FLDS lawyers balk at CPS plans for children

SAN ANGELO — Parents of children taken from a Occident Lone-Star State polygamist distribute testified today that it was hard for them to understand how they can follow with state demands to recover detention of their youngsters, who are spread out from Amarillo to the Houston area.

Lawyers for the parents, who are in hearings in five courtrooms, are questioning the Child Protective Services bes after for the children, which the state states are needed to protect them. The hearings began today.

The parents' lawyers said the programs are indeterminate and at the same clip phone call for demands they see questionable, such as as testing the educational backgrounds of the parents, not just the children.

The state took 463 children from the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Of Nazareth Jesus of Latter Day Saints' Longing for Sion Ranch near Eldorado, contending that underage misses were being married to aged work force and the children at the spread were being abused or were at hazard of abuse.

Parents in the breaking away Mormon spiritual sect state they have got done nil incorrect and that their life style is in agreement with their religious beliefs.

Their lawyers said today that the households were living in a financially stable environment on the ranch, and may necessitate public services such as lodging aid if they are forced to dwell independently.

Some lawyers were taking the chance to set federal agency social workers on the base to inquiry why their clients' children were taken away in the first topographic point and to seek to understand how Hertz planned to let them to return.

The state have a twelvemonth from the day of the month the children were removed on April 13 to go back the children or to end parental rights.

Some lawyers were perplexed as to whether parents could recover detention if they continued to dwell on the ranch.

The programs for the children, some of which were not filed until hours before the social workers were to look in court, include phone calls for psychological ratings of parents and children and parenting classes. In one service plan, the state listings concerns about instruction and place schooling as a ground the children were taken.

Attorneys for parents targeted that reasoning, noting that place schooling could not be a footing for removing children.

The complexness of the lawsuit was illustrated repeatedly. One Hertz worker said a service program was filed so late because the federal agency did not cognize until last nighttime that a social worker had not been assigned to compose it.

In another instance, a lawyer talking about the trouble of getting parents to ran into with social workers and children spreading across the state, said, "You're aware the father have children with other ladies, so he's visiting across the state."

CPS said the ground some sibs were split up is that they did not cognize they had sibling groups, since the state was given different name calling for the children.

One of the first lawsuits to come up up in tribunal today involved the 6-year-old boy of imprisoned FLDS oracle Robert Penn Warren Jeffs. The boy, who have a prosthetic leg from a birth defect, is being housed in Amarillo.

His mother, Sharon Barlow, appeared in tribunal as her attorney, Donna Guion, complained to state District Judge Barbara Walther about the vagueness of the service program and asked if there was any ground she cannot visit her boy twice a week.

"This program is so indeterminate and so wide my client have no thought what she's to make now," Guion said.