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NYC nonprofit budget cuts leave some parents in custody cases unable to visit children
By
Samantha Max
Published Jul 15, 2025
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By
Samantha Max
Published Jul 15, 2025
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An organization that offers free supervised visits between children and parents in the family court system is shutting down its services in the Bronx, Queens and Staten Island — a move that’s expected to dramatically lengthen wait times to get an appointment.
Safe Horizon’s contract with the city to oversee visits in those three boroughs expired last fall, and no new funding source has surfaced. The organization informed the court system earlier this month that it can no longer supervise visits in the meantime.
Attorneys who represent children and parents in family court told Gothamist the change will overwhelm an already overburdened system, making it even more difficult for families to secure appointments. For many parents and children, the lawyers said, losing Safe Horizon as a visitation provider could mean losing the chance to have a relationship.
“It was already a crisis,” said Liberty Aldrich, executive director of the Children’s Law Center and a former family court judge in the Bronx. “Now it’s beyond imaginable. I literally don’t know what’s going to happen.”
For decades, Safe Horizon has allowed kids and parents who don’t have custody — often due to allegations of domestic violence or substance use, or in cases involving mental illness — to spend time together under the supervision of trained professionals. The organization is one of the few providers of supervised parenting time for New York City residents in family court proceedings.
Maureen Curtis, vice president of criminal justice programs at Safe Horizon, said the organization has stopped accepting referrals for new clients but will try to see through the appointments that have already been scheduled.
A spokesperson for the state Office of Court Administration said in a statement that the agency “is concerned about the loss of Safe Horizon’s supervised visitation services, particularly with the dearth of such services available to NYC Family Court,” but did not specify any plans to address the gap. A bill is pending in the state legislature that would boost funding for supervised visitation statewide.
Bernie Lubell, a spokesperson for the Mayor’s Office to End Domestic and Gender-Based Violence, said in a statement that the expiration of Safe Horizon’s contract last year caused a “temporary lapse” and that the city has “absolutely no concerns with Safe Horizon’s ability to provide the service.”
“The city remains committed to the need for a supervised visitation program for survivors of domestic and gender-based violence and is actively exploring new procurement options to restore services as soon as possible,” he said. “Supervised visitation plays an important role in supporting survivors and their families, and it needs the backing of the family court since the court depends on it when making custody and visitation decisions.”
‘It could have devastating consequences’
Family court judges can order supervised visitation for a parent who doesn’t have custody of their child if there are safety concerns. When the Administration for Children’s Services is investigating allegations of abuse or neglect against a parent, the agency oversees those visits. But if there’s no active ACS investigation and a judge orders supervised visitation, then the parent has to find an outside provider.
Safe Horizon is one of just three nonprofits that offer supervised visits in New York City, according to the Children’s Law Center. Curtis said Safe Horizon oversaw about 1,200 visits in the Bronx, Queens and Staten Island last year. The organization’s supervised visitation program in Brooklyn will continue through federal funding, she said.
Parents can also hire private social workers to oversee meetings with their kids. But social workers and some nonprofit providers require payments for supervised visitation, making them out of reach for many parents in family court, attorneys said.
The Children’s Law Center estimates that providers in New York City only can serve about half the families who are seeking supervised visitation. Christopher Junior, a supervising custody attorney at Bronx Defenders, said he often has to scramble to find a provider for his clients, only for them to spend months on a waitlist.
That can be “extremely, extremely painful” for parents, he said. One client, he said, has been waiting 14 months to see their child.
“ For many of these parents, they have been fighting sometimes for years for their children and for their right to be meaningfully involved in their children's lives,” Junior said. “These supervised visitations represent, I think, an opportunity for them to begin rebuilding that relationship.”
Without Safe Horizon, family court lawyers expect waitlists in the Bronx, Queens and Staten Island to get even longer.
“It’ll add an enormous amount of time,” said David Shapiro, a longtime family court attorney in the Bronx.
Parents often rely on supervised visits to strengthen relationships with their children, and often don’t want to go to trial without spending that time together, lawyers said. Supervisors’ notes from those meetings can also be entered into the court record, which can help a judge to decide whether a particular parent should get custody. While parents wait for supervised visits, lawyers said, family court cases get stuck in limbo. This adds to an already large backlog in New York City’s family courts. In the Bronx, Queens and Staten Island, collectively, nearly 42,000 cases are currently pending in family court, according to data from the Office of Court Administration. That’s up from 32,000 in 2019.
Laura Russell, director of the family and domestic violence unit at the Legal Aid Society, said she expects the backlog now to get even worse.
“The people that are going to be hurt the most are the children, because they’re the ones that are not going to see the parents,” she said. “Five months is a long time to a 6-year-old.”
Russell’s unit represents many parents who are survivors of domestic violence. She said they often want the parent accused of harm to be able to maintain a relationship with their child, but in a safe way. Supervised visits at the courthouse with Safe Horizon are often “a first step in our clients feeling comfortable,” she said.
Without that option, Russell said, she worries judges will order less secure options, like a visit overseen by a family member or friend who isn’t trained to look for warning signs. She said judges might also forego supervision altogether.
“If there’s no supervision available, and the court orders unsupervised, or the court orders some family friend to do it, it could have devastating consequences,” she said.
‘This is a government failure’
Curtis with Safe Horizon said her organization hoped to receive funding for supervised visitation in the new state budget, which took effect on July 1. But that didn’t happen.
A coalition of organizations that support parents and kids in the family court system has been urging lawmakers to include $20 million in the state budget to bolster supervised visitation throughout New York. Nearly half of the counties in the state have no supervised visitation programs outside of abuse and neglect cases, according to a report released last fall by a state committee on supervised visitation. Areas that do, like New York City, don’t have the resources to meet the existing demand, the group found.
Queens Assemblymember Andrew Hevesi sponsored a bill that would have established supervised visitation programs statewide and expanded service in counties that already have them. The measure passed in the Assembly but didn’t go for a vote in the Senate.
Hevesi said he’ll try to get the legislation included in next year’s state budget. In the meantime, he said, there’s no emergency stopgap to fill the void that Safe Horizon will leave behind.
“Being separated from your parents is a trauma, and the longer it goes on, the more difficult it is for those relationships to be repaired,” he said. “This is a government failure that is leading to exponentially more trauma for children than it needs to.”
Tagged
new york city
public safety
Samantha Max
Samantha reports on whether New Yorkers feel safe and whether the institutions that are supposed to protect them are working. Before coming to WNYC/Gothamist, she spent three years covering the criminal justice system in Tennessee for Nashville Public Radio. Her reporting on Nashville's police department received multiple awards, including the Daniel Schorr Journalism Prize. Samantha was also part of the inaugural class of Report for America, a service journalism program that sends up-and-coming reporters to local newsrooms across the country. She is a Northwestern University grad, a Baltimore native and fluent in Spanish. Got a tip? Email [email protected] or Signal: samanthamaxwnyc.93.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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