BALTIMORE, Md. — For Margaret Neal, the whole system felt pointless.
Her daughter's father was paying child support. But she didn't see a dime of it.
"With my daughter at the time that wanted to go like to dance school and stuff and she couldn't go because I didn't have enough money. But had I been getting the money that her dad was sending, she could have went," she told WMAR-2 News.
Hear from Maryland families on the newly-passed child support reform bills
Trying to get back on her feet after experiencing homelessness and addiction, she was receiving government benefits.
But that meant the state got to keep her child support payments as reimbursement.
"As a condition of applying for that public benefit you as a single parent have to give up your right to collect child support from your child's other parent," Amee Vora, director of advocacy for family law at Maryland Legal Aid, explained.
In 2019, Maryland implemented a "child support pass-through" initiative, in which custodial parents were able to retain some of a child support payment - $100 a month if they have one child, and $200 a month for two or more children.
"And so the noncustodial parent has to decide like, my kid’s telling me they're hungry. I know if I give $200 to the Child Support Administration, my kid only is gonna get $100 of it or I give $200 to the kid, right, then they tell me I'm not supporting my child and then I face those all those consequences we talk about," Zachary Alberts, director of advocacy and strategic initiatives at the Center for Urban Families in Baltimore, said.
The government collecting child support payments for parents who are receiving benefits is the standard in every state except Illinois and now, Maryland. Governor Wes Moore recently signed House Bill 881 into law.
"It's just so exciting to be only the second state in the nation to pass a bill like this and make sure that money that's paid for children goes to the children," Alberts said.
The law doesn't go into effect until July 2026, and the amount that's given to children will increase incrementally every year, beginning with 25% of a payment, until 2031 when it finally gets to 100%.
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Margaret Neal's daughter is no longer a child. But she still fought for the bill's passage, testifying in front of lawmakers this past legislative session, in order to help other parents and families who find themselves in similar situations.
"I get emotional because like my daughter is one of those young women that's raising kids, you know, and that child support would help her," Neal said.
And for parents struggling to make child support payments, there's also relief on the way.
Under existing law, if a parent is at least 60 days behind on their payments, they're automatically referred to the Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration (MVA) for a potential driver's license suspension, sometimes with no notice, even though one is technically supposed to be provided.
"So rather than incentivizing people to pay or compelling them to pay, they were further stripping them of their ability to become compliant with their child support orders because they're taking away what they need to actually be employed and maintain that employment," Vora explained.
"It's one of the number one things that non-custodial parents tell us is preventing them from meeting their obligations, preventing them from seeing their children," Alberts told WMAR-2 News.
It happened to Aprille Hamilton, who pays child support for her 12 year-old daughter.
"The child support payments weren't something that I could keep up with and it snowballed into a monstrosity of an amount that I couldn't even fathom to pay off."
At one point she was walking 8 miles every day to get to work in Carroll County.
Hamilton is now trying to make enough money to show a judge she should regain custody of her daughter, but when her arrears are equal to her salary, and she loses her license if she falls behind, it creates a vicious cycle.
That's why she testified in Annapolis in favor of a bill that exempts parents who's incomes are below a certain threshold from being subject to license suspensions.
Hamilton recalled how she felt when it passed.
"I outright cried. It felt like the biggest weight coming up off of my shoulders because if I can drive and I can work, I know that I have it within myself to grind. I have that determination," she told WMAR-2 News.
Under the new law, parents earning 250% or below the federal poverty line, or about $37,650 per year, would be exempt from the automatic referral to the MVA. However it does maintain some accountability in cases where a parent is actively choosing not to pay.
"That income exemption does not apply individuals who the court has found are voluntarily impoverished," Vora explained. "And so these are people that the court have sort of observed and have made a finding that, 'we do believe you have the ability to pay child support; we believe you're choosing not to.'"
House Bill 681 goes into effect in October 2025.
“Implementation is something that we're very concerned about and we're definitely gonna be monitoring,” Alberts said. “The bill was written in a way that the Child Support Administration and DHS should be able to automatically exclude all these folks from the license suspension program but with any new legislation like this we need to make sure that it actually happens.”
