MacLaren Hall abuse lawsuits

This page covers one facility. The County’s child welfare claims as a whole are on our LA County foster care page, and the settlement and its payment schedule are on the LA County juvenile hall settlement page.

What MacLaren was

MacLaren was where Los Angeles County took children it had removed from their families. The County’s 2001-02 Civil Grand Jury described it as “originally designed as an emergency or temporary holding facility for children taken from their families in cases of abuse, neglect or abandonment,” meant to house them until they went home or to relatives, a foster family or a group home (Civil Grand Jury Final Report, 2001-02). It was a unit of the Department of Children and Family Services until 1998, when it was placed under an interagency consortium of County departments, Probation among them.

County records place it at 4024 Durfee Avenue in El Monte, operating on that site from the 1960s until 2003 (County report to the Board, October 26, 2022). The roughly 14-acre property is now being redeveloped by the County and the City of El Monte as a park and affordable housing.

How it closed

MacLaren was under official scrutiny for years before it shut. The grand jury’s audit reported that background checks begun in June 2001, ahead of state licensing, found 17 employees with previously undisclosed criminal histories that the state, or MacLaren’s own stricter standard, would not accept; four more resigned during the checks. That finding concerned criminal records, not abuse allegations, and it names no one.

In July 2002 a coalition of public interest groups filed a foster care lawsuit against the County, Katie A. v. Bonta (U.S. District Court, C.D. Cal., No. 2:02-cv-05662). In the County’s settlement, announced March 13, 2003, it agreed to “surrender its license for MacLaren Children’s Center” and no longer use it for the residential care of children under 18 (ACLU of Southern California, March 13, 2003). A County budget release in April 2003 said the closure freed $17.8 million to place foster children “in more suitable quarters.”

Who may be able to file

Claims about MacLaren are brought by people who allege they were sexually abused there as children, against the County that ran it. Because it closed in 2003, every such claim concerns abuse more than twenty years old, and many would have been time-barred before 2020. AB 218, the 2019 California law described below, reopened them, which is why MacLaren claims arrived in large numbers from 2022.

According to news reports and the filing firm’s release, an early group suit over MacLaren under that law was filed by 12 former residents in Los Angeles Superior Court in May 2022 (plaintiffs’ firm release, May 17, 2022). Many more followed. The County has not published a count of claims by facility, and we do not repeat law-firm estimates.

Children were often moved between MacLaren, foster homes, group homes and juvenile halls, and few remember exact dates. County placement records can usually show where a child was and when. Not remembering is normal and does not rule anything out. If you would prefer your name stay off the public record, our guide to filing anonymously explains how that is requested.

Deadlines that apply

For abuse before 2024, California’s Code of Civil Procedure section 340.1 applies the law as it read on December 31, 2023. That law, as changed by AB 218 in 2019, generally allows a claim until age 40, or within five years of when the person discovered or reasonably should have discovered that the abuse caused a psychological injury, whichever is later. AB 218 also opened a three-year window, from 2020 through 2022, for claims that had already expired, and removed the need to file a government claim first, which matters because the defendant is a county.

The window has closed. Whether a MacLaren claim can still be brought now turns on a person’s age and on when they connected the abuse to its harm, and those are general rules with exceptions.

What the claims allege

The claims allege that children at MacLaren were sexually abused by people the County put in charge of them, and that the County failed to protect them. The County’s description is general: the majority of the claims in the April 2025 settlement “date from the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s and are alleged to have happened at Probation Department facilities and at the MacLaren Children’s Center, which was permanently closed in 2003” (County announcement, April 4, 2025). In April 2023 Supervisor Kathryn Barger cited “new costly legal liabilities due to allegations of incidents at MacLaren Children’s Center and the Probation halls and camps” (FY 2023-24 budget statement).

These are allegations. The County settled them in bulk, and no court has made findings on any individual claim or about any individual. We do not name anyone accused.

The County’s chief executive said in April 2025: “On behalf of the County, I apologize wholeheartedly to everyone who was harmed by these reprehensible acts.” The County has also said its ability to assess the claims “was hampered by a lack of records, the sheer number of cases and court ordered limits on legal discovery,” and that every claimant must complete a written factual summary under penalty of perjury, with an independent allocator reviewing any claim the County believes is fraudulent (County announcement, October 17, 2025).

Settlement and compensation status

On April 29, 2025 the Board of Supervisors approved $4 billion to settle Jane Doe 1 v. County of Los Angeles (Los Angeles Superior Court No. 21STCV20949) and about 6,800 related matters, against the Department of Children and Family Services, Probation and four other departments (statement of proceedings, Item 11). That is the settlement the County described when it named MacLaren. On October 28, 2025 the Board approved up to $828 million for about 414 more matters against DCFS and Probation (statement of proceedings, Item 6); its records do not say whether any of them concern MacLaren.

Awards are not split evenly. Independent allocators set each one based on factors that include the severity of the abuse alleged. The County pays the $4 billion over five fiscal years beginning in FY 2025-26 (County Counsel, May 13, 2025). It appropriated $815.0 million for the first payment, anticipated in January 2026 (Supplemental Budget, September 30, 2025), and on September 29, 2026 carried $403.6 million forward for remaining first-year payments while funding the second year’s $1.2 billion without bonds (Supplemental Budget, September 29, 2026).

Those records show when the County pays into the settlement process. They do not show when any one survivor is paid, and we do not give dates for individual claimants: timing runs through the allocator and the claimant’s own lawyer. Our guide to how settlements are actually paid explains the process.

Update log

No dated updates are published for this page yet.

Questions we are asked most

Related states and institutions

MacLaren is part of the County’s child welfare claims, covered on our LA County foster care page, and of the settlement covered on the LA County juvenile hall settlement page. Claims against foster care systems elsewhere are on our foster care overview. Our guides on statutes of limitations, what filing involves, trauma and healing and support for families may help, and a confidential case review costs nothing.

Figures on this page are as of the dates given beside them, and the latest is September 29, 2026. Allegations described here are allegations unless a court has found otherwise.