It’s hard to imagine the misery of a mother whose child is snatched from her arms. It’s an agony Ingrid Ronan Johnson’s mother experienced on March 18, when Miccosukee tribal police arrived at the maternity ward with an order from a tribal court commanding that 2-day-old Ingrid be taken away. It’s the grief Summer Page felt when—weeping in her southern California driveway—she watched her 6-year-old foster daughter Lexi driven away by county officials at the behest of the Mississippi Choctaw tribe and sent to live in Utah. It’s the frustration of a Tohono O’odham mother known in court documents as Justine, who was barred by Arizona judges from letting her new husband adopt her son. And it’s the anguish that a Texan mother called J. J. suffered when her own tribe’s government vetoed the adoption she’d arranged and ordered her baby boy sent to New Mexico to live with strangers.

These traumatic stories are the consequences of a federal law called the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), which was passed in 1978 in an effort to protect Indian families from unjust intrusions by state governments. But today it often devastates the families it was supposed to protect.