Texas officials who took 416 children from a polygamist retreat into state custody sent many of their mothers away, as a judge and lawyers struggled with a legal and logistical morass in one of the biggest child-custody cases in US history.
Of the 139 women who voluntarily left the compound with their children since an April 3 raid, only those with children 4 or younger were allowed to continue staying with them on Monday, said Marissa Gonzales, spokeswoman for the state Children’s Protective Services (CPS) agency. She did not know how many women stayed.
“It is not the normal practice to allow parents to accompany the child when an abuse allegation is made,” she said.
PHOTO: AP
The women were given a choice: Return to the Eldorado ranch of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a renegade Mormon sect, or go to another safe location. Some women chose the latter, Gonzales said.
On Monday night, about three dozen women, many of them mothers, sobbed and held each other outside a log cabin on the sect’s ranch, recounting the way police officers encircled them in a room and told them that they could not stay.
One woman, Marie, said the women weren’t allowed to say goodbye to their crying children.
“They said, ‘your children are ours,”’ said the sobbing 32-year-old, whose three sons are aged nine, seven and five and who would not give her last name. “We could not even ask a question.”
She said the children at the ranch had not been abused, but she felt like “they are being abused from this experience.”
The women believe the abuse complaint that led to the raid came from a bitter person outside their community.
The state is accusing the sect of physically and sexually abusing the youngsters and wants to strip their parents of custody and place the children in foster care or put them up for adoption. The sheer size of the case was an obstacle.
“Quite frankly, I’m not sure what we’re going to do,” Texas District Judge Barbara Walther said after a conference that included three to four dozen attorneys either representing or hoping to represent youngsters.
The mothers were taken away on Monday after they and the children were taken by bus under heavy security out of historic Fort Concho, where they had been staying, to the San Angelo Coliseum, which is used for hockey games, rodeos and concerts.
Some of the children’s mothers complained to Texan Governor Rick Perry that the children were getting sick in the crowded fort. About 20 children had a mild case of chickenpox, Sandra Guerra-Cantu of the state Health Department said.
Perry spokesman Robert Black said the governor did not believe the children were being housed in poor conditions at the West Texas fort.
“Let’s be honest here, this is not the Ritz,” Black said, but he called the accommodations “clean and neat.”
Monday’s courtroom conference was held to work out ground rules for a court hearing beginning tomorrow on the fate of the children.
The 139 mothers who voluntarily left the sect to be with their children will need lawyers, too, to help them fight for custody.
The raid followed a call to a hotline from a 16-year-old who said she was raped and beaten by her 50-year-old husband.
Betty Balli Torres, executive director of the Texas Access to Justice Foundation, said 10 women went into the San Angelo legal aid office last week seeking help and reported there were 100 other women who needed lawyers.
Attorneys began meeting with the women over the weekend. She said it was vital that the mothers be represented by lawyers.
A church lawyer, Rod Parker, said the 60 or so men remaining on the 688-hectare ranch have offered to leave the compound if the state would allow the women and children to return to the place with child welfare monitors. But the state CPS agency said it had not yet seen the offer and had no comment on it.
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