My question involves child support in the State of Alabama.
My husband has 2 children from a previous marriage, the reside in AL.
My husband has not seen said children in 7 years. There was a CS order done in 2000 and he paid faithfully on that except for 2 periods where he was forced to move due to layoff. He was bullied by a DHS worker to no go for a modification, they told him it would only increase. He paid child support the entire time and attempted to pay the arrears that were retroactive from when his ex wife filed for CS.
He tried for 3 years to gain contact but AL would not release their location ( He never violated anything, no record or anything )
He eventually decided to move on as the pain of knocking on doors and getting turned away was to painful to bear. One day out of no where we get a phone call from his Ex-wife who is in rehab for drug abuse - 18 month program - she tells him he needs to get the kids, they are with her father - legally - and she doesn't want them there (Her father would not drive them the 300 miles to come see her every weekend).
She has no info on the legal proceedings that have happened with her children over the last 5 months. We contact DHS and get ahold of a caseworker only to find that custody has been passed between a maternal grandfather, maternal grandmother (divorced) and a aunt over 7 times. They have been in foster care a few times, in and out of safe houses.
My husband was passed over each time because is ex wife told the caseworker he was dead - although he was paying child support to the office down the hall. We attempted to gain custody of the children, but since custody had legally been given to someone else it was as if he had to adopt them at the cost of $13k. We also had to get a home inspection and to do that we needed to go through foster care classes in Michigan - at the time we were unmarried, college students who worked full time, they would not enroll us in the program.
The caseworker told us to drop it and that the kids were happy. We were at a loss so to say. He continued to pay his child support. He still had about $1500 in arrears from the original amount that he was paying as well as the current support, the interest was killing him.
18 months ago we got a bill from the state of AL from the Maternal grandmother - she went retroactive on all the time she had the kids, anything over a week she counted - the awarded her $8k in arrears, 3 months later we got the bill for the interest for $7k.
When my husband found out that his ex did not have custody he called AL and asked who to pay CS to, at first they had him keep paying Becky because no one else had filed an order, then they told him to stop paying since the original order had been put on hold.
The maternal grandmother did contact him and ask him to send her cash and she wouldn't take him to court but he decided against that (shady people) and at that time we were going on her word that she had the children, when in all actuality the childrens maternal grandfather had legal custody (He was deceased at that point though, we later found out that his second wife was taking care of them).
Yesterday we called AL DHS and asked about a modification of the CS order. I was laid off last December from my job in Bio-medical research and we are on an very tight budget. The DHS worker told us that Our family here doesn't matter to them, which I get and further more she could care less if we were homeless as long they got their money. She told us that children from the 'north' don't matter. I asked her if that was the state of Alabama's official stance on out of state children and then asked to speak with the director of DHS. She declined to transfer my call, and told me if we went in front of a judge they would most likely raise his CS because they don't like "northern folks". This isn't a joke.
Does anyone have any ideas on how to figure this stuff out. There is no way to get on top of the arrears from the maternal grandmother. We have tried many times to gain custody and they keep telling my husband he would have to adopt them - his own children. The state of AL has also granted custody back to his ex-wife who is a habitual drug user, she has the record to prove it. What are you supposed to do?

