So you should check out the statistics on the child snatchings. I stopped calling it child protection a long time ago, almost immediately in my own case. They weren’t protecting my kids. If they were, if that had been their intention, they would have checked with the school. They would have checked with my pediatrician. They would have looked into my family, friends and neighbors. They could have done all that without ever removing my kids.
Straightforward, plain and simple, their intention, DCF, CPS, whatever you want to call them, was to kidnap my kids, to snatch my kids, to use their messed-up laws and personal immunity to snatch them away from me right before my very eyes.
And they did this. They accomplished this with no muss, no fuss and no problem. They did exactly what they set out to do from the start, from the very moment that that teacher who was a mandated reporter made the mistake of telling her supervisor that my son had a black eye and that she was concerned he’d been hit [by me]. The supervisor, who knows me, then made the mistake of telling the principal, who knows me, and the principal then made the gross mistake of calling DCF instead of me. By the way, the teacher knows me too, and they are all familiar with my son who is no stranger to the school. My son, a model student, told them repeatedly how it happened, and his friend verified it too.
So why did all this happen? The $64,000 question.
Over and over again I keep asking myself this question. But the answer is simple. It’s right out there. The teacher is a young, relatively new teacher. She is not tenured, wants to get tenure because it’s a primo school district, one that is safe and secure and mostly without incident. So, my guess, she was afraid someone would see my son and ask her if she said anything. Thus, fear of a negative thought about her on the job by someone above her caused her to report something first instead of checking it out first. So it went up the chain of command, wrongfully so, needlessly so.
DCF, DYFS,CPS came to school. They saw two perfectly healthy, happy white kids. They saw two absolutely adoptable kids, kids they knew were in high demand.
Jackpot! They hit the lottery.
No phone call home. No warning. One day I sent my son off to school and he didn’t come home. Instead, they came and snatched my daughter and I didn’t know why.
Every parent’s worst nightmare come true.
And then of course CPS does what CPS does. Most people working in that system have immunity. The caseworkers can snatch your kids, take you (me) all the way through the court system, break you (me), financially and as a person (mentally), and then, if it looks like they’re not going to get what they want, which is to legally “sell” your kids into adoption, if it looks like they can’t win their case or if they think the judge might not be too happy with what they’re doing, they can just drop the whole thing, look you straight in the eye and say “oops, my bad.”
No shame. No guilt. No “I’m sorry.” No thoughts or feelings about what they’ve put you and your kids through and the damage they’ve inflicted on everyone.
So I bet many of you are thinking no, it can’t be like that. They wouldn’t do a thing like that.
Well, it is. They do. And they do it all the time. And if you don’t believe me, take some time and do some honest checking into it. Read up about it.
By Peter Weiss
I did stay with my lawyer. The whole thing was a crap-shoot any way you sliced it. I was already a ton of money in the hole, I’d borrowed a fortune from my father literally messing up his retirement calculations. As a result of DCF, not for anything I’d done, I was going to have to sell my house and most probably move in with my parents who were mortgaging their paid-off house to pay off my lawyer.
Well, their mostly paid-off house, anyway, because my father told me there was still some left to pay off.
My lawyer said he was glad I was staying with him. He said, and to this day I believe this, that it was not about money. The money, he said, mostly went into his costs. He said he felt that he could best negotiate a good ending of the situation for me and that with his connections and reputation he was hoping that he could do it sooner than later.
Sooner than later. Yeah right. Turns out it was another six weeks to the next hearing date. In that six weeks I saw my kids only three times. I was supposed to see them every week, but DCF managed to make sure to cancel the visits at the last minute. Since the visits were there, at their office, and after school, I had to take the afternoon of the visits off work in order to get there in time. So on top of not seeing my kids three times out of the six, I still lost six afternoons’ work.
Each time they missed a visit, they made no apology. Each time I tried to reschedule, they made excuse after excuse such that accomplishing a visit became impossible.
But they knew all this. They knew exactly, precisely, what they were doing and they, of course, were doing it on purpose. They knew my funds were limited so they were purposefully costing me as much as they could so they could break me.
And they were doing a great job of it.
So each time they missed a visit I called my lawyer (costing me more money) and he called them (costing me more money).
That’s how it works.
Oh, I know. Don’t think so? Well it is so.
Twice they actually did reschedule only to call me at the last minute (again) to tell me they’d made a mistake and the kids had other appointments. They told me they didn’t know this when they rescheduled and would they make sure it would work for the next week’s visit. They did make sure never to miss two weeks in a row. That, I would discover, missing two weeks in a row, is a no-no to the judges.
So we got to the next hearing. The lawyer asked me to get there early, at least an hour early, first because he wanted to speak with me and second because he wanted to have a meeting with them. He assured me that they would be willing to have a meeting and that we might be able to effect what he hoped we could in order to get my children home to me.
