Court rules against removal of polygamists’ children

HOUSTON – Texas authorities did not have the right to take more than 400 children from a secluded polygamist compound last month because officials never demonstrated that the children were in imminent danger, a state appeals court ruled Thursday.

It was not immediately clear whether Texas officials would have to return children to their mothers as a result of the ruling by the 3rd Court of Appeals in Austin. It was triggered by a lawsuit filed by Texas RioGrande Legal Aid, a group that represents 48 mothers in the ongoing child custody battle, one of the largest in U.S. history.

The decision, however, was another setback for Texas officials, who in recent days have been forced to admit that at least 15 of the young mothers the state initially detained as child brides were in fact adults. One turned out to be 27 years old.

Texas officials have maintained that they were legally compelled to remove all the children from the Yearning for Zion Ranch because their investigation had uncovered widespread evidence of children being sexually abused and of teenage girls, some visibly pregnant, who were in polygamous marriages with older men.

But members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a 10,000-member polygamist sect that split from the mainstream Mormon church after it banned polygamy in 1890, have strongly denied the state’s claims that all children were in danger of abuse in the compound’s communal dormitories.

Their attorneys have accused officials of whipping up mass hysteria about their religion based on scant evidence, and of separating breast-feeding infants from their mothers and scattering brothers and sisters in foster care from Amarillo to San Antonio without just cause.

“The way that the courts have ignored the legal rights of these mothers is ridiculous,” Julie Balovich, an attorney for the legal aid group said in a statement. “It was about time a court stood up and said that what has been happening to these families is wrong.”

Ongoing custody proceedings in court have shown that some girls were underage when they got married. But authorities have not been able to determine the identities of many of the children taken into custody. Many reportedly do not know their ages and answer to multiple mothers, a situation that polygamy experts said is not uncommon in plural marriages, where biological mothers are not always the ones who grow closest to children.

Texas officials invited church members to take DNA tests to prove they were the biological parents of some of the children, but few men showed up for the tests. The results have not yet been revealed.

The raid on the compound followed phone calls made by someone who identified herself as a 16-year-old girl named Sarah. She said she was inside the compound and was suffering abuse at the hands of her husband. State officials later disclosed that the calls appeared to have been made by a Colorado woman with a history of making false accusations, and an arrest warrant for the man the caller had identified as her abuser – who was living in Arizona – was eventually withdrawn.

miguel.bustillo@latimes