Chicago City Wire

In a recent interview with the Chicago City Wire, Illinois state Sen. and former gubernatorial candidate Darren Bailey (R-Xenia) discussed the embattled Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) as it faces a new lawsuit.

"There is essentially no getting back on track unless you fire Marc Smith as director and [Gov. JB Pritzker] has already announced he is bringing him back," Bailey said in the interview. "As a candidate for governor, one of my pledges as a candidate was to strip and rebuild the agency."

A federal civil rights lawsuit has been filed by Cook County Guardian Charles Golbert, a recent WLS report said. The lawsuit accuses the DCFS of allowing innocent children to be held in detention centers for weeks to months at a time without proper care, even after a judge ordered several of them to be released into the care of their parents or guardians.

"I don’t think [Pritzker] cares about children," Bailey told the Wire. "I mean he locked them out of school for two years [with COVID-19 restrictions] and works everyday to make this more of an abortion state. He’s destroying our future because he’s destroying our children. I think besides all the abortions this is the next biggest travesty to our kids."

The senator added that he has no confidence in the way the DCFS operates.

"Absolutely none, I’ve been calling for the governor to fire Smith," he said. "He’s been a failure and things are only getting worse."

18-year-old Janiah Caine, who was a charge of the DCFS as a minor, spent a cumulative 166 days over three occasions in Cook County's Juvenile Detention Center, even after a judge had ordered her release.

"You don't feel safe," Caine, one of eight defendants named in the lawsuit, told WLS. "The staff don't make you feel safe either. They're not respectful to you. They treat you like nothing."

Statistics from the Office of the Cook County Public Guardian showed that there were 84 instances of children held in detention for prolonged periods of time in 2021, the WLS report said. Seven of those children are still in that same predicament.