I was a little skeptical. Okay. I wasn’t a little skeptical, I was very skeptical. I hoped beyond hope that he really could do what he was saying he could do, which was get my kids home without me having to actually cop to anything. But I knew they were holding both my kids and my kids were surely of the type that was eminently adoptable. In their terms, from all that I had read by now, I knew that this meant they were prime candidates for adoption, that DCF would do its best to make sure that I could never get my kids back.
By Peter Weiss
link to full printable NCCPR article here with all working links
National Coalition for Child Protection Reform / 53 Skyhill Road (Suite 202) / Alexandria, Va. 22314 (703) 212-2006 / info(at)nccpr(dot)info / http://www.nccpr.org
THE EVIDENCE IS IN Foster Care vs. Keeping Families Together: The Definitive Studies
NCCPR long has argued that many children now trapped in foster care would be far better off if they had remained with their own families and those families had been given the right kinds of help. Turns out that’s not quite right.
In fact, many children now trapped in foster care would be far better off if they remained with their own families even if those families got only the typical help (which tends to be little help, wrong help, or no help) commonly offered by child welfare agencies.
That’s the message from the largest studies ever undertaken to compare the impact on children of foster care versus keeping comparably maltreated children with their own families. The first study was the subject of a front-page story in USA Today. The full study is available here. child protection and outcome, the full study
The first study, published in 2007, looked at outcomes for more than 15,000 children. It compared foster children not to the general population but to comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes. The result: On measure after measure the children left in their own homes do better.
In fact, it’s not even close.
Children left in their own homes are far less likely to become pregnant as teenagers, far less likely to wind up in the juvenile justice system and far more likely to hold a job for at least three months than comparably maltreated children who were placed in foster care.
One year later, the same researcher published another study. This time the study included 23,000 cases. Again he compared foster children to comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes. This time he looked at which children were more likely to be arrested as adults. Once again, the children left in their own homes fared better than the foster children.
Implications
- The studies use the term “foster care” generically; they include children placed in any form of substitute care. That’s important because whenever information like this comes out, people who want to warehouse children in orphanages try to use it to justify their schemes. But these studies were not limited to family foster homes. And it takes three single-spaced pages just to list all the other studies documenting the harm of orphanages. (Those pages are available from NCCPR.)
- This does not mean that no child ever should be placed in foster care. But it means many fewer children should be placed in foster care.
The studies excluded the most severe cases of maltreatment, a very small proportion of any child protective worker’s caseload. That’s precisely because, horror stories that make the front page notwithstanding, these are cases where everyone with time to investigate would agree that removal from the home was the only alternative.
Rather, the studies focused on, by far, the largest group of cases any worker sees, those that can best be called the “in-between cases” where the parent is neither all victim nor all villain; cases where there are real problems in the home but wide disagreement over what should be done. As the first study itself notes: “These are the cases most likely to be affected by policy changes that alter the threshold for placement.” They also are, of course, the cases most likely to be affected by a foster-care panic – a huge, sudden upsurge in needless removals after the death of a child “known to the system” — which also alters the threshold for placement.
Even among these cases, the figures are averages. Certainly there are some individual cases among the thousands studied in which foster care was the less harmful alternative. But what the data make clear is that foster care is vastly overused, damaging large numbers of children who would do better in life had they remained in their own homes, even with the minimal help most child welfare agencies offer to families.
THE EVIDENCE IS IN/2
This says less about how well child protection agencies do in helping families than it does about how enormously toxic a foster care intervention is. Anything that toxic must be used very sparingly and in very small doses.
- Child welfare agencies have a disingenuous response to all this: “Why yes, of course,” they like to say. “This research just shows what we’ve always said ourselves: foster care only should be used as a last resort; of course we keep families together whenever possible.” But this research shows that agency actions belie their words. These studies found thousands of children already in foster care who would have done better had child protection agencies not taken them away in the first place.
- The USA Today story quotes one deservedly well-respected expert as saying that the 2007 study was the first to produce such results. But that is an error. Actually it was at least the second since 2006. A University of Minnesota study used a different methodology and measured different outcomes, but came to very similar conclusions. And now, of course, there is this third, largest study of all.
- Though the USA Today story says other “studies” go the other way, the one cited, with less than 1/100th the sample size of the new studies, a shorter duration and at least one other serious flaw (omitting foster children in care for less than six months) is the only one we know of. And that study focused on reunification, not on children never removed in the first place.
- And, of course, that study also compared foster care only to typical “help” for families in their own homes, which generally is little or nothing. Providing the kinds of real help NCCPR recommends (See our publication, Doing Child Welfare Right) would likely change the result and, in the case of the three more recent and more rigorous studies, create an even wider gap in outcomes favoring keeping families together. Perhaps most intriguing, these studies suggest it actually may be possible to quantify the harm of a foster-care-panic.
Thanks to these studies, we now have an estimate of how much worse foster children do on key outcomes compared with comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes. It’s also usually possible to calculate how many more children are taken away during a foster-care panic. So it should be possible to estimate how many more children will wind up under arrest, how many more will become pregnant and how many more will be jobless as a result of a foster-care panic.
