Siblings Not Kept Together, Another Adult Mother Held as Minor Child

Updates below::
In at least one state that I know of, homelessness itself is grounds for removal of your children. In Texas, CPS workers aer telling parents that if they return to their homes at the YfZ ranch, they will not get to see their children, forcing families into homelessness. Will this then result in grounds for keeping the children? I don't know.

I do know Texas CPS (which is called some other acronym) scares me to death, and I do not think comparing them to the Gestapo is over the top. Consider this family's plight:

James and Nancy Dockstader described living mostly in the covered bed of their truck, traveling to the far corners of Texas in hope of seeing their five children. Another FLDS couple, Rulon and Lorene Keate, said they drive from one end of the huge state to another for three days at a time, trying to see their six children. And even when there are visits, they said, the men who say they are the children’s fathers are not allowed to visit them at all.

“It is truly a nightmare. We just are empty,” James Dockstader told TODAY’s Meredith Vieira in an interview Monday in New York. “We need our children returned. Life is nothing without them.”

You can see a picture of the couple if you click on the link.

CPS' incompetence is causing trauma, hardship, and suffering for these parents and their children:

“I’ve seen my two daughters once. I haven’t seen my sons,” said Nancy Dockstader. “It’s been 37 days since I’ve seen my sons. It’s because they don’t have a caseworker — they say if they don’t have a caseworker, we can’t see them.”

But it's-all-about-the-children, and CPS cares so much about the children.

The Keates have six children aged 1 to 9 in custody. Lorene Keate told Vieira that two are in San Antonio in west Texas, three are in Liverpool, near Houston in east Texas, and one is near Amarillo, in the Texas panhandle at the northern end of the state.

“I tell them that I love them. The first time that I went to see them, they thought I was coming to take them home. When I left them, it was really hard on them,” she said as she fought back tears.

There is something deeply, fundamentally basically wrong with a country and a system that permits a state agency this much power over people's lives with such no standard of proof, little oversight, and no checks or balances:

Willie Jessop, a spokesman for families from the ranch, said the state has instead purposely scattered children as widely as possible. “They have everyone split up from one end of Texas to another,” he told Vieira. “They have purposely put these parents where they have to be on the road 24/7 to see their children.”

The Dockstaders and Keates confirm that, saying they have drives as long as 900 miles to get from one group of their children to another. The families also say they have been told that if they return to the YFZ ranch, they will not be allowed to see their children at all.

Have you seen the price of gas these days? Do they make gift cards for gas stations? Maybe that would be a practical, useful way to help.

The Dockstaders and Keates both say that they are monogamous couples who are opposed to any abuse of children....

The Dockstaders have a daughter who has a 2-year-old daughter of her own. They say their daughter is 23; CPS officials say she is 16. Nancy Dockstader said she has provided officials with a birth certificate and that her daughter has a valid Texas driver’s license showing that she is 23, but state officials have said they don’t believe her.

“The state has been very selective about what they want to believe and not believe,” Jessop claimed. “So if you can have a 29-year-old accused of being a 15-year-old, and you can’t produce any government ID to correct it, then they want to believe what they want to believe without letting the truth of the matter stand on its own.”

They say they don't know of any abuse at the ranch, and they are cagey about the issue of under-aged marriages. Clearly, there have been some. At most, it looks like there have been around 20, and that's if we include the 17 year olds. They do point out that this has nothing to do with why all their young children have been taken and they aren't allowed to live in their homes.

Speaking of their former home on the ranch, I think it's interesting (and somebody else has pointed out) that on the one hand, they couldn't stay at the ranch and have the husbands leave because the ranch was too big, impossible to secure, and people could come and go at will without CPS' knowledge. On the other hand, the ranch is a compound, designed to trap people within and make it impossible for them leave.

This is like the Welfare Fraud accusations, often made by the same people- they have no identification but they defraud Welfare- it can't be both. If they are on welfare, then they have identification. If the ranch is impossible to secure, then it can't be this walled compound designed to keep people in against their will, or at least not a very successfully designed 'compound.'
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Updates:

FLDS site has a new page up- a PDF file with a four page essay called 'reflections of a mother,' lots of pictures as well.
Hoping that caretakers will check with them to make the lives of the children more comfortable, they have posted lists of the childrens' daily schedules.
They also have a new video- I don't have sound, but watching it without sound was heart-wrenching. Dear God in Heaven, how my heart aches for these mothers and their children. Somebody had a video camera at the coliseum or fort, and interspersed with photographs and video taken at home before the children were abducted, there is footage of a CPS worker taking a sobbing, screaming little child from her mother, of sad, unhappy children crying, of the appalling living conditions CPS provided. It's not easy to watch.