HOUSTON — Texas authorities had no right to take more than 400 children from a secluded polygamist compound last month because officials never proved that the children were in imminent danger, a state appeals court ruled Thursday.
The ruling by the 3rd Court of Appeals in Austin did not specifically call for the state to return the children to their mothers. But it laid waste to the state's arguments for taking the children, opening the door for at least some of the polygamist families to be reunited within weeks.
The decision was triggered by a lawsuit brought by Texas RioGrande Legal Aid, a nonprofit group that represents 38 mothers in the ongoing child custody battle, one of the largest in U.S. history.
"The way that the courts have ignored the legal rights of these mothers is ridiculous," said Julie Balovich, an attorney for the legal aid group, in a statement. "It was about time a court stood up and said that what has been happening to these families is wrong."
The ruling was another setback for Texas officials, who in recent days have conceded that at least 15 of the mothers the state had initially detained as child brides are, 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 that children were being sexually abused and that teenage girls, some visibly pregnant, were in polygamous marriages with older men.
But members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints -- a 10,000-member sect that long ago split from the Mormon Church, which banned polygamy in 1890 -- have strongly denied state claims that all the children were in danger of abuse in the compound's communal dormitories.
The appeals court sided with the sect, ruling that the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services erroneously treated the entire 1,691-acre YFZ Ranch in western Texas as an individual household.
It concluded that even if state officials could prove abuse was occurring in some families, it did not mean all children were at risk. The court also noted that state officials had presented no evidence showing that boys and prepubescent girls were in peril.
"Even if one views the FLDS belief system as creating a danger of sexual abuse by grooming boys to be perpetrators of sexual abuse and raising girls to be victims of sexual abuse, as the department contends, there is no evidence that this danger is 'immediate' or 'urgent,' " the ruling stated.
