By Ghost Zero

In 2018, the whole country watched thirteen brothers and sisters walk out of a house in Perris, California, where their parents had starved them and chained them to furniture. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief. They were finally safe. The state had them now.

Then the state placed some of the younger Turpin children with a foster family in Riverside County. The foster father, Marcelino Olguin, was later sentenced to seven years in prison. Rosa and Lennys Olguin got probation. The victims included several Turpin children.

An independent review hired by the county found that "the social services system often failed the Turpin siblings." Housing that fell apart. Food they could not count on. Children placed with caregivers who were later charged with abuse. In February 2026, six of the siblings settled with Riverside County and the foster agency for $13.5 million. Both denied wrongdoing.

Rescued from a house of horrors, and handed to another one. That is the story Part 1 could not tell. Part 1 followed the money. This part follows the children.

Who Is in the Care

On September 30, 2025, there were 331,747 children in foster care in America, according to the federal government's own count. During that year, 175,008 more children were taken in, and 501,745 passed through the system.

The government measures abuse in its own care, too: 9.07 victimizations per 100,000 days a child spends in foster care. That is the agency grading its own homework. Keep that in mind when you read what the court records show.

The Cases

New Mexico. In July 2023, a jury in Rio Arriba County awarded $485 million to an eight-year-old who was repeatedly sexually assaulted in foster care. The defendants were not just the man who did it. They were private companies paid to run treatment and placement programs, including Acadia Healthcare. Acadia later told the SEC it paid $400 million to settle three cases, with no admission of wrongdoing.

That is a part of this system most people never hear about. The state takes the child. Then it pays private companies to care for them. When the care fails, the companies settle and admit nothing.

Indiana. Prosecutors in Morgan County charged foster parents Brian and Sonja Stafford with 121 counts after investigators said they abused at least 33 children over 13 years. Thirteen years of placements in one house. These are charges, and the Staffords are presumed innocent. But the question every parent should ask is how many caseworkers walked through that door during those years.

Illinois. Federal law requires fingerprint background checks for foster parents. But in 2023, CBS Chicago reported that Illinois DCFS approved a 24-year-old man named Erick Johnson as a "fictive kin" caregiver for a 16-year-old girl, a shortcut that skipped the normal foster parent licensing and training. The Cook County Sheriff later charged Johnson with promoting prostitution while on probation. He is presumed innocent. DCFS says the girl was removed.

Washington. In September 2025, Washington State agreed to pay $9 million to Ashley Miller, who said she was sexually abused in foster care from age 5 to 12 while the state failed to watch the home. The state settled to avoid a jury trial.

Every one of these cases came out because someone sued, someone prosecuted, or someone reported. None of them came out because the system told on itself.

The Medicine Cabinet

The book calls it the chemical cage. Here is what the government's own investigators found.

In 2011, GAO looked at foster children on Medicaid in five states. Foster children were prescribed psychiatric drugs at higher rates than other children. GAO found 609 foster children on five or more psychiatric drugs at the same time. It found psychiatric drugs prescribed to babies under one year old.

GAO added that higher rates do not necessarily mean bad prescribing, since these children have been through trauma. That is the government's explanation. Here is another one: the child in that file has no parent in the room asking questions. The state signs the consent form.

In 2014, a House hearing on overmedication cited research that nearly one in four foster children was on a psychiatric drug on any given day. When GAO checked back in 2016, four of seven states it looked at had cut back. The others had not, or had no data.

In October 2023, a 19-year-old named Mon'a Houston told the U.S. Senate what her years in care were like: 18 placements, overmedication, restraint, isolation, and detention. Eighteen homes. One childhood.

The Missing

A federal audit across 46 states estimated that 34,800 cases of missing foster children were never reported the way the law requires. Some of those cases are the same child running more than once. Every one of them is a child the state was responsible for, gone, without the report that is supposed to trigger a search.

The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children reports 23,348 reports of children missing from foster care. It says 17% of the children missing from care who were reported to it were likely victims of child sex trafficking.

In Arizona, local reporting found 74% of the children who went missing from state care between January 2024 and September 2025 vanished from group homes. Group homes are where the state puts the children it has the hardest time placing, and where it pays private operators by the day.

What Comes After

In 2025, about 15,000 young people left foster care the way no child should: they aged out. No family. No adoption. Just a birthday and a door.

The federal government surveys them. At age 21, 16% reported being homeless and 10% reported being incarcerated during the survey period. A long-running Chapin Hall study of former foster youth in three Midwest states found that by ages 23 and 24, 37% had been homeless or couch surfed since leaving care, and about 2.5% had a four-year college degree.

The state took custody of these children because their homes were supposedly unsafe. Then it raised them, and this is what it produced.

My opinion, labeled as my opinion: if any parent in America had a record like this, the state would take their children. Abuse in the home, drugs in the cabinet, kids missing with no police report, and more than a third homeless or couch surfing after they leave. The system that judges parents would never pass its own inspection.

What You Can Do

– Call your state representative and ask two questions: how many children went missing from foster care in our state last year, and how many were reported to police within 24 hours? Make them find out.
– Ask your state legislators whether every psychiatric prescription for a foster child gets an independent second look. If the answer is no, ask why not.
– Consider becoming a court-appointed advocate or a relative caregiver if a child in your family enters care. A child with one adult watching their case is safer than a child with none.

Start today. Look up how many children are in foster care in your county. Then ask yourself who is checking on each one of them.

The full research is in Children for Sale: The Corrupt Underbelly of Child Protective Services, free in the Red Pill Library. Part 1 of Paid to Take Them follows the money, and Part 3 covers your rights when CPS knocks. I also put this subject into song form, released by Vigilant Protocol as PROPERTY OF THE STATE, with a song from The Valkyrie Project on the way. Protocol Media is building an archive for every topic it covers: books, briefs, music, art and short-form video, backed by the Evidence, Founding and Acts Records. The work is underway and the documents are still being added, so the page keeps growing.

ART AS THE WEAPON. TRUTH AS THE AMMUNITION.