DEARBORN — Ahmed and Rehab Amer are still fighting to pass a law that would give relatives primary consideration when the state is placing children in foster care. The bill, HB 4118, has been dubbed the “Amer Act.”

The Amers had three children taken from them after Rehab Amer, the mother, was charged with negligence in the death of their two-year-old son Samier. Samier had fallen in the bathtub and died from the injuries sustained.  A year later in 1986, she was acquitted of the charges, but two of her children had already been placed in foster care, and the last was taken from her at birth four months after her acquittal. After years of working to get their children and their reputations restored, the Amers were able to prove that Samier had a rare disease called Brittle Bone Disease, which doctors had repeatedly missed on examination and which was actually the cause of his death.

Almost worse for the Amers was what the then-called Department of Social Services did with the children. “My children were torn apart from their heritage and who they are,” Rehab Amer said. “They don’t accept who they are or where they come from.”After being placed in foster care, the children had their names changed and were adopted into a Christian home in Clarkston, Michigan.  Amer said that her brother-in-law filed to be their foster parent, and although he has taken other children, he was not allowed to take hers and raise her children in a culture and environment they were familiar with. They are Muslim. “I feel as a parent it isn’t right for the state to do this to any child,” Amer said.  “It’s more important to put them in familiar surroundings and minimize the damage. The children’s advocacy group and the Department of Human Services (DHS) say they are working for the children’s best interest, but to put them in a place they are not familiar with is doing more harm.”

Although the DHS says they prefer to place children with relatives, Amer believes they don’t follow that due to financial reasons.

“I believe the state gets more federal money when a child is placed with non-relatives,” Amer said. The Amer Act would make preferential placement for relatives the law.

The bill’s primary sponsor was State Representative Gino Polidori, who introduced the bill in 2008. It was passed by the house in March of 2008. Amer says that after the bill was passed on to the senate, she was told that they would get a hearing within a week. It has been over a year.

The bill is currently stuck in the Senate Committee for Families and Children’s Services, which is chaired by Senator Mark Jansen.

“When is Jansen going to give us a hearing on this?” Amer asked. Although Amer claims she has made numerous phone calls and sent e-mails, she said she was just contacted by Amanda Comment, a clerk from the Senate Committee for Families and Children’s Services on Tuesday.

“We never received any calls from her. We also checked our entire electronic database and the only contact we have from her is the call she made on July 11th, and I returned that call on the 12th,” Comment said. Comment contacted Amer four days after the Detroit Free Press, a major newspaper in southeast Michigan, wrote an article on the bill.

“I was told that I should have contacted her first,” Amer said.  “I was also told that the Department of Human Services was the one opposed to the bill.”

According to the Legislative Director Kelly Miller, the bill’s language required they do extensive research, which is why it has taken so long to get a hearing.

“We were researching and reviewing the bill making sure that it did not conflict with the lawsuit filed by the national children’s advocacy group Children’s Rights. That lawsuit was very expansive and we had to make sure that the bill complied,” she said. The DHS and Childrens’s Rights settled out of court in 2008 just prior to going to trial, with the DHS agreeing to a litany of reformations designed to bring the foster care system up to standard. Miller stated that there were problems with the language of the bill that may have conflicted with the lawsuit. Miller also said that the bill could receive a hearing in the fall of this year once they receive their schedule for the fall session.

Currently, the head of the DHS in Michigan is Ismael Ahmed, the former director of the Arab Community Center of Economic and Social Services (ACCESS), who was appointed to that post four years ago by Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm.

 Amer hopes that by letting others know about the bill, they might receive support from the community in getting a hearing and getting the bill passed.

“I am not going to get my kids back and all the years I missed watching them grow up,” Amer said. “But I can prevent another parent from going through this.”