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Rh the State’s “belief that an Indian reservation is an unsuitable environment for a child.” Ibid. So it was that some Indian families, “forced onto reservations at gunpoint,” were later “told that they live[d] in a place unfit for raising their children.” Id., at 3–4.

Aggravating matters, these separations were frequently “carried out without due process of law.” Id., at 4. Children and their parents rarely had counsel. Ibid. For that matter, few cases saw the inside of a courtroom. Welfare departments knew that they could threaten to withhold benefit payments if Indian parents did not surrender custody. Id., at 4–5. Nor were threats always necessary. After all the Tribes had suffered at the government’s hands, many parents simply believed they had no power to resist. Ibid. One interviewed mother “wept that she did not dare protest the taking of her children for fear of going to jail.” Id., at 7. For those Indian parents who did resist, “simple abduction” remained an option. Id., at 5. Parents were, for instance, sometimes tricked into signing forms that they believed authorized only a brief removal of their children. Ibid. Only later would they discover that the forms purported to surrender full custody. Ibid.

Like the boarding school system that preceded it, this new program of removal had often-disastrous consequences. “Because the family is the most fundamental economic, educational, and health-care unit” in society, these “assaults on Indian families” contributed to the precarious conditions that Indian parents and children already faced. Id., at 7–8. Many parents came to “feel hopeless, powerless, and unworthy”—further feeding the cycle of removal. Id., at 8. For many children, separation from their families caused “severe distress” that “interfere[d] with their physical, mental, and social growth and development.” Ibid. It appears, too, that Indian children were “significantly more likely” to experience “physical, sexual, [and] emotional”