It also should be possible to estimate roughly how many children have been saved from these rotten outcomes in states and localities that have reformed their systems to emphasize safe, proven programs to keep families together.
These new studies and the Minnesota study are in addition to the comprehensive study of foster care alumni showing that only one in five could be said to be doing well as a young adult – in other words, foster care churns out walking wounded four times out of five. (See NCCPR’s publication, 80 Percent Failure for more on this study) and the mass of evidence showing that simply in terms of physical safety, real family preservation programs have a far better track record than foster care. (See NCCPR Issue Paper #1).
The current buzzword in child welfare is “evidence-based.” What that really means is: How dare proponents of any new, innovative approach to child welfare expect to get funding if they can’t dot every i and cross every t on evaluations proving the innovation’s efficacy beyond a shadow of a doubt? Old, non-innovative programs, however, are not held to this standard. If they were, child welfare would be turned upside down by the results of this new research.
Because now, more than ever, the evidence is in.
NB: This is an NCCPR Issue paper and the link to the paper with its full links is above.
By Peter Weiss
by Brian Shilhavy
Editor, Health Impact News
link to article on Medical Kidnap
Imagine a day where every child born in a hospital gets ranked on whether or not their parents will be good enough parents to take care of them, and a risk score is attached to that child based on how the government views the child’s parents.
If the risk score is too low, the parents do not get to take their child home. The child is seized by the government and assigned new parents through the multi-billion dollar foster care system.
Does this sound like something terrible from a science fiction movie? Or something that might happen in other tyrannical countries where parents have little or no choice over how their children are raised?
This system is actually already in place and is already being used in many states all across the U.S.
Richard Wexler from the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform published an excellent piece last week on the topic of “Predictive Analysis” in child welfare, and how Allegheny County, which includes Pittsburgh and surrounding suburbs, is now using a system like this to label every child born in the county with a “risk score” which supposedly tells Child Protective Services how likely parents are to abuse their newborn children.
From Pittsburgh’s child welfare agency goes full Orwell:
It is perhaps the ultimate Orwellian nightmare: From the moment your child is born, the child and family are labeled with a “risk score” – a number that supposedly tells authorities how likely you are to abuse your newborn. The big government agency that slaps this invisible scarlet number on you and your newborn promises it will be used only to decide if you need extra help to raise your child, and the help will be voluntary.
But once you’re in the database, that score stays there forever. And if, someday, the same big government agency wants to use the score to help decide you’re too much of a risk to be allowed to keep your child, there is nothing to stop them. The scarlet number may haunt your family for generations. The fact that your child was supposedly born into a “high risk” family may be used against the child when s/he has children.
Welcome to the dystopian future of child welfare – and childbirth – in metropolitan Pittsburgh, Pa.
As we have reported in previous articles, in places where Predictive Analysis software is used for risk assessment for child abuse, poor minorities are targeted as more likely to have a high risk score.
From Wexler’s article
For a couple of years now, Allegheny County, which includes Pittsburgh and surrounding suburbs, has been using something called the Allegheny Family Screening Tool (AFST), a predictive analytics algorithm, to help decide which families should be investigated as alleged child abusers.
The algorithm is weighted heavily toward punishing parents for being poor. In her brilliant book, Automating Inequality, Prof. Virginia Eubanks calls it “poverty profiling.” In her review of Automating Inequality, Prof. Dorothy Roberts (a member of NCCPR’s Board of Directors) extends the analysis to show how predictive analytics reinforces racial bias.
County Starts “Hello Baby” Program in January 2020
According to Wexler, starting in January, 2020, the county plans to start a program it calls “Hello Baby” which will assist them in getting newborn babies into their database. To NOT have your baby included in the database, one has to “opt out,” but how to opt out is apparently not clearly defined yet.
Here’s how the county says it will work.
During some of the most chaotic hours of a family’s life, those hours in the hospital after a baby is born, when one medical professional, volunteer or other hospital-affiliated person after another is traipsing in and out of the room, the family will be handed a packet of information about the help available through “Hello Baby.” A nurse may also discuss the program with the family.
The program offers three tiers of services. Tier 1 is automatically available to everyone without having to surrender their data. That tier is simply information about help that’s already out there. Tiers two and three provide more intensive help to individual families. But to get that help you must accept having the child labeled by an algorithm as at moderate or high risk of abuse.
The program automatically assumes you have given permission for this massive invasion of family privacy – it’s the equivalent of a “default setting” on an app you may download without realizing how much data you surrender in return. (Or just think of all the data you may have given to Facebook to share at will because you didn’t find the right button among the settings.)
The “Hello Baby” document is vague about the whole opt-out process. You get one notice – in the form of a postcard mailed to your home a few days after the child is born. Along with a reminder of the benefits of “Hello Baby” somewhere on that postcard will be a notification that you must specifically opt out of being run through the database – otherwise you and your child are slapped with that risk score whether you really wanted to participate or not.
The material made available by Allegheny County does not mention how much time you have to opt out before your name is run through the database. Nor does it say anything about expunging a risk score if you choose to opt out after the county has already done it.
