Eldorado, USA - A year after a massive child welfare raid at a West Texas ranch run by a polygamist sect, some legislators want to rewrite the laws that guided the state's actions during an investigation into whether young girls there were being forced to marry older men.
Disturbed by news images of hundreds of children being separated from their mothers, some lawmakers are seeking to clarify when the state should remove suspected perpetrators of child abuse and neglect from their homes — rather than remove the children. And to address the issue of minors being forced into plural marriages, they're considering extending the statute of limitations for bigamy.
Looking back, lawmakers say the state simply had no blueprint for how to handle what Texas officials have said was the largest removal of children in U.S. history.
"Our existing laws were not envisioned to accommodate this large of an incident," said state Rep. Drew Darby, R-San Angelo.
Meanwhile, members of the breakaway Mormon sect say that the proposed laws are part of a continued effort to target their religion and way of life.
"It's like saying, 'Let's pass certain laws that only apply to blacks, or only apply to Hispanics,'" said Willie Jessop, a member of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
State Rep. Harvey Hilderbran, R-Kerrville, has filed a bill that would, among other things, enhance criminal penalties for failing to report child abuse or neglect — a response to allegations by a grand jury that a sect doctor delivered babies of underage girls but did not report sexual abuse.
Hilderbran said that the proposal is about protecting children and is not intended to drive the sect out of Texas.
"However, if that's what happens, that's not a bad outcome," Hilderbran said. "The polygamy lifestyle does not fit Texas values."
On April 3, 2008, Texas officials entered Yearning for Zion Ranch, from which they would eventually take 439 children and scatter them around the state in foster care. The Texas Supreme Court ruled May 29 that the state had overreached in removing the children, and all but one have been returned to their families.
Asked about the impact of the raid, Jessop said: "Some people have been able to come to terms with it, but for other people, it's far more dramatic ... a real setback." About 70 percent of the families have returned to the ranch, he said. Some of the families have gone to join relatives in other states, while others have settled in San Antonio, Corpus Christi and other Texas cities, said Cynthia Martinez of Texas RioGrande Legal Aid, which represented some of the mothers.
State Sen. Jane Nelson, R-Flower Mound, said that as a mother of five, watching the children being taken "struck an emotional chord" and made her wonder why the alleged perpetrators weren't removed instead. But that should occur only "if the safety of all the children in the home can be assured," she said.
State officials feared that the mothers were encouraging their daughters to participate in underage marriages.
Child Protective Services already has the authority to remove alleged perpetrators but rarely uses it, said Patrick Crimmins, a spokesman for Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, which oversees CPS. Crimmins said that removing alleged perpetrators in this case wasn't an option because the families lied about the relationships among the parents and children.
"There was no way for investigators to determine who they should remove and who should be left behind," Crimmins said. "If they erred, they erred on the side of making sure all the children would be safe."
But Martinez said that the state should have found a way to evaluate the situation on a family-by-family basis.
"We strongly believe that the legislators should look at the situation and try to find out why it was allowed to happen to try to make sure that it never happens again," Martinez said. The sect members "might be a little different from the rest of us, but all in all they're good parents and these kids are back home and I think that's very telling."
The state spent $12.6 million on the child welfare operation, Crimmins said. As of January, the attorney general's office had spent an additional $223,000 on travel, office space rental and DNA testing to sort out sect members' family relationships, according to spokesman Jerry Strickland.
A CPS investigation report released in December states that 12 girls were victims of sexual abuse and that more than 260 others suffered neglect because they were exposed to sexual abuse in their households.
After the investigation began, the sect publicly clarified its policy on underage marriages, saying the church will not participate in them.
And CPS arranged for parenting classes. But except for the single pending child welfare case — involving a girl who is in foster care in San Antonio — CPS is no longer monitoring the families.
Asked whether the children are safe, Hilderbran said: "My guess is they aren't."
Meanwhile, a criminal investigation continues. A Schleicher County grand jury has indicted 12 men — including jailed sect leader Warren Jeffs — on charges including sexual assault of a child, bigamy, failure to report child abuse, conducting an unlawful marriage and tampering with evidence, Strickland said. Trials are set to begin in October.
The case has drawn national attention. On Monday, Oprah Winfrey dedicated her show to a visit to the ranch, where she asked residents about the raid, living in polygamy and the long dresses the women wear.
Today, to mark the anniversary, sect members plan to visit San Angelo's Fort Concho, where CPS took women and children after the raid. They're visiting in part because some fathers have never seen where there families were sent, Jessop said, and also to thank area residents who offered sect members blankets, money and lodging.
At its core, Nelson said, the case was like many other abuse and neglect cases, "except on an unprecedented scale and with the added mystery and public fascination over this lifestyle," Nelson said. "We may never know what truly happened in that compound."