FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE March 12, 2026
Oregon’s Foster Children Have Been Failed Long Enough — Justice for Kids® Is Now Fighting for Them in Portland
The Nation’s Premier Child Welfare Law Firm Establishes Oregon Presence to Pursue Accountability Against ODHS and the Foster Care System That Has Left Thousands of Children Vulnerable to Abuse, Neglect, and Exploitation
PORTLAND, Ore. — There is a question that haunts every family who has watched a child suffer inside Oregon’s foster care system: if the state was supposed to keep this child safe, how did it come to this?
How does a child end up sleeping on the floor of a government office because no foster home could be found? How does a teenager get shipped to a residential facility in another state — one with a documented history of abuse — and spend months there without anyone intervening? How do reports of physical violence inside a licensed foster home get ignored, reviewed, and then ignored again, while the child in that home continues to be harmed?
These are not hypothetical questions. They describe real conditions that real Oregon children have lived through. And for too long, the agencies responsible for those conditions have faced far too little accountability.
Justice for Kids®, a division of Kelley Kronenberg and one of the few law firms in the country dedicated exclusively to children harmed by government care systems, has opened a Portland office to change that. Under the leadership of nationally recognized child welfare advocate Howard M. Talenfeld and Oregon-licensed trial attorney Justin Grosz, the firm arrives in Oregon as an experienced Oregon child foster care abuse law firm ready to take on the Oregon Department of Human Services and the private providers whose failures have left children permanently scarred.
Oregon’s Child Welfare System: Years of Failure, Broken Promises, and Children Left Behind
Oregon’s foster care crisis did not emerge overnight. It built slowly over years of underfunding, understaffing, poor oversight, and institutional indifference — until it became impossible to ignore.
The clearest picture of that crisis came through federal litigation. Beginning with Wyatt B. v. Brown in 2016, Oregon’s child welfare system faced legal scrutiny that pulled back the curtain on conditions most Oregonians never knew existed. The lawsuit revealed a system stretched far past its limits: children being cycled through placement after placement with no stability, no continuity of care, and no meaningful safety planning. Children with significant mental health needs going without treatment for months at a time. Teenagers housed in ODHS offices and hotel rooms — a practice that became known as “hoteling” — because the agency had nowhere else to put them.
A companion case, A.B. v. Brown, exposed a separate but equally troubling practice: Oregon was routinely sending foster children to residential treatment facilities in other states, many of which had serious documented histories of abuse, improper restraints, isolation, and staff misconduct. Children were transferred thousands of miles from their families, their schools, and their communities, placed in programs that could not meet their needs and in some cases actively harmed them.
Oregon reached a sweeping settlement in Wyatt B. in 2022. But as any experienced Portland child abuse law firm will tell you, a settlement agreement is only as meaningful as its implementation. Subsequent audits and oversight reports confirm that hoteling continues, placement shortages persist, caseworker turnover remains dangerously high, and children with disabilities still cannot access the specialized services they need. The signature on a settlement did not make Oregon’s children safe. It created a roadmap — one that ODHS has been slow to follow.
What ODHS Failures Actually Look Like for Children
When advocates and attorneys talk about systemic failures in child welfare, it can sound abstract. It is anything but.
For a seven-year-old placed with a foster family that ODHS failed to adequately vet, a systemic failure means repeated physical abuse in a home that should never have been licensed. For a fifteen-year-old with a trauma history who is placed in a hotel room and supervised by rotating staff who know nothing about her, a systemic failure means being targeted for trafficking within days. For a child with autism who is transferred to an institution far from home because no local placement was available, a systemic failure means losing the therapists, teachers, and routines that took years to build — and gaining nothing in return except harm.
As a committed Portland Oregon child neglect law firm, Justice for Kids® has seen how these harms accumulate. Children who enter foster care already carrying the weight of early trauma can emerge from the system with injuries, disorders, and losses that will follow them for the rest of their lives — not because those outcomes were inevitable, but because ODHS made decisions that were negligent, careless, or driven by resource constraints rather than the child’s actual needs.
The Full Scope of Justice for Kids®’ Oregon Practice
Justice for Kids® represents children across the full spectrum of foster care and child welfare harm. The firm does not limit itself to a narrow category of cases. It goes wherever children need legal advocacy.
