CPS at the door; let them in?

Eliyahu Tulshinski

October 23, 2022

Many people have a natural instinct to refuse to cooperate with any invasion of their privacy, even when facing well intentioned government officials. Others feel the need to “prove” to authority figures that they have nothing to hide, particularly when they’ve done nothing wrong. It almost feels to them like they are being unnecessarily belligerent if they demand to see a search warrant or otherwise question government officials demanding entry to their property or answers to questions.

But what if the investigation initiated by government officials is not benign?

Conflicted police

We may want to open the door for police in hot pursuit of a murder suspect to show he’s not in our apartment. A person may be faced with an entirely different reality, though, when a police chief is under pressure to make an arrest in an unsolved murder case, or when a mayor running for reelection wants to show increased arrests and his police chief institutes “informal” quotas for drug arrests.

Frontline News covered the latter in Police plant drugs on minorities to meet arrest quotas. As for the former, a University of Michigan Law School project found hundreds of post-conviction exonerations following false murder confessions. They note that the Supreme Court, in the famous Miranda case, found unbearable interrogation techniques to be legal, albeit after being offered the right to refuse to answer questions:

The officers who conduct “modern” interrogations may lie about the evidence and tell the suspect that his fingerprints were found at the scene; that a codefendant already confessed and put the blame on him; that he was seen by an eyewitness. They routinely say that they already have him dead to rights [sic] and that this is his only chance to tell his side of the story and help his cause; that the victim must have provoked him; that what he did is understandable. They may describe dire consequences if he does not come clean, perhaps the death penalty, and imply leniency if he does. This can go on for days, in isolation, with police officers constantly repeating that they know the suspect is guilty, that the evidence is overwhelming, that this is his only chance to help himself.

This may give one pause when asked to cooperate in a police investigation.

There are investigations, though, that begin without a police presence.

Conflicted social workers

Child Protective Service (CPS) agents, generally government social workers, arrive at the door, unannounced, mostly without a police escort. Sometimes they say they just want to see the children, not the house. They generally do not say why they came. As parents try to determine who called CPS, they have to quickly decide whether to open the door and prove themselves innocent, or start an adversarial relationship that could lead to a search warrant with the same agent returning together with a police escort.

A factor in deciding is that, like police with arrest quotas or pressure to solve high profile crimes, CPS agents are also under pressure - not to make an arrest but to execute a child removal. In an exposé of CPS called These Little Ones, Diego Rodriguez lists the hundreds of thousands of dollars CPS receives for each child they remove from parents. CPS agents are under pressure to keep that revenue coming in order to guarantee their salaries.

Rodriquez himself had a grandson, Baby Cyrus, fall into CPS custody after being unable to hold down food when being weaned. His very public campaign against CPS ended with the case closed and Cyrus returned home, as chronicled in the exposé.

A California law firm which recommends always fighting CPS provides this advice as part of their 10 Things You Should do if CPS or DCFS is Investigating You:

Never invite any CPS or DCFS social worker or investigator into your home unless he or she has a warrant or court order. . . .

Do not even open the door to allow the CPS agent [to] look into your home to see your children: they can see something that creates an “emergency situation” even if it is not true.

Be FIRM. You should not waiver nor give in to thinking: “What’s the harm?” There is no compromise here: no exception. If you invite a County CPS investigator . . . into your home, you have just waived your Federally-protected fourth amendment constitutional protection. Just like a police detective intent on hauling you to the police station for questioning would love for you to willingly invite them into your home, a CPS social worker who is openly or secretly intent on taking your children from you WILL FIND SOMETHING IN YOUR HOME TO JUSTIFY THE REMOVAL OF YOUR KIDS.

This happens every day all over America. . . . The bar for removal is “whatever it needs to be” as far as the social worker is concerned. A legal prescription in your bathroom cabinet, a beer bottle on the coffee table, a kitchen knife not in the drawer, a broken window, a back door without a deadbolt, a missing smoke detector, a swimming pool without its own secondary safety fence: whatever might be necessary to fill out the paperwork to justify removal.

The law firm also recommends that parents record any interrogation of their child and have their doctor conduct a thorough physical examination of their child. While this may sound extreme, CPS does not only investigate parents on unfounded charges; they actually remove children in the absence of proof of those charges. In Indiana “only 15% of children taken away from their parents are ever substantiated for abuse or neglect.”

Lawyer up?

These cases rise to the level of legal fights over custody. In fact, LawInfo is replete with law firms in all 50 states specializing in CPS cases. Legal costs can destroy a family’s finances though. Can “regular” parents really find themselves in such a situation?

My kids?

Could a traumatizing investigation, with countless, unannounced visits, interrogations of children at their schools, and mounting legal fees come to a “normal” home? Family Preservation Foundation says the answer is, unfortunately, “yes”.

This traumatization of US children has reached epidemic proportions. According to a 10-year study by the American Public Health Association, [their] alarming estimate [is] that 37.4% of all children experience a child protective services investigation by age 18 years. That results in 27.7 million children investigated based upon the current U.S. population census of approximately 75 million children under age 18. . . .

What’s even more alarming is that a staggering 84% of all child removals are not related to any physical harm to the child whatsoever as reported to the US Congress in the AFCARS report. . . . Furthermore, 61% of the placements were considered neglect, which is based purely on social worker discretion, which basically translates to the freedom to do whatever the caseworker wants. What they see as “neglect” is often just what poverty looks like.

More about hospitals and CPS

Please see our previous articles on medical kidnapping: