Paloma Aguirre: Contempt From the Chair
When the family raised sexual assault concerns involving Malaika and Xayah, Chair Paloma Aguirre appeared to react with visible hostility and a disturbing lack of concern.
At the San Diego Board of Supervisors, while Audra Morgan stood at the podium raising sexual assault concerns involving Malaika and Xayah, Chair Paloma Aguirre appeared, on video, to answer from the dais with a disguised obscene gesture. It was subtle enough to be denied later, but visible enough to ignite the moment. That gesture fired Audra up, and she was not going to just stand there and take it. In that flash, with Tara Lawson-Remer appearing to try to calm the situation, the public saw something raw: not humility, not urgency, not concern for children, but contempt.
And that moment, supporters of this family say, was not isolated. It reflected nearly two years of what they describe as retaliation, institutional cruelty, and a system that has lost its moral center.
Malaika and Xayah have become the center of one of the most disturbing child welfare scandals in recent San Diego history. Their family and supporters do not see this as a system moving honestly toward healing or reunification. They see a modern-day behavioral health experiment in prolonged trauma: children separated from the family they love, destabilized by the separation, and then treated as if the pain caused by that separation is proof they need more intervention, more supervision, more control, and even the shadow of psychotropic drugs instead of reunion with the people they are crying for.
This fight has never fallen on the mother alone. Evelyn Lopez has been trying for nearly two years to get her daughters home. Their grandfather has been fighting for nearly two years. Community advocates have been fighting. Journalists and activists have been speaking out. Even elected officials have publicly said these girls have suffered long enough. A great-grandmother should not have died in the crossfire of this system. Yet despite all of that effort, all of those voices, and all of that pain, the suffering continues.
They are not invincible. They are not untouchable. They are not beyond exposure, and they are not beyond accountability. They built this on power, secrecy, and harm. Now it is in the light, and the light is not going away.
Face of San Diego’s Child Welfare Machine and the Shadow of a Modern-Day Behavioral Health Experiment
Meet Nadia Privara Brahms: A Modern-Day Dr. Frankenstein — directing a machine that turns children like Malaika and Xayah into behavioral health casualties. Story coming soon.
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