A group of demonstrators gathered outside a Santa Clarita foster family’s home on Monday to support parents Rusty and Summer Page in their legal battle to keep a 6-year-old girl in their home.
The child — who is 1.5 percent Choctaw, according to her foster family — was removed from the family’s care on Monday afternoon and will be placed in the care of relatives in Utah due to the Indian Child Welfare Act, a 1978 federal law intended to protect Native American children.
Her fate prompted a “Save Lexi” campaign, including an online petition and Facebook page.
The Choctaw Nation has issued the following statement about the child’s case:
The Choctaw Nation desires the best for this Choctaw child. The tribe’s values of faith, family and culture are what makes our tribal identity so important to us. Therefore we will continue to work to maintain these values and work toward the long-term best interest of this child.
The Page family issued a statement Monday afternoon after the 6-year-old girl was taken from their home in Santa Clarita, which read in part:
Our family is so incredibly devastated. Our hearts are broken and we are trying to make sense of everything that has happened with our three other children who witnessed their sister Lexi forcefully ripped away from our family by strangers.
But nobody could possibly be more devastated than our 6-year-old daughter who found herself restrained in a car and driven away to go and live in a foreign place hundreds of miles from her family, friends, teachers, home and life.
Let me speak directly to the people who took our daughter and who have her now. Please search deep into your heart and soul and do what’s best for Lexi. Do the right thing and bring Lexi back home. Do not keep her one more minute. Do not force her to spend one more night away from us and her siblings. Look her in the eyes and just ask her what she wants. She will tell you she wants to go home. I’m begging every American within the sound of my voice to help us bring Lexi back home.
