Children’s Defense Fund-NY joined the nation’s leading child advocates in a friend of the court brief, filed in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on behalf of over 18,000 children in Arizona foster care. The lawsuit seeks state-wide reforms to improve investigations of child maltreatment, to increase the number and array of foster placements available for children removed from their families, to decrease the use of emergency shelters and group homes, and to address long-standing failures in the state’s physical and behavioral health services for foster youth.