The FOC System Has a Race Problem and Kalamazoo Families Are Caught in It

Black parents in Michigan pay 59.4 percent of obligations. White parents pay 78.8 percent. A 19.4 point gap built into the same system Kalamazoo County uses to enforce child support.

KALAMAZOO, Mich., April 1, 2026 — A federally funded study of Michigan's child support system found a 19.4 percentage point gap in compliance between Black and white non-custodial parents. Black parents paid 59.4 percent of their court ordered obligations. White parents paid 78.8 percent. The data covered 645,827 cases across the state.

The gap was statistically significant, documented by the University of Michigan using data from the state's own tracking system. It was not a small sample. It was not one county. It was the entire state.

The enforcement tools producing these outcomes are the same ones used by the Kalamazoo County FOC. Bench warrants, contempt proceedings, license suspensions. The federal study proved that the punitive tools make payment worse for every demographic group. But the data also shows who bears the heaviest burden.

92.6 percent of non-custodial parents in Michigan's system are male. The racial disparity in compliance reflects what is happening predominantly to fathers. In Kalamazoo County, where the FOC has denied every grievance filed in the last five years and operates with no independent oversight, these fathers have no functioning mechanism to raise concerns about how the system treats them.

Kalamazoo County is 11.5 percent Black. The families in this county are not immune to the statewide disparity documented in the federal report. They are living inside it, in a county where the office enforcing these orders has a 100 percent grievance denial rate and no outside accountability.

The Kalamazoo Transparency Act publishes this data because the first step toward fixing a disparity is acknowledging it exists.

“19.4 points is not a gap. It is a chasm. And it runs right through the system Kalamazoo families depend on.,” stated Kalamazoo Transparency Act.

About the Kalamazoo Transparency Act

The Kalamazoo Transparency Act is a public interest data project that extracts court data from government reports published by the Michigan Supreme Court State Court Administrative Office and makes it accessible to the public. The project covers the 9th Circuit Court, 8th District Court, and Probate Court of Kalamazoo County. All data is sourced from publicly available government publications and can be independently verified. For more information, visit www.kalamazootransparencyact.com.

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