Florida Legal Powerhouse Justice for Kids® Arrives in Oregon With a Mission: End the Silence Around Foster Care Abuse, Sexual Exploitation, and the Civil Rights Violations Harming Oregon’s Children
Kelley Kronenberg’s Elite Child Welfare Division Crosses the Country to Bring Florida’s Most Aggressive Child Advocacy Practice to Portland — and to the Thousands of Oregon Foster Children Still Waiting for Justice
PORTLAND, Ore. / FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — When Floridians think of firms that have reshaped how this country fights for children harmed by government systems, one name stands above the rest. Justice for Kids®, the child welfare division of Kelley Kronenberg — one of Florida’s most powerful and respected law firms — has spent decades building a reputation that other practices measure themselves against. Landmark verdicts. Systemic reforms. Constitutional litigation that has forced government agencies to confront the harm they caused and the children they failed. A practice so focused, so experienced, and so relentless that families across Florida and the nation have come to see it as the gold standard for child welfare legal advocacy.
That gold standard is now available in Oregon.
Justice for Kids® has opened a Portland office, bringing the full weight of its Florida-built expertise to a state where the evidence of child welfare failure is not merely anecdotal — it is documented in federal court records, state audit reports, investigative journalism, and the lived experiences of thousands of children who entered Oregon’s foster care system seeking safety and found something far more dangerous instead. Under the leadership of Justice for Kids® founder Howard M. Talenfeld and Oregon-licensed trial attorney Justin Grosz, the firm establishes itself as the premier Oregon child foster care abuse law firm committed to pursuing accountability at every level of a system that has failed Oregon’s children for far too long.
This is not a firm expanding for the sake of expansion. This is a firm responding to a crisis — a documented, ongoing, federally scrutinized crisis that has left children physically injured, sexually abused, psychologically devastated, and constitutionally wronged inside a system that was legally obligated to keep them safe.
The Oregon Foster Care Crisis: A Record That Cannot Be Ignored
Florida attorneys and child welfare professionals who follow national child welfare litigation know Oregon’s story well. It is a story of systemic failure on a scale that drew federal judicial intervention, produced multiple landmark class-action lawsuits, and generated oversight findings that painted a picture of an agency — the Oregon Department of Human Services — that repeatedly placed children in danger, failed to respond to warning signs, and allowed harm to continue long after it should have been stopped.
The most sweeping of Oregon’s child welfare cases, Wyatt B. v. Brown, filed in 2016, exposed conditions inside ODHS foster care that shocked advocates and legal professionals alike. Children were being moved through placement after placement with no stability and no coherent safety planning. Youth with serious mental health needs were going without treatment. Teenagers — including LGBTQ+ youth who were already among the system’s most vulnerable — were being housed in ODHS offices, government buildings, and hotel rooms in a practice that became known as “hoteling,” because the agency had no appropriate placement available and nowhere else to put them.
The hoteling crisis placed children in environments with minimal supervision, no trauma-informed care, and significant exposure to sexual exploitation, self-harm, and physical danger. Oregon eventually reached a sweeping 2022 settlement in Wyatt B. that mandated major systemic reforms. But as any experienced Portland child abuse law firm will attest, a settlement agreement is a roadmap — not a guarantee. Subsequent audits have confirmed that hoteling continues, placement shortages persist, and the structural conditions that produced the crisis remain largely intact.
Perhaps the most disturbing dimension of Oregon’s child welfare failures involves the sexual abuse of children in state custody. Court records, ODHS oversight reports, and the testimony of foster youth across the state have documented a consistent and devastating pattern: children placed in foster homes, group care settings, and residential programs where they were sexually abused — often by caregivers, staff members, or other residents — and where the warning signs that should have triggered intervention were missed, dismissed, or ignored entirely.
Sexual abuse of children in foster care is not an anomaly. It is a foreseeable risk that government agencies are legally required to guard against. When ODHS licenses a foster home without adequate screening, fails to respond to prior complaints, ignores known risk factors, or places a vulnerable child in an environment where sexual predation is predictable, the agency bears legal responsibility for what happens to that child. Justice for Kids® pursues that responsibility without hesitation.
