Appeal Filed in Case Against Missouri Family Support Division

Last month, Equal Justice Under Law filed an appeal in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit in an effort to keep our lawsuit challenging wealth-based driver’s license suspensions alive.

 Originally filed in 2019, Wright v. Missouri Family Support Division aims to ends Missouri’s statewide practice of suspending driver’s licenses for parents who are living in poverty and therefore unable to make payments toward their child support debt. As Equal Justice Under Law argued in the Complaint, driver’s license suspensions are counterproductive as a means of coercing indigent parents to pay child support because the deprivation of a driver’s license only exacerbates the problems at play. Parents without licenses are often unable to secure and maintain employment, are less likely to be able to make these and other payments, and are less able to visit with and parent their noncustodial children.

All 50 states have some statutory or administrative provisions authorizing the suspension or revocation of driver’s licenses for unpaid child support. Unfortunately, such suspensions are just the tip of criminalization of unpaid child support, with 36 states allowing for arrests and jail-time for failure to pay child support and as many as 50,000 people serving jail time at any given time based solely on unpaid child support debt. As we have written about before in our Justice Report, these types of criminalization tactics happen not just to parents who willfully withhold child support payments, but parents who are living in poverty and simply lack the means to pay.

Nationwide, parents with incomes below the federal poverty line have child support payments that comprise 69 percent of their total incomes. Parents earning less than $10,000 annually report having monthly child support payments that make up 83 percent of their total earnings. Meanwhile, 93 percent of those with incomes over $10,000 annually pay their child support orders, showing that, in large part, parents who can afford to pay do pay. It is exceedingly difficult for indigent parents to have their support amounts modified in court, partly because there is no right to counsel in family court, and family court judges assessing child support are authorized to impute support amounts without considering incarceration, structural and chronic poverty, and other relevant factors.

 To make matters worse, even when child support is collected, it only makes it to children and custodial parents about half of the time. The other half — just shy of $900 million in 2023 — is retained by state governments to reimburse the state for cash assistance provided to children and custodial parents through the Temporary Assistance for Needy families (TANF) program. This means that when states like Missouri take criminalizing measures such as suspending driver’s licenses, they are doing so to spur payments not for the benefit of the children but to reimburse the government for cash assistance it would be providing anyway.

Equal Justice Under Law brought this lawsuit to defend and promote the rights of indigent parents in Missouri who want, more than anything, to parent and support their children, but who face homelessness, poverty, disability, and unemployment that prevent them from being able to make their exorbitant child support payments. For our clients, license suspensions do not suddenly change their life circumstances and make them able to pay their child support; instead, the suspensions hamper their employment prospects, prohibit them from moving freely, hinder their ability to parent their children effectively, and ultimately harm everyone involved.

This lawsuit was paused for an extended period of time in the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic because Missouri, along with many other states, paused many of its social services functions, including driver’s license suspensions. It was during this time that two of our named plaintiffs, through a process of trial-and-error with the Family Support Division, were able to get “stays” — temporary pauses — on their license suspensions. The stays allowed them to drive legally, but left the suspension intact. Both plaintiffs, as well as others with suspended licenses in Missouri, reported that the process of requesting the stays was onerous, complicated, opaque, and arbitrary. It was only after many hours of back-and-forth with multiple different Family Support Division employees that our clients and those we spoke with were able to request stays. Even then, they were assured by the Family Support Division that the stays were temporary in nature, and could be lifted at any time, reimposing the full effect of the suspensions.

Then, in 2023, the Missouri State Legislature passed a bill requiring that the Family Support Division hold pre-suspension hearings assessing, among other factors, the obligor’s past and current ability to make payments. The legislation accomplished much of what Equal Justice Under Law and our clients originally sought in this lawsuit: an opportunity for parents, prior to having their licenses suspended, to show that they could not afford to make payments. But the Family Support Division quickly made clear its intent to not apply the legislation retroactively. In other words, the new hearings would be for future suspensions, but there would be no recourse offered to our clients or the thousands of other Missourians whose licenses had already been suspended.

Because there was no consideration for our clients and those with existing suspensions, and because we identified other gaps in the Family Support Division’s planned implementation of the state legislation, Equal Justice Under Law filed a Motion for Injunctive Relief in 2024. This motion asked that the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri require that the Family Support Division standardize and publicize its process for issuing suspension stays — like the ones two of our plaintiffs had received — while working on implementing the new legislation. Neither Equal Justice Under Law nor our clients viewed this requested relief as comprehensive: it was meant to provide a temporary stopgap to help parents with existing suspensions get legal access to drive again while we continued the litigation and while the Family Support Division worked to implement the new legislation.

In January of this year, the District Court judge unexpectedly dismissed the case, holding that because two of our plaintiffs had temporary stays on their license suspensions, they no longer had the required injury to continue to litigate the case in federal court. We strongly disagree: a stay is merely a temporary pause on the suspension and those plaintiffs still have active license suspensions on their records. While they can legally drive, there are a host of harms that accompany the suspensions, which remain on their driving records. They still have a significant interest in continuing to litigate this case, to request formal and standard stay procedures, to argue the unconstitutionality of the suspension processes to which they were subject, and to seek full reinstatement of their driver’s licenses beyond just stays. Our appellate brief, filed earlier this month, makes these arguments and asks the Eighth Circuit to reverse the dismissal.  It asks the Court to allow our clients to continue their fight in District Court to vindicate their due process rights and get relief for themselves and the thousands of other Missourians who continue to be harmed by the state’s child support and license suspension systems.

We expect to have our case heard by the Eighth Circuit soon, and we are committed to using all the tools available to us to continue fighting this battle on behalf of Missourian parents living in poverty. Be sure to stay apprised of case updates for this and other cases by visiting our website and by reading the Justice Report. If you are interested in learning more about how you can support our work in Missouri and beyond, be sure to stay connected with Equal Justice Under Law online and learn more about how you can contribute to our effort to end the criminalization of poverty.