Trumpet Online | 07 Jul 2018
242 years ago American colonists declared independence from England, in the name of personal liberty.
What would it take for Americans to once again declare independence from an oppressive government?
For the colonists, it was excessive taxation without representation. It was also that English soldiers were quartered in their homes, as an occupying army. The English attempted to disarm them and shot into a crowd killing five in the lead up to the American Revolution.
Well, entire volumes could be written about the abuses Americans suffer at the hands of the government today.
But one especially egregious violation of rights is the state kidnapping children without due process.
No, I am not talking about immigrant children at the border.
(That is another whole topic, though I will weigh in briefly to say every human being who sets foot on American soil should have the right to due process and the rights of the accused.)
I am talking about Child Protective Services.
Has there ever been a more justifiable cause for revolution, than the state kidnapping your children?
Growing Abuse of Parents’ Rights
When a serious crime is committed against a child by his or her parents, of course it is right to remove that parent’s access to the child. The way society is currently organized, that responsibility falls to the government.
But in the United States, you are innocent until proven guilty. If you have committed a crime, you are afforded due process.
If the crime is serious enough, yes, you can be held in prison pending trial. Obviously, this removes your access to the victim. But accused criminals still have rights. Due process means going through various channels to make sure the government has a legitimate reason to search your home, arrest you, charge you, and sentence you if you are convicted.
Yet a father was told by Child Protective Services in Mississippi that they did not need a warrant to search his home.
His nightmare began when a Mississippi social worker, Kyra Reed (who also goes by Kyra Carson), knocked on his door demanding entrance without a warrant. Chambers was never told what the charges were. “She didn’t tell me what I was accused of and demanded to interview my 6-year-old daughter without my presence,” Chambers told PJM. “I told her that was unacceptable, but she was more than welcome to talk to her with me there without me interfering. She seemed perturbed, but accepted that. She then told me she wanted to search my house,” said Chambers. “I told her I had no problem with that, but wanted her to get a court order or a warrant as I am a bit of a constitutionalist and would just feel better having that respected. She was immediately angry. She hopped in her car without another word and drove off.”
The CPS agent then showed up with two sheriff’s deputies who were apparently meant to intimidate Michael Chambers into abandoning his rights. However he once again politely asked to see the warrant, which did not exist. The Sheriffs said they would not illegally search the home and the three left.
For this, the state retaliated.
According to Chambers, “She [Kyra Reed] told me that if I made her get a warrant, she would take my child instead.” Reed left again, unable to obtain illegal entry. But she didn’t stay away. “She returned with another sheriff’s deputy,” said Chambers. “I answered the door thinking that surely she would have [the warrant] this time and hopefully, we could just get this done and over with. I was instead handed a subpoena to appear in court in the morning and was told that they had taken my child from school.” No warrant was ever obtained.
PJM reached out to the sheriff of Warren County and was told that no warrant is necessary for CPS to take a child, but they would need a warrant to search a private home.
No warrant needed to take a child from a parent!
No charges. All the state had were calls from his apparently crazy ex who used their child as a thumb screw. He was not even told what crime he was suspected of until his child had already been taken.
The state appears to have invented an incident as justification for the kidnapping. They said Chambers went to his daughter’s school and caused a scene yelling, “I love Hitler!”
The school could produce no evidence of this, however–no videos, no recording, no witnesses. The school also gave false information when freedom of information requests were filed about the alleged incident.
The Sheriff wrote and signed a letter that he found no reports where Michael Chambers was ever named as a suspect, witness, or complainant at the elementary school. CPS appears to have made the incident up.
However, even in the unlikely event that the incident happened, this is still not just cause to take a child without due process.
[Judge] John Price, dismissed all charges of abuse and neglect against Michael Chambers in a subsequent hearing but placed Bell with her mother, whom she has not seen in four years, with no explanation or investigation into her suitability as a parent. Lawyers involved in the case said they had never seen any action like it and that the judge’s order might even be illegal.
Even worse is that Chambers daughter told him she was abused by other children while in foster care. And as you will see below, this too is unfortunately not uncommon.
Widespread Abuse
It might be tempting to write this off as some crazy rogue agent from the backwaters of the deep south.
But unfortunately, this is happening all over the country.
First, she removed a baby from her parents in an attempt to force a confession.
There was no evidence of abuse. But when neither parent would “cop to it,” as Judge Younge phrased it, she removed the baby from their custody. She refused to place the baby with a willing and fit grandmother, and eventually terminated parental rights altogether.
This went on for two years until last month, a higher court reversed all her decisions. The court issued a scathing rebuke of Judge Younge noting that she violated due process, failed to remain impartial, and had intentionally caused alienation of the family members in an attempt to force a confession.