Child Sexual Abuse in Oregon Foster Care: What Justice for Kids® Does When Systems Fail to Protect
Sexual abuse cases represent one of the most significant and most sensitive areas of Justice for Kids®’ Oregon practice. They also represent cases where ODHS’s failure is often the most clearly documented — and where the harm to the child is the most profound and the most lasting.
Children in foster care are statistically more vulnerable to sexual abuse than children in the general population. They are more likely to have prior trauma that makes them targets. They are more likely to be in settings — group homes, residential programs, shared foster placements — where opportunities for abuse exist and where supervision may be inconsistent. They are less likely to have a trusted adult advocate in their lives who will believe them and act on their behalf when they disclose abuse.
When ODHS places a child in a setting where sexual abuse occurs, the agency’s potential liability extends far beyond the individual perpetrator. The firm examines every aspect of ODHS decision-making: Was the foster parent adequately screened? Were prior complaints reviewed and properly investigated? Were safety plans in place and followed? Were there known risk factors in the home — other residents with histories of sexualized behavior, adults with prior allegations — that should have prevented the placement? Was the child’s disclosure handled promptly, properly, and in a way that prioritized their safety and well-being?
As a Portland Oregon child neglect law firm with deep experience in both sexual abuse and systemic negligence cases, Justice for Kids® builds these cases with the thoroughness and sensitivity they demand. The firm works with forensic experts, child development specialists, and trauma-informed mental health professionals to document the harm, establish the agency’s responsibility, and present a case that reflects the full magnitude of what the child has suffered and will continue to face throughout their life.
Children’s Civil Rights: The Constitutional Dimension of Oregon’s Foster Care Failures
One of the distinguishing features of Justice for Kids®’ practice — and one of the elements that sets the firm apart from general personal injury practices that occasionally take child welfare cases — is its command of children’s civil rights law. When a government agency violates a foster child’s constitutional rights, the legal framework shifts in ways that can significantly expand both the scope of accountability and the remedies available to the child.
Under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, children in government custody have actionable civil rights claims when state actors act with deliberate indifference to known dangers, violate clearly established constitutional standards, or subject children to harm that the Constitution prohibits. Oregon’s documented child welfare failures generate civil rights claims across multiple categories.
Children who were subjected to unnecessary institutionalization — placed in psychiatric hospitals, residential treatment centers, or out-of-state facilities not because those placements were clinically appropriate but because ODHS lacked sufficient community-based options — may have constitutional claims grounded in the right to liberty and the right to treatment in the least restrictive appropriate setting. Children who were subjected to excessive physical restraints, isolation, or seclusion in residential programs may have claims under the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments. LGBTQ+ foster youth who were denied appropriate placements, subjected to discriminatory treatment, or placed in environments hostile to their identity may have both constitutional and statutory civil rights claims that Justice for Kids® is experienced in pursuing.
Children with disabilities have additional civil rights protections under federal law — the Americans with Disabilities Act, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act — that create enforceable legal obligations on ODHS and on the schools and service providers that work with foster children. When those obligations are ignored and a child with autism, an intellectual disability, or a serious psychiatric condition is placed in an inappropriate setting, denied required services, or excluded from educational programming that the law guarantees, Justice for Kids® pursues every available legal avenue.
As an established adoption disclosure negligence law firm, the firm also brings civil rights analysis to adoption cases where agencies violated families’ constitutional and statutory rights through fraudulent concealment of material information — cases where the breach was not merely negligent but reflected a deliberate institutional choice to suppress information that would have changed the outcome of the adoption entirely.
Physical Abuse, Neglect, and the Injuries That Define Too Many Oregon Foster Children’s Lives
Justice for Kids®’ Oregon practice handles the full spectrum of physical harm cases arising from ODHS foster care placements. Physical abuse — hitting, choking, excessive corporal punishment, physical restraint used as discipline — occurs inside licensed Oregon foster homes with troubling frequency, and ODHS’s failure to prevent it is rarely accidental.
As a dedicated foster care child neglect law firm, the firm investigates not only the immediate abuse but the conditions that enabled it: inadequate background screening of foster parents, failure to investigate prior complaints, insufficient monitoring of placements, and the systemic pressure that leads caseworkers to keep children in placements they know are suboptimal because no better option is available. Each of these failures creates potential legal liability, and Justice for Kids® pursues every thread.
