It's a "Well, duh!" kind of decision, but the Texas Supreme Court has affirmed a lower court decision that the state overstepped its bounds in rounding up more than 400 kids and trying to take them from their parents.
In a crushing blow to the state's massive seizure of children from a polygamist sect's ranch, the Texas Supreme Court ruled Thursday that child welfare officials overstepped their authority and the children should go back to their parents.
The high court affirmed a decision by an appellate court last week, saying Child Protective Services failed to show an immediate danger to the more than 400 children swept up from the Yearning For Zion Ranch nearly two months ago.
"On the record before us, removal of the children was not warranted," the justices said in their ruling issued in Austin...
Under Texas law, children can be taken from their parents if there's a danger to their physical safety, an urgent need for protection and if officials made a reasonable effort to keep the children in their homes. The high court agreed with the appellate court that the seizures fell short of that standard.
No, the state decided to do a commando-style raid of the complex and grab as many kids as they could. It was a "grab first and ask later" sort of event.
Texas officials claimed at one point that there were 31 teenage girls at the ranch who were pregnant or had been pregnant, but later conceded that about half of those mothers, if not more, were adults. One was 27.
As I stated in a previous post, the state was hellbent on stripping these parents of their rights and adopting out the kids before there could be any sort of due process. It's a good thing that a number of lawyers prevented that from happening.
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