A 6-year-old Caucasian girl with only 1.5% Choctaw Indian blood was removed by force from the only family she has known in 4 years.
Lexi was adopted at age 2 by Rusty and Summer Paige, who have 3 children of their own.
After a 3-year court battle to keep Lexi, a California Supreme Court judge ruled the Paige’s must give her up.
An archaic law that seeks to preserve native Indian families forced the courts to remove Lexi from her foster family and place her with a non-Indian family that is related to her through marriage only.
Protesters locked arms and formed a ring around the Paige’s Santa Clarita, Calif., home the first time social services came to pick up Lexi. The agency left empty handed.
But social services returned on Monday with reinforcements, and this time they left with the sobbing child.
“She said, ‘Don’t let them take me. I’m scared. I’m scared. Don’t let me go.’ And I have to because the county of LA said I had to,” her tearful foster father, Rusty, told ABC7.
Lexi’s birth parents, who are both drug addicts, relinquished their parental rights after she was placed in foster care.
Lexi’s biological mother is a non-Indian and her biological father is less than 20% Choctaw Indian.
According to the NY Daily News, the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act was designed to keep Native American families together. Non-Indian families can’t adopt native Indian children even if children such as Lexi have only a drop of Indian blood in them.