Still, the Judge escaped punishment for her crimes. The appeals court simply suggested she recuse herself from the case.
But this was far from an isolated event.
On June 8th, a Judge reversed yet another of Younge’s cases. Again, the court found that Younge violated the due process rights of the children and parents, while failing to act in the best interests of the children. The Judge said there was no risk to the health or wellbeing of the children if they stayed in the home, and therefore grounds for removal were unfounded.
This time, Younge seemed motivated to take the children from their mother because the hearing lasted until six o’clock in the evening.
Younge interrupted the counsel multiple times to remark about the late hour, apparently less concerned for the children and more concerned that she was working late.
Reading the case, the mother in question certainly doesn’t seem like mother of the year. But the main reasons she found herself in family court with the custody of her children at stake was because her children missed too many days of school, and because she tested positive for marijuana.
Yet at the hearing in which custody was removed, evidence showed clean drug tests except for one marijuana “relapse.” The mother had also reduced the number of unexcused absences for her children from 72 the previous year, to merely 6 missed days of school.
So just like that, one woman’s decision tore another family apart.
What this means:
Forget the question, why is she still in court? Why is Judge Lyris Younge not in prison?!
The state Conduct Board began an investigation in May, and protesters amassed outside the courthouse to call for Judge Younge’s removal.
Another Judge took over Judge Younge’s cases. Yet the explanation was simply that Younge was taking an “extended chambers week” to write rulings. Taking time out of court to write rulings is normal, but having another Judge take over ongoing cases is not…
Judge Younge is still however employed–and continues to be paid–by the court.
Everyday in her court was a nightmare for parents. She decided the fate of families based entirely on her biases and whims. Some hadn’t even broken the law, but that did not stop Younge from taking their rights, and taking their children.
In another case Younge denied grandparents of two boys the right to foster the children. She did this without bothering to look at the evidence or allowing the grandparents to speak in court. Her excuse was that the grandparents lived across state lines. Yet they had already received state and federal clearance to foster the children, and nothing in the law prevented transfer of custody across state lines. The brothers were split up, and the older boy was later sexually abused in one of the foster homes.
Young also refused to reinstate custody to a mother the state accused of opioid abuse, despite the mother testing negative and accomplishing all other court ordered goals.
In another case, a woman’s daughters were removed over abuse allegations made against the woman’s boyfriend by her daughter. The allegations were later recanted, and the daughters told the court they wanted to go home to their mother. Younge refused. Last month Fernandes also reversed that decision, putting the family on track to be reunited.
We found at least three other desperate pleas from parents who claimed to have had their children and grandchildren removed from their custody by Judge Younge without reason. With no other recourse, victims of Younge are commenting on similar stories online, attempting to organize and make sense of the abuse they have suffered at her hands. (Note that we have not verified the claims of the commenters.)
Here is a Judge who expects not only that the parents in her court know the law. They are expected to behave in a subjective way in which Younge approves, depending on her tumultuous emotions–and how late into the evening she has worked.
Meanwhile, Younge herself blatantly runs roughshod over the very law, the Bill of Rights, which forms the foundation of the individual rights supposedly guaranteed to all Americans.
Why does one person have so much unconstitutional power? And at what point will she actually be removed or punished?
Any “justice system” that allows a psychopathic tyrant like this to go on destroying families in the name of the law is no system of justice at all.
Luckily Younge has now been reassigned out of family court, so at least she cannot victimize any more families. But what about punishment? Surely Younge’s behavior is as egregious as the British officials who administered the abuses of the colonists before the revolution.
But even if Younge was tarred and feathered–or better yet drawn and quartered [Editor’s note: The Trumpet Online does not agree with drawing and quartering.] –this does not address the underlying problem. The state has far too much power, and regularly abuses it.
Federal Incentive for Kidnapping
A Clinton era federal law called the Adoption of Safe Families Act hands out federal funds to states based on the number of children the state takes from parents. So abusive Child Protective Service agencies can be a nice source of revenue for states. They receive about $6,000 per child per month, while foster parents get about $600.
The law also gives states more power to split up families, take children permanently, and put them up for adoption. Some even see the sinister underpinnings of the law enabling child trafficking. This certainly wouldn’t be the first time the Clintons were associated with such horrors.
So we are left with runaway state agencies, protected and funded by the federal government.
They have the power to take your children, without due process, without a warrant, without charging you with a crime.
Remind me again when the colonists started shooting?
The post Kidnappers: The Tyranny of Child Protective Services Across the Nation appeared first on The Trumpet Online.