Can We Trust Government with “Risk” Data?
In his article Wexler points out how government officials are dancing around ethic problems and trying to assure the public that the system will be voluntary, and that they will never misuse the data.
The biggest problem with this promise, of course, is that it depends on health officials and CPS to police themselves.
As an example of how this kind of data can be misused to take children away from their parents, Wexler mentions a case in New York earlier this year where a mother had her children rated as “at risk” simply because she disclosed that during her pregnancy with twins, she used cannabis for medical purposes.
Shakira Kennedy wrote about her experiences in the New York Daily News:
I am a 28-year-old loving mother and a taxpaying citizen. I have a beautiful 7-year-old daughter in a gifted and talented program and two beautiful twin baby boys. I would do anything for my children.
Unfortunately, during my pregnancy with the twins, I suffered from extreme morning sickness and could not keep food or water down. I sought the best medical care, and my doctors told me I needed to gain weight for the health of my babies.
But the medicine they prescribed didn’t work. Nothing did, until I tried cannabis.
Making sure to tell my doctor everything, I disclosed that I smoked cannabis and it helped me eat normally. That’s when I became a victim of circumstance. When my children were born, they tested negative for marijuana. But still the hospital called ACS.
I made clear to ACS that I had to use marijuana under unique circumstances — but that I would not continue to use it. I asked to schedule a drug test to prove that it would no longer be in my system.
They made me go to court or face the loss all three of my children. Then, instead of ongoing drug-testing, I was compelled to go to an outpatient rehab program three days a week for an addiction I don’t have.
Now, I have complete strangers from ACS coming into my home and telling me what to do as a parent.
Unless I am able to win my case in Family Court and get my record sealed at a later hearing, I will be blacklisted for alleged child neglect — and unable to get any job near children until my twins turn 28. (Source.)
With a long history of CPS using whatever means they can to abduct children, Wexler has a healthy skepticism when it comes to trusting government sources who say they will never misuse risk assessment data.
County officials solemnly promise not to use the data that way – they say they’ll use it only to target help, and won’t make it a part of child abuse investigations. But even the promise has a loophole:
As the county’s “Hello Baby” overview puts it:
The County pledges that this Hello Baby analytic model will only be used to provide voluntary supportive services as described here and updated over time. [Emphasis added.]
But there is no institutional safeguard in place. There is nothing to stop the leaders of the agency that created “Hello Baby” and crave having data on every child from birth from changing their minds whenever they damn well feel like it.
When might that be? How about the first time there’s a child abuse tragedy and word leaks out that the family had been labeled “high risk” at the time of the child’s birth? That’s when the demands will come to make this information available immediately to child protective services and to use it to immediately trigger a CPS investigation – or worse.
Read the full article at the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform blog.
By Peter Weiss
Well, if you do any research into how these people operate, I mean any real research, research not prepared by them or the by the state or Federal governments, you’ll find out what’s really going on, what this whole thing is about. It’s certainly not about kids. It’s all about money and jobs.
Think about it. In my state, the DCF budget is pretty close to 1.2 billion dollars. That’s just for DCF as an agency. It doesn’t talk to anything coming from the Feds or any of the other agencies and contract people they utilize.
That’s a whole game unto itself. And that’s another story.
So apart from the agency, DCF and its workers, there’s all the government lawyers involved, the judges and juvenile courts and all their people, which range from court clerks to police. There’s the police and district attorneys and probation department people, and on and on.
Then there’s the doctors, social work agencies, dentists, specialists, psychological people and their agencies, and their experts, and on and on.
Then there’s the drivers and transportation agencies and all their workers and people, and on and on.
And on and on and on.
That’s how it works if you really look into it. DCF sits atop this big, multi-billion dollar empire like a god. DCF determines who gets contracts, which very often means who stays in business and who doesn’t. It can make or break agencies, even whole networks of agencies depending upon whether or not the people they utilize cooperate with what they want.
Cross them and you’re screwed. That’s how it is.
They can determine things you might never think of. For example, maybe some cops don’t like what they’re doing. Well then they find the cops who will do what they want for money. They can promise a cop a certain amount of overtime a month simply by choosing when to make a removal, what time of day. So twenty minutes before the shift ends, they call for the cops and make the removal so the cop assisting gets the overtime.
It’s a game to them. It’s a Darwin thing, you know, survival of them as an agency. And that’s how they play it. First and foremost is their survival as an agency and keeping their budget, ever expanding it, and their power, which of course is their budget.
That their priority is supposed to be helping kids who need help and families who need help and support, well… f—that.
Think I’m kidding? I’m not kidding at all. Think I’m crazy? That’s exactly what they want you to think. They want you to think I’m a bad parent, that I’ve done something wrong, that I’ve abused my kids.
Well I didn’t do anything wrong. In my whole life I’ve never hurt a fly let alone a person, especially and particularly my children who I so adore and for whom I’m spending my whole life’s everything to get them back. I’ve never done anything but give them the best of everything including the best of me. I’ve never hit them, hurt them, abused them or neglected them.