In Oregon, that includes cases involving physical and sexual abuse inside licensed foster homes where ODHS ignored warning signs or failed to act on prior complaints. It includes children harmed in group homes, residential treatment centers, psychiatric hospitals, and out-of-state facilities — settings where improper restraints, peer-on-peer violence, overmedication, and staff misconduct are far more common than the public realizes. It includes children with disabilities who were denied appropriate services, placed in dangerous or inappropriate settings, and stripped of the educational and therapeutic supports they needed.
It also includes a critically important but frequently overlooked category: adoption cases. Many families who adopted children from ODHS or private Oregon foster care organizations were never told the truth about those children’s backgrounds. Diagnoses of reactive attachment disorder, histories of sexual aggression, severe psychiatric conditions, and significant trauma were withheld — and families were left to manage crises they were given no tools to anticipate or address.
As an established adoption disclosure negligence law firm, Justice for Kids® pursues claims against agencies that concealed or misrepresented critical information from adoptive families. The firm fights for increased adoption subsidies, damages for fraud and negligent misrepresentation, and the financial resources that families and children desperately need to stabilize their homes and access meaningful treatment. When adoption disruptions occur that could have been prevented, Justice for Kids® pursues accountability for the agencies responsible — and advocates for the children who experience yet another devastating loss.
Children in congregate care, group homes, and residential programs face a distinct set of risks that Justice for Kids® is specifically equipped to address. As an experienced foster care child neglect law firm, the firm investigates not only what happened to a child inside one of these facilities, but what ODHS knew about the facility before placing the child there, what oversight the agency exercised during the placement, and what steps — if any — were taken when warning signs emerged.
The Attorneys Fighting for Oregon’s Children
Justice for Kids®’ Oregon practice is led by two attorneys whose combined experience and commitment make them uniquely capable of taking on Oregon’s most complex child welfare cases.
Howard M. Talenfeld, founder of Justice for Kids®, has devoted his career to representing children harmed by the very systems designed to protect them. He is nationally recognized in child welfare law, having handled landmark class actions, major civil rights matters, and complex individual injury cases involving government foster care systems across the country. Talenfeld serves on the Board of the Youth Law Center (ylc.org), and his work reflects a conviction that legal advocacy is not just about individual cases — it is about changing systems so fewer children suffer in the future.
Justin Grosz is a licensed Oregon attorney, Co-Business Unit Leader and Partner at Justice for Kids®, and a seasoned trial lawyer with more than 230 jury trials to verdict. Grosz has spent his career representing children and families harmed by child welfare systems, residential facilities, and schools. His knowledge of Oregon’s courts, ODHS procedures, and the state’s contracted provider network makes him an immediately effective advocate for Oregon children and families seeking answers and accountability.
“Every child who was harmed in Oregon’s foster care system deserved protection. Our firm is here to make sure those children are heard, and that the agencies that failed them are held to account.” — Howard M. Talenfeld, Founder, Justice for Kids®
Statewide Reach Across Oregon
Justice for Kids®’ Portland office serves children and families throughout Oregon. The child welfare crisis is not confined to one city — it affects communities across the state, from the Portland metro area to Salem, Eugene, Bend, Medford, Gresham, Beaverton, Hillsboro, Springfield, Corvallis, and every rural community in between. Wherever ODHS operates — and wherever it has failed a child — Justice for Kids® is prepared to help.
Reach Out Today
Justice for Kids® welcomes contact from foster parents and kinship caregivers, biological parents, adoptive families, attorneys and guardians ad litem, mental health and education professionals, and former foster youth who suffered harm in Oregon state custody. All consultations are free, confidential, and handled with the sensitivity these cases require. The firm works on a contingency fee basis — no fees are owed unless the firm recovers on a client’s behalf.
About Justice for Kids®
Justice for Kids® is a division of Kelley Kronenberg, one of the largest law firms in Florida. It is among the very few practices in the country that limits its representation exclusively to children harmed by government child welfare systems, foster care agencies, residential treatment facilities, and institutions responsible for children’s safety. The firm has a proven record of securing significant verdicts, settlements, and meaningful systemic reform on behalf of injured and abused children nationwide.
CONTACT INFORMATION
Justice for Kids® | Howard M. Talenfeld 6500 S Macadam Ave., Suite 380 Portland, OR 97239 Phone: 754-888-KIDS (5437) Toll-Free: 844-4KIDLAW (844-454-3529) Email: help@justiceforkids.com Website: https://justiceforkids.com/where-we-protect-kids/oregon/
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