This story was originally published by The Imprint, a national nonprofit news outlet covering child welfare and youth justice. Sign up for The Imprint’s free newsletters here.
Thirty-five years ago, the Minnesota Legislature created an independent ombuds office to assist families of color grappling with the racial and ethnic disparities embedded in the child welfare system. Each ombudsperson would help Native American, Hispanic/Latino, Asian-Pacific, African, and African-American communities navigate the child welfare system and act on their behalf. Armed with investigative and subpoena powers and reporting directly to the governor, the office would respond to complaints and remedy court or government failures.
This year, for the first time since 1991, the state has taken stock of the office’s performance. It set out to answer: How effectively has the Office of Ombudsperson for Families fulfilled its statutory duties? How well has the office handled complaints?
In a report released in January, Minnesota’s legislative auditor concluded that the Office of Ombudsperson for Families (OBFF) “does not fulfill all duties required by law” and that the community boards appointed to oversee its work are “ineffective and insufficient.”
“Ultimately, the OBFF’s impact in recent years on children and families of color involved in the child protection system — or the child protection system overall — is unclear,” the legislative auditors stated.
Annual reports required by law have been spotty, and the auditors said the outcome of complaints are poorly tracked. And although the office states that its free services are supposed to be confidential, auditors “found instances of the office forwarding complaint information directly to county social service agencies without taking efforts to keep confidential the identity of the complainant.”
Legislative Auditor Judy Randall said in an email that an “anonymous suggestion” launched the 74-page evaluation. To track progress on her office’s recommendations, the auditor will conduct a follow-up evaluation early next year.
Meanwhile, a new case management system is still being tested, and the ombuds office has yet to meet a prior commitment to improve transparency of its investigative process by July 2026.
In public written responses, Ombudsperson for African American Families Ann Hill, Ombudsperson for Spanish Speaking Families Muriel Gubasta and Ombudsperson for Asian Pacific Families Manuel Zuniga mostly agreed with the state auditor’s critiques. They said improvements are planned or in progress, including a strengthened connection with community advisors and a clearer process for handling complaints.
But in follow-up interviews with The Imprint, the representatives for families of color described a host of challenges — primarily a lack of staff and an overly broad mission. They said that with the limited number of employees on staff during the review period, they’ve been unable to monitor courts and Minnesota’s 87 county child welfare agencies.
The three disagreed about the extent to which they’ve met their obligations under state law. And each pointed to different areas of progress and challenges.
Ombudspeople cite challenges after pandemic, George Floyd murder
According to a 2024 report on the prior year’s calls — the most recent available — the Office of Ombudsperson for Families received 540 complaints and inquiries, and resolved or consulted on roughly 383 of those cases. Complaints involved a range of issues, including parents who said they were not appointed an attorney, lack of translation services for non-English speakers, and child protection workers who were allegedly disrespectful or did not return calls.
Community advocates say the need for the ombuds’ services is great. According to the most recent state data, in 2023, Black and Latino youth were roughly twice as likely to be in foster care as their white peers. Multiracial youth were around eight times as likely. And Native American youth were 16 times more likely to be removed from home that year.
Originally, the office included a representative for Native Americans. But that ombudsperson, who focuses on laws specific to tribal families, moved to a separate agency in 2021.
Hill, who has worked as an ombuds since 1993, said her office has mostly met its obligations over the decades since its founding. But because the office’s title includes the word “families,” she said it often receives calls that aren’t related to child protection services, such as requests for food, shelter and healthcare assistance.
She also said specific challenges arose in 2020 that the office had difficulty recovering from.
One was slow responses from social workers to inquiries her office fielded during the pandemic. Another was the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, which coincided with an unusually high number of complaints. Those calls had to be sifted through, even though many did not involve the office’s purview, she said, including calls about kids acting out in school during the heightened unrest and parents asking for mental health resources.
Since then, she said, the office has been “limping along with the best we could do under the circumstances. It just wasn’t enough staffing, enough hours in the day, to do all that we needed to do.”
Gubasta, who has served the office since 2005, told The Imprint the auditor’s findings did not come as a total surprise.
“It wasn’t a mystery to us before they contacted us that we have operational deficiencies,” she said in a June interview. And her office had already begun work on the issues and other inefficiencies before the auditor’s review, she added.
Zuniga joined the office in 2022, after leaving the state’s Department of Human Rights. He called its responsibilities “unbelievably broad” and suggested legislative fixes are needed to make its goals clearer and more achievable.
He said, in particular, that it is not possible for his office to meet its responsibility to the state courts, including making sure bilingual workers are trained, court workers receive instruction on cultural diversity, and guardians ad litem advocate for children of color.