DCF doesn’t give a shit.
DCF just wants the money. Each of my children is worth about six thousand dollars a month to them. Their total payout for my kids is only about a thousand each, maybe a little less. That’s ten grand a month they’re making on my kids alone.
Here’s the facts. Less than one in four kids actually needs to be removed from a home. Less than one in four kids they remove are in actual physical danger or are being sexually or emotionally abused. More than three in four kids are removed just because DCF needs kids for the money. And the basis for the removals is an arbitrary standard they call neglect, a big blanket thing no one can actually see, feel or define.
Pick up a copy of all my works here: By Peter Weiss
link to article as posted here
By Richard Wexler
Suppose, hypothetically, you could gather in one room 333 former foster children. Now, suppose you asked how many of them had been abused while in foster care. Does anyone seriously believe that only one of those 333 former foster children would raise her or his hand?
Both common sense and an overwhelming mass of evidence says: Of course not.
But, apparently, Wendy Rickman wants us to believe it. That’s frightening, because Rickman is a high-ranking official in a state child welfare agency. She runs the division of adult, children and family services for the Iowa Department of Human Services (DHS).
In an exercise in alternative facts worthy of Kellyanne Conway, Rickman told state legislators in June: “For the kids that reside in foster care in the state of Iowa, 99.7 percent of the time are free from any kind of maltreatment — 99.7 percent.”
That’s one out of 333.
Rickman had plenty of reason to be on the defensive. At the time she made her claim there had been three horrific cases of child abuse, two of them fatal, in less than a year. All of them involved foster parents who adopted the children they allegedly abused. In the brief time since Rickman spoke there’s been a fourth case, again involving an adoptive parent.
Had the alleged abusers in even one of these horror-story cases been birth parents there would have been a wave of attacks on efforts to keep families together. Politicians would be railing about the state supposedly putting family preservation ahead of child safety — and there would be a foster care panic, a huge spike in needless removals of children.
But even after four cases involving foster care, no one is asking whether Iowa should re-examine its take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare — the state removes children at one of the highest rates in the country.
To help ensure that no one takes a close look at wrongful removal and how it endangers children, Rickman offers up her alternative facts.
She didn’t make up the 99.7 percent figure out of whole cloth — not exactly. Rather these are the official results when DHS investigates allegations of abuse in foster care — in other words, when DHS investigates itself. Other states get similar results when their child welfare agencies investigate themselves — and their child welfare officials make similar claims.
To see the extent to which DHS buries its head in the sand about abuse in foster and adoptive homes, consider the most recent case: There were 68 reports; an older sibling even posted video of the abuse on Facebook and gave it to authorities. But no one responded until the older sibling gave the videos to a newspaper.
That might help explain the 99.7 percent figure.
But compare those figures to studies done by independent researchers. In some cases, they went back and pored over case records. In other cases they really did ask former foster children what happened to them.
Here’s what they found:
- A study of foster children in Oregon and Washington state found that nearly one third reported being abused by a foster parent or another adult in a foster home. That study didn’t even include cases of foster children abusing each other.
- In a study of investigations of alleged abuse in New Jersey foster homes, the researchers found a lack of “anything approaching reasonable professional judgment” and concluded that “no assurances can be given” that any New Jersey foster child is safe.
- A study of cases in metropolitan Atlanta found that among children whose case goal was adoption, 34 percent had experienced abuse, neglect or other harmful conditions. For those children who had recently entered the system, 15 percent had experienced abuse, neglect or other harmful conditions in just one year.
So is it any wonder that even Marcia Lowry, former executive director of the group that calls itself Children’s Rights and no friend of family preservation, says:
“I’ve been doing this work for a long time and represented thousands and thousands of foster children, both in class-action lawsuits and individually, and I have almost never seen a child, boy or girl, who has been in foster care for any length of time who has not been sexually abused in some way, whether it is child-on-child or not.”
This does not mean that all, or even many, foster parents are abusive. The majority do the best they can for the children in their care — like the overwhelming majority of parents, period. But the abusive minority is large enough to cause serious concern — or at least it should.
When the Arizona Republic found that its own reporting was turning up far more abuse in foster care than the state was letting on, they took a closer look. They found:
“Both in Arizona and nationally, there is a huge disconnect. In 2014, of 46 states that reported data to the Federal Children’s Bureau, all claimed that fewer than 2 percent of children in foster care had been harmed in the prior year. Arizona said that barely a tenth of 1 percent of children in care were verifiably harmed.
“But in surveys going back for decades, from 25 percent to as high as 40 percent of former foster children report having been abused or neglected in care.”
If anything, the problem is likely to be worse in Iowa because the state’s high rate of removal overloads the foster care system, increasing the pressure to ignore warning signs about abuse.
Instead of facing up to this mess, Rickman rubs rhetorical salt in the wounds of all those abused foster children by telling lawmakers the harm done to them never happened.
If Wendy Rickman seriously believes what she told legislators she should be fired for willful ignorance.
