TCRP Calls for Emergency Commission on State Treatment of El Dorado Children

TCRP Asks Texas Attorney General to Appoint Emergency Special Commission of Judges and Law Professors to Examine Raid on Religious Compound in El Dorado and CPS Efforts to Separate Children from Mothers

April 16 Letter to:

Greg Abbott
Attorney General of Texas

Re: raid on Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in El Dorado, Texas

Dear Attorney General:

The Texas Civil Rights Project calls upon you in your capacity as the Attorney General of Texas to appoint an emergency panel of judges and law professors to evaluate and make preliminary and final findings and recommendations regarding the raid and subsequent activity of Texas Child Protective Services to separate permanently more than 325 children from their mothers, and another 100 children 5-years-old and younger in limbo with their mothers.

Authorities say they were looking for a teenage girl who had reported being abused by her husband, but they have yet to identify or produce any evidence of the girl whose alleged call to a domestic violence hot line triggered the April 3 raid. In any regard, that would not seem legally sufficient to justify the wholesale raid and now current efforts by CPS to separate all the mothers and children.

From all appearances at this juncture and singular lack of evidence, the raid and CPS actions seem to be prompted more by intolerance for a religious group that does not conform to the ideas of majority society. If this is the case, it would be a grievous transgression of the religious freedom guarantees of the Texas and Federal Constitutions and wreak untold havoc and pain on innocent young children. I am sure you would agree the state should not rip apart these mother-child relationships without proper legal cause — and that would not include religious persecution.

Nor should the taxpayers of Texas shoulder the enormous law enforcement charges and phenomenal legal costs that will be incurred in CPS’ efforts to use the courts to break up these peaceful and peaceable families.

Because of the ongoing and volatile situation that may cause permanent damage to such young children and their mothers, we respectfully ask that you convene this panel immediately so that the judges and law professors can make immediate interim recommendations and end this consummate miscarriage of justice, if they indeed find that is what is occurring.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Cordially,
James C. Harrington