they planned public forums in coming months to focus attention on the problem. San Jose Vice Mayor David Cortese, a La Raza Roundtable member, said "in general, the system is broken in terms of the competency with which it deals with dependency cases." The first step in solving the problem, he said, "is getting the people who've been hurt the most and letting them speak out. But we're going to go well beyond that."



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Contact Karen de Sá at kdesa@mercurynews.com or (40 920-5781.



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Recent Comments
Thanks for the morning laugh. Tell LaRaza the citizens have been screaming for deportation of illegals for a long time and wanting immediate action.


http://www.mercurynews.com/valley/ci_84 ... ck_check=1

Here's the link for this story:

http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_8418069

La raza is nothing more then a hate group. We don’t let other hate group influence are political system, give them airtime or fund them with tax payer dollars rightly so. They need to be classified as a hate group like the kkk and federal funding needs to be cut. Mecha is another one we let in are schools, when is this nonsense going to stop? When most of us talk of illegal aliens we are speaking in terms of all races, when we speak of Americans we speak of all races as should be. It is only these groups that seek to divide us, so when will are Politian see these people for what they are , publically denounce them, and cut off federal funding?