“That itself almost seems like it could be done by an entire agency,” he said. “To do it adequately, it would take a lot of resources.”
The state has increased the office’s budget each year from 2022 through 2025, the January report states. The budget totaled $845,000 last year, the majority of which went to payroll. The legislative auditor found that in recent years the money has not been fully spent.
But Gubasta said her office is underfunded, and needs a total budget of $1 million for operational expenses to hire an additional investigative staffer and rent a larger office. To complete all the auditor’s recommendations, she said, an executive director may also need to be hired.
No reports for four years
The three ombudspeople were each paid more than $100,000 by taxpayers in the 2025 fiscal year.
The auditor’s report, which included comments collected through a public input survey, did have some positive remarks. One unnamed survey respondent said the office has been a “valuable partner.”
“The Office of Ombudsperson for Families plays a critical role in elevating the voices of families involved in the child welfare system,” the comment reads. “Their work has helped shine a light on systemic issues that often go unaddressed, particularly for communities disproportionately affected by state intervention.”
Still, there have been ongoing concerns. In 2021, the state’s most prominent advocacy group for foster youth evaluated the office’s capacity to serve children taken from their parents. Foster Advocates partnered with four University of Minnesota graduate students who produced a 50-page report that included interviews with three of the four ombudspeople, plus a survey of guardians ad litem and child welfare professionals across the state.
They concluded that the ombuds did little youth outreach, staff were spread thin, had few interactions with the public, and did not keep consistent records or evaluate their effectiveness. The researchers noted that although the office was required to produce annual reports, it had not done so since 2017, four years prior.
The conclusion that the office for families was mainly focused on parents and did not adequately serve foster youth led to the creation of a separate entity — the Office of the Foster Youth Ombudsperson — in 2024.
Complaint outcomes? ‘Unknown,’ auditors found
In its January report, the legislative auditor said the three ombudspeople have failed to consistently file annual reports, and the few released in recent years included only “scant information.” Their investigations of complaints were inconsistent and poorly documented, and as a result, “complaint outcomes are unknown.” (Gubasta has said the annual reports could not be completed in the past due to staff shortages.)
In addition, the ombudspeople “spend considerable time on activities that are not required,” investigators found.
And although Minnesota has outspoken youth advocates in the child welfare field and an active ombuds office for foster youth, the report stated that the 35-year-old family ombuds office is little-known: “Many individuals we spoke with across Minnesota’s child protection system were unfamiliar with OBFF.”
Hill disagreed, saying that in general, child welfare workers are familiar with them, although new county staff might be less aware of her team than longtime employees.
Kelis Houston is among those familiar with the office. The founder of the nonprofit Village Arms and longtime advocate for African American families in Minnesota said it’s an important resource for people involved in the child welfare system. But she added that the office seems overextended given the number of families who need help. And she said she has seen local agencies fail to address problems identified by the ombuds office.
As a result, Village Arms has had to conduct its own inquiries into parents’ complaints — even though her agency lacks investigative powers and funding to do that work.
“The office has the potential to be a powerful accountability mechanism within the child welfare system because of its role and authority,” she said. “But that power and influence are undermined when the agency does not meaningfully respond to or act on its findings and concerns.”
Ultimately, it’s lawmakers’ responsibility to ensure the ombuds office is accountable to the public, said state Sen. Mark Koran, a member of the Legislative Audit Commission. In a July interview, the Republican said the office “failed every element of statutory compliance that the office of the legislative auditor reports or audits validate.”
Koran said he’d like the office to serve all Minnesotans, not specific racial or ethnic groups. A similar recommendation was made in 2015, under Gov. Mark Dayton by his task force on the protection of children. Members also recommended better outreach by requiring courts and social services to distribute information about the office at various stages of child welfare cases.
During a January hearing on the auditor’s report, Rep. Rick Hansen, a Democrat, said it was unclear how the Legislature should proceed. Since the report was released, no legislation has been introduced to improve the office’s services to the public.
“Perhaps we give them a sunset date of a year or something to get this figured out — or it’s over and we start over with some other way of providing the protection,” Hansen said. “Clearly, looks like systematic failure everywhere with this, and we have to do better.”
Elena Leomi, former director of movement-building for the nonprofit Foster Advocates, said the state Department of Children, Youth, and Families, county child welfare agencies and the Legislature all have a stake in ensuring the office’s success.
“Reform can’t happen just by this agency alone,” Leomi said. “How we hold accountability for this ombuds office to serve families better needs to be connected with a larger accountability across our child welfare system.”