If she doesn’t really believe it, she should be fired for misleading lawmakers.
Pick up a copy of all my works here: By Peter Weiss
This is a follow-up article to the article presented entitled: Texas Senator Exposes Corruption with CPS and Child Abuse Doctors Over Medical Kidnapping of 4-Year-Old Child. link to complete story here
Please note: it is reprinted directly from MedicalKidnap.com. It is being presented here in three installments due to length. This is the 3rd and final installment. The article in its entirety can be found here: link to full article here.
State Senator Bob Hall, who attended the July 2 hearing, recently recounted his observations and his disbelief at the “egregious miscarriage of justice” that is taking place in the case.
To add to the list of offenses, when the July 2 hearing began it was discovered that CPS and the Attorney Ad. Litem had failed to respond to the valid discovery requests from the Pardo’s attorney.
Observers in the courtroom were left searching for anything that CPS had done correctly during their gross mishandling of the case.
Despite the lack of any evidence against the family and the admissions by CPS of their gross and repeated mishandling of the case, Judge Michael Chitty granted every single request made by CPS’s attorney, including leaving Drake in CPS custody, and issued a gag order preventing the family from discussing the case publicly.
CPS saves thousands of children from legitimate situations of abuse. Their incredibly difficult job and the considerable weight of their responsibility is something that none of us should envy. However, when laws are broken without a second thought, CPS can quickly become the source of trauma in a child’s life.
When this happens, judges, lawmakers, and the public must be willing to stand up to defend innocent families.
The jaw-dropping events of the Pardo case follow a series of high profile and egregious errors committed by CPS overreach in Texas.
- In 2018, CPS was sanctioned $127,000 for lying to a Houston judge and fabricating an emergency in order to seize the 2 children of Melissa and Dillon Bright.
- Also in 2018, the two children of Lyndsay and Jason Grant were severely abused during a short stay in the foster care system when CPS wrongfully removed their children after having officially ruled out any abuse by the family.
- In 2017, the Tutt family came through a 3-year nightmare after a CPS caseworker perjured herself and the agency accused the family of having no “state approved homeschool curriculum,” something that does not exist.
- In 2016, CPS was ordered by a Houston judge to pay $27,000 in sanctions and to have agency staff read the U.S. and Texas Constitutions after the judge said CPS “knowingly mislead the court” in order to remove a child who they knew was not in any danger.
- In 2011, CPS was sanctioned $32,000 when the judge found that CPS had acted in “bad faith” to obtain an “illegal” emergency order for the removal of three children.
Since the removal of Drake, the Pardos’ two other children have been fearful of any strangers who enter the house and have asked repeatedly why their brother was taken.
Observers in the courtroom described the illegal removal of Drake Pardo as a “state-sanctioned kidnapping.”
We can’t let them get away with breaking the law and abusing the Pardo family. We need your help to #BringDrakeHome.
So, what can you do to help?
The homeschool community has often rallied to defend each other from state overreach. It’s time to do it again. THSC is raising money to cover the costs of what could be a very expensive legal defense for the Pardos. We need to raise $100,000 to bring Drake home.
Here is what you can do to help #BringDrakeHome:
- Donate and sign the petition to #BringDrakeHome.
- Call Governor Abbott and tell him that Drake Pardo was illegally removed from his family and that Texas needs Governor Abbott to make CPS reform a priority during the legislative interim and during the next legislative session in 2021 (check the action tool below for instructions).
- Pray for the family and for Drake’s safe return.
It is easy to invade one home at a time. If we let them get away with this, they will do it again.
Pick up a copy of all my works here: By Peter Weiss
This is a follow-up article to the article presented entitled: Texas Senator Exposes Corruption with CPS and Child Abuse Doctors Over Medical Kidnapping of 4-Year-Old Child. link to complete story here
Please note: it is reprinted directly from MedicalKidnap.com. It is being presented here in three installments due to length. This is the 2nd installment. The article in its entirety can be found here: link to full article here.
The Background:
THSC has launched a campaign to raise money for the Pardos’ legal expenses. The Pardos are a homeschool THSC member family. The Pardo case has gained media attention due to egregious and repeated violations of the law committed by CPS. After refusing to inform the family of allegations against them, the agency fabricated an emergency to remove the child, ultimately pressuring a judge to grant them temporary conservatorship of Drake at a hearing on July 2.
The events have put the homeschool community, the family’s State Senator, and the media in an uproar.
CPS first made contact with the family on June 7, leaving a business card on the family’s door. Two weeks later, after repeated and unsuccessful attempts by the family and their attorney to obtain any information about the case, CPS suddenly declared an “emergency” and forcibly removed Drake from his home.
At the time of the removal, advocates from Family Rights Advocacy and the Parent Guidance Center were live on the phone, attempting to de-escalate the situation.
In a rough cell phone video captured by the family, the Pardos remained calm but can be seen challenging the caseworker’s claim to a two-week delayed “emergency” and the decision to suddenly remove Drake. Drake’s father, Daniel, can be heard for several minutes attempting to keep Drake calm as he is placed into the police car and as he asks repeatedly why his father is not coming with him.
