This post originally appeared at https://www.wisconsinrightnow.com/janet-protasiewicz-fought-to-remove-twins-from-black-grandmother/

“I would have to question whether or not she (Janet Protasiewicz) looked at us as humans or she looked at us as the ‘N-word.’” -Denise Goggans, the twins’ aunt

TOP FACTS

• A black grandmother, Margaret Hudson, lost custody of her grandchildren after it was determined her home was too small. “I was raised in a family, and we stick together. That’s what families do,” said Hudson, who fought the case to the Supreme Court.
• Janet Protasiewicz, acting as an assistant district attorney, was the prosecutor who fought tooth-and-nail to take the 5-year-old twins from the black grandmother and give them to a single, childless white woman on Milwaukee’s south side.
• A black Milwaukee judge, Joe Donald, ruled the twins should stay with the grandmother, saying she “never wavered in her desire or her love for her grandchildren.” But Protasiewicz appealed the judge’s decision all the way to the Wisconsin Supreme Court even after the grandmother purchased a 6-bedroom home.
• The twins would eventually be placed with the adoptive single white mother favored by Protasiewicz who lived in an even smaller two-bedroom home on Milwaukee’s far south side. But the twins ended up having a difficult life in some ways and, by age 13, they were returned to their birth family after years of traumatic separation.
• Protasiewicz wrote that she had the “honor” of arguing the case before the state Supreme Court and said the state “prevailed.” She described working on the case as a “very fulfilling experience” and “rewarding.” We asked Protasiewicz today if she regrets the decision. She did not respond.
• This happened during the time frame when Protasiewicz allegedly used racial slurs to refer to black parents in Children’s Court and other cases.

Around the same time she is accused of using a vile racial slur to refer to black parents in Children’s Court, Janet Protasiewicz, then a prosecutor, fought tooth-and-nail to remove two 5-year-old African-American twins from their black grandmother’s care and give them to a single white adoptive mother on Milwaukee’s south side over the objections of the grandma, aunt, and a highly regarded black judge, Wisconsin Right Now has documented.

The Milwaukee grandmother, Margaret Hudson, initially lost the twin boys, Darryl and Durrell, because she did not have a big enough house, court records show. In fact, that was the “only obstacle,” Protasiewicz admitted in a court brief:

The grandmother, then in her 60s, fought ferociously, and ultimately unsuccessfully, to raise her own kin. “They are my grandchildren. They ain’t anybody else’s. They’re mine, and I want them with their brothers and their sisters, and I want them with me,” Margaret told the court, to no avail.

One of the most shocking angles in the 1999 case, however, is that property records show that Hudson, who skipped family reunions and social events to scrimp and save for years, DID manage to eventually buy a bigger house along Sheridan Avenue in 1998, but Protasiewicz continued trying to take her grandkids away anyway.

One of the twins, Darryl Guentner, told WRN that his adoptive mother’s house was smaller than the new six-bedroom house that Hudson purchased, although there were more people in the latter.  But even that was not enough for Protasiewicz and others in the system.