Neglect cases — chronic, grinding, and often invisible until the damage is catastrophic — represent an equally important category of harm. A child who is moved through seven foster placements in eighteen months has been neglected by a system that failed to provide the stability their development requires. A child whose mental health needs were documented and then unaddressed for years has been neglected by an agency that substituted paperwork for care. A child with a serious medical condition who was placed with caregivers who had neither the training nor the resources to manage it has been neglected in ways that may produce lifelong health consequences.
Justice for Kids® brings medical experts, child development professionals, and child welfare specialists into these cases to document and quantify the harm — because Oregon’s most neglected foster children deserve to have their injuries seen, understood, and fully compensated.
Adoption Disclosure Negligence: The Hidden Crisis Inside Oregon’s Child Welfare System
Among the populations most profoundly affected by Oregon’s systemic child welfare failures are the adoptive families who trusted ODHS and private foster care organizations to tell them the truth — and were deceived.
Oregon law imposes clear pre-adoption disclosure obligations. Agencies must provide adoptive families with complete, accurate information about a child’s background, diagnoses, trauma history, prior placement failures, and known behavioral patterns. These obligations exist precisely because the consequences of withholding that information are so severe: families placed in impossible situations without resources or preparation, children denied the specialized care they need from the start, and placements that disrupt — causing yet another devastating loss for children who have already endured far too many.
Justice for Kids® regularly represents families who adopted children from ODHS or private Oregon agencies without being told about diagnoses of reactive attachment disorder, histories of sexualized behavior or aggression toward other children, prior psychiatric hospitalizations, serious trauma responses, or documented placement failures that predicted the challenges the adoptive family would face. The firm pursues claims for negligent misrepresentation, fraudulent concealment, and breach of statutory disclosure obligations, and fights for the increased adoption subsidies and damage awards that families need to access intensive treatment, maintain placement stability, and keep families together when the agency’s failures have pushed them to the breaking point.
Justice for Kids® in Oregon: The Attorneys Who Will Not Back Down
Howard M. Talenfeld built Justice for Kids® in Florida on a conviction that has never wavered: children harmed by government systems deserve the most skilled, most committed, and most relentless legal advocacy available. His decades of experience in landmark child welfare litigation, class actions, and complex civil rights matters have produced results that changed systems, not just individual cases. He serves on the Board of the Youth Law Center (ylc.org), bringing a national perspective to the Oregon practice that no locally focused firm can match.
Justin Grosz, Oregon-licensed attorney and Co-Business Unit Leader and Partner at Justice for Kids®, has tried more than 230 jury cases to verdict. His career has been devoted to children and families harmed in child welfare systems, residential programs, and institutional settings. His knowledge of Oregon courts, ODHS processes, and the state’s child welfare landscape makes him an immediately formidable advocate for every Oregon family that calls.
“Florida gave us the foundation. Decades of fighting for children gave us the tools. Oregon’s children give us the reason. We are here, and we are not leaving until every child in this state has access to the advocacy they deserve.” — Howard M. Talenfeld, Founder, Justice for Kids®
Statewide Representation Across Oregon
Justice for Kids® represents children and families in Portland, Salem, Eugene, Bend, Medford, Gresham, Beaverton, Hillsboro, Springfield, Corvallis, and communities throughout Oregon. All consultations are free and completely confidential. The firm works exclusively on a contingency basis — families pay nothing unless Justice for Kids® achieves a recovery on their behalf.
About Justice for Kids®
Justice for Kids® is a division of Kelley Kronenberg, one of Florida’s largest and most respected law firms. It is among the very few practices in the United States that limits its representation exclusively to children harmed by government child welfare systems, foster care agencies, residential treatment facilities, disability programs, and institutions responsible for children’s safety. The firm has a proven national record of securing significant verdicts, settlements, increased adoption subsidies, and systemic reforms that improve outcomes for the children it represents — and for the children who come after them.
CONTACT INFORMATION
Justice for Kids® | Howard M. Talenfeld 6500 S Macadam Ave., Suite 380 Portland, OR 97239 Phone: 754-888-KIDS (5437) Toll-Free: 844-4KIDLAW (844-454-3529) Email: help@justiceforkids.com Website: https://justiceforkids.com/where-we-protect-kids/oregon/