On April 22, nearly two months prior to this horrific incident, the Pardos had filed an official complaint against Children’s Medical Center because of the refusal of one of Drake’s doctors to visit him while he was admitted to the hospital.
Children’s informed the family that they would review the matter and resolve it within 45 days. On day 46, with the family still having heard nothing from the Children’s Medical Center, CPS showed up at the family’s door with an affidavit signed by one of the hospital’s doctors and removed Drake.
At a hearing on July 2, approximately 100 homeschoolers arrived to support the Pardos and their attorney as they argued that Drake should be returned home. During the hearing, testimony from CPS and Dr. Dakil of Children’s Medical Center left the audience in shock.
Dr. Dakil admitted on the stand that:
- She had never seen or met with Drake or his parents;
- She had no first-hand knowledge of Drake’s medical conditions;
- The concerns listed in her affidavit were all speculative and she could not confirm them or rule them out without speaking to the parents, a step she had not yet taken;
- Her concerns were not an emergency;
- She had not requested that Drake be removed from his home and only wanted CPS to facilitate a meeting with the family on June 10 to help address her concerns;
- She was surprised when CPS chose to remove Drake from his home;
- Going forward, her concerns could all be alleviated by having a sit-down conversation with the parents to create a treatment plan and having both parents attend future medical visits;
- She was not sure how that would be possible as long as Drake remained in CPS custody as CPS had been given conservatorship of Drake;
The CPS caseworker and her supervisor admitted in testimony that prior to the removal CPS had:
- never seen or talked to the child, the parents, family members, neighbors, or any doctors who had first-hand knowledge of Drake’s condition;
- not conducted a background investigation;
- not pursued multiple opportunities to resolve the issue without removal;
- refused to disclose the allegations to the parents or to their lawyer;
- had no firsthand knowledge of any wrongdoing by the parents;
- had intentionally not informed the family of the June 10 meeting requested by Children’s Medical Center.
- decided there was an “emergency” because the family failed to attend the June 10 meeting they were never informed of.
- decided there was an emergency based on the concerns provided by Dr. Dakil, despite Dr. Dakil’s testimony that her concerns were not an emergency.
State Senator Bob Hall, who attended the July 2 hearing, recently recounted his observations and his disbelief at the “egregious miscarriage of justice” that is taking place in the case.
To add to the list of offenses, when the July 2 hearing began it was discovered that CPS and the Attorney Ad. Litem had failed to respond to the valid discovery requests from the Pardo’s attorney.
Observers in the courtroom were left searching for anything that CPS had done correctly during their gross mishandling of the case.
Despite the lack of any evidence against the family and the admissions by CPS of their gross and repeated mishandling of the case, Judge Michael Chitty granted every single request made by CPS’s attorney, including leaving Drake in CPS custody, and issued a gag order preventing the family from discussing the case publicly.
CPS saves thousands of children from legitimate situations of abuse. Their incredibly difficult job and the considerable weight of their responsibility is something that none of us should envy. However, when laws are broken without a second thought, CPS can quickly become the source of trauma in a child’s life.
When this happens, judges, lawmakers, and the public must be willing to stand up to defend innocent families.
(end of 2nd installment)
Pick up a copy of all my works here: By Peter Weiss
This is a follow-up article to the article presented entitled: Texas Senator Exposes Corruption with CPS and Child Abuse Doctors Over Medical Kidnapping of 4-Year-Old Child. link to complete story here
Please note: it is reprinted directly from MedicalKidnap.com. It is being presented here in three installments due to length. This is the 1st installment. The article in its entirety can be found here: link to full article here.
by Texas Home School Coalition Association
On Friday, August 9, a status hearing was held in the Pardo case where the court considered what action steps would have to be taken before Drake could be sent home. Judge Tracy Gray, the same judge who signed the original emergency removal order on June 20, presided over the case. The tone of the hearing was strikingly different than the post-removal July 2 hearing presided over by Judge Michael Chitty, which Senator Bob Hall described as an “egregious injustice.”
While the scope of topics which may be considered at a status hearing is extremely narrow, several startling revelations were still made. Most strikingly, CPS brazenly asked that the court order Ashley and Daniel Pardo to admit to medical child abuse and to having “severe” mental health problems before they could have their son returned to them.
Nearly as incredible was when CPS was asked on the stand whether they had followed the required legal process in the construction of their recommendations for how the family could have their son returned home. When asked if they had followed CPS rules, along with state and federal law, the CPS caseworker responded “no.” The law requires that CPS develop the recommendations collaboratively with the family. Instead, CPS brought their pre-printed plan (which included a required admission of guilt) to the July 23 meeting with the family and then accused the family of “not cooperating” when they rejected the plan.
The Attorney Ad. Litem also asked the court to prohibit THSC from posting any updates about the case on social media, something the court has no jurisdiction to do because THSC is not a party to the case.
