Former US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said his family was targeted in what he called a politically motivated hoax after an anonymous caller filed a false report with child protective services in Michigan. A police officer and a CPS worker arrived at his Traverse City home, notifying him of allegations that his four-year-old twins were at risk.

The anonymous report claimed the caller had spoken to a woman who said Buttigieg told her at a conference in Alabama that he had committed unspecified violent crimes against children. Michigan State Police confirmed they received the report and determined it was false.

What CPS Workers Found When They Arrived at His Home

The CPS worker assigned to the case found no evidence to support the allegation. Despite that, Buttigieg said he was told he could not be around his children unsupervised for 24 hours while investigators reviewed the case, separating him from his twins during that window.

He described the experience in a post on his Substack account on Friday. He called it “the ugliest thing that has happened to me since my career in service began.” His husband Chasten and their two children were at home when officials knocked.

The tactic is sometimes called “CPS swatting,” a variant of swatting in which a false emergency call sends police or other authorities to a target’s address. Buttigieg said the goal was clearly to cause disruption and humiliation, not to protect any child.

Buttigieg Calls It a Warning for Families in Public Life

Buttigieg is widely considered a potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidate, and Friday’s disclosure drew immediate attention from political circles. Several Democratic figures condemned the incident as an abuse of child welfare systems for political ends.

NPR and CNN both reported on the incident on June 26. The Washington Post confirmed that Buttigieg described being briefly separated from his children as a direct result of the false report, which he called painful and deliberately targeted.

Michigan State Police did not identify the anonymous caller by Friday. Buttigieg said he intends to pursue every legal avenue available to hold whoever filed the report accountable.

Pete Buttigieg and his family remain in Traverse City. The false report case is now in the hands of Michigan State Police and potentially federal investigators.