Judge Tracy Gray chastised CPS for the ridiculous list of requests included in their report to the court. Judge Gray threw out every item challenged by the family’s attorneys, ordered CPS to “expedite” their efforts to place Drake with family or friends, and to start allowing the family to bring a third party witness to visits with Drake, something CPS has prohibited thus far.
While the hearing was a great success for the family, there is still a long way to go. Judge Gray clearly appeared frustrated by CPS’ brazenly unconstitutional requests (like a court-ordered admission of guilt). This offers a ray of hope that CPS may not be able to continue getting away with their illegal actions.
Intervention from the Dallas Court of Appeals:
On August 2, Ashley and Daniel Pardo requested emergency intervention by the Dallas Court of Appeals after their son, Drake Pardo (age four), was illegally taken from his family by Child Protective Services (CPS) on June 20.
The family filed two motions asking the Court of Appeals to intervene on an emergency basis to stop the abuse being allowed by district Judge Michael Chitty. The family’s first motion was a petition for Mandamus, asking the appellate court to return Drake home and detailing how Judge Chitty abused his discretion by removing Drake from Ashely and Daniel without any evidence against them.
In their second motion, the family filed an emergency Motion To Suspend, asking the court to immediately dismiss Judge Chitty’s latest order on the basis that it was illegally issued and it harms the rights of Ashley, Daniel, and Drake.
According to the family’s Mandamus petition, “The trial court is supposed to be the gatekeeper to ensure that actions taken by CPS conform to Texas Constitutional and statutory law, and the trial court utterly failed to perform that vital function.” If the appellate court grants the emergency orders the family could get immediate relief and have their son returned home. If not, the family may have to seek emergency assistance from the Texas Supreme Court.
On August 5, CPS filed a response to the family’s second emergency motion. In their response, CPS argues that Ashley and Daniel have nothing to complain about because Drake is receiving the same medical care which Ashley and Daniel would have given him. The response details repeatedly how the family has agreed to every medical recommendation being suggested for Drake and how the parents stated to the court that they plan to follow all recommendations from Drake’s doctors. CPS argues that because CPS and the parents plan to give Drake identical medical care, that therefore no harm is done by Drake remaining in state custody.
In essence, CPS claims that because the state is handling Drake’s medal needs the same way Drake’s actual parents had planned to, that he might as well remain in state custody. It’s hard to imagine a more callous view of family rights than this.
Apparently, the state does not believe that removing a child from his home or his family has any negative effect that the appellate court should consider.
The Court of Appeals has ordered CPS to file a response to the family’s petition for Mandamus by August 12 and will likely rule on the Motion to Suspend within the next few days.
(end 1st installment)
Pick up a copy of all my works here: By Peter Weiss
And you wonder why people explode, why they want to just, you know, like, kill people. Of course I don’t mean kill as in actually kill someone. But I was feeling that I wanted run up to the judge and slap him silly, say “What the fuck is wrong with you? Can’t you see what’s going on here?”
But then that’s what they want. They want you to lose it, to go berserk so they can say they’ve been right all along. And that’s what they were waiting for from me, both in and out of court. That and for me to go broke.
Option B, the other option to cutting a deal of some sort, was for my lawyer to turn my case over to one of the smaller lawyers in private practice that he knew, one who would work for about a third of what he cost. He assured me that this other lawyer was every bit as good as he was. However, he had fewer resources and was a bit busier personally because he had less help and had to carry more cases on his own shoulders. But since he had much less overhead, he was much less expensive.
My lawyer assured me that he had plenty of experience. He wasn’t too clear on whether it would be a good thing to switch lawyers in terms of the case, this because it would signal to CPS that I was running out of funds or that I couldn’t afford to continue on the way we were going.
So I told him I would think about it, but I’d already made up my mind. I was willing, at least I thought so at the moment, to sell my house, even to go move in with my parents and to change our lives completely if I could only get my kids back.
I told him that I would probably continue on the way we were and that I would do my best to get him some money as quickly as I could. I told him that this meant getting money from my father, my father was already telling me that he had to take a home equity loan on his house in order to be able to access any funds.
And so there we were face-to-face, back on the clock again and discussing my case.
My lawyer told me that if I continued with him, and again he reminded me that he thought it would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $100,000, that at the next court date he would see about if they were willing to discuss options for getting the case over with quickly. He told me he could present to them the notion that it would be easier for them to find a way for unification with me and my children than it would for them to press for termination of parental rights. But he told me he couldn’t assure me they would agree to anything.
As we were speaking there were so many things we didn’t know, either him or me. But we would learn some of them at the next court date.
In his final instructions he told me to make sure that I was a model citizen at the visitations, that I did everything they asked of me, no matter how stupid or ridiculous it seemed. He reminded me that their game was to intimidate me and infuriate me, that they would do anything, including treating me like a baby and/or a moron, in order to do so. He reminded me that they were out to make me have an emotional outburst or go broke.
And then he said something very interesting. He told me that this case was no longer, and maybe never was, about my children. He told me it was about them and money.
