This is the letter I sent to my U.S. senators and congressman. Please copy it, edit it for your needs and send it to your senators and representatives. Reserve the date August 12, 2011 to be at the Daley Center for a national protest about abuses of child protection agencies, family courts. and juvenile courts. Watch for more information.
Get more info at Luke’s Army, U.S.. Protest info for August 12, 2011 can be found here.
Sign the petition here. My letter was sent from this link where I modified it as follows. Either use this link to send a letter or copy my letter, modify it to personalize it and mail it yourself. The link allows you to find your congressman’s and senator’s addresses, send the letter as an e-mail or send it as a letter which is done for you with a $9 fee.
My senators’ and congressman’s addresses in IL and the 3rd congressional district are:
___________________________
Senator Richard Durbin
711 Hart Senate Building
Washington, DC 20510
202.224.2152 phone
202.228.0400 fax
_________________________
Senator Mark Kirk
524 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington DC, 20510
202.224.2854 phone
202.228.4611 fax
___________________________
Representative Daniel Lipinski
3rd Congressional District IL
1717 Longworth HOB
Washington, DC 20515
202.225.5701 phone
866.822.5701 phone
202.225.1012 fax
_______________________________
June 25, 2011
Dear [Your Federal Senators and Representative],
Nationwide, there are State run agencies who are supposed to be protecting abused children in dangerous situations. Each State has many different titles for them. All of them are main stapled as CPS (Child Protective Services). For example, in Texas they’re known as DFPS. (Department of Family and Protective Services)
In Illinois DCFS and the family courts, whether the issue is divorce or child neglect and abuse, or orders of protection, act AGAINST the best interest of the children. Instead of seeking re-unification or joint parenting, appropriate counseling and family support, false accusations are made against parents to force them into expensive counseling by unqualified hacks. Laws regarding Title IV money have been extremely corrupted and now are more about profit to agencies, unqualified counselors, and corrupt child representatives, than about preserving families and acting in the best interest of children. There are huge profits in declaring a parent unfit, supervising prolonged efforts at re-unification, and then adopting out a child in DCFS custody.
Child representatives and guardians ad litem are more concerned about extending divorce and custody proceedings, which increase their profits and their agencies profits using Title IV money, than interested in solving parental alienation syndrome, protecting kids from drug abusing parents and mental/physical abuse, or providing necessary quality mental health services.
The costs to our economy of destroying families, reducing them to poverty, increasing their reliance on public assistance is STAGGERING! Please act now. Please contact me and let me come to talk to you with concrete suggestions as to how to solve the problems, as well as with concrete statistics!
While there is an important need to find abused children and to protect them, the current system is only finding a small percentage of those truly abused children. The rest of their statistics that guarantee a high departmental income are from families who never abused their children. Where they get this income and the sources of information will be posted after the next paragraph.
I am not calling for an abolishment of CPS. What I am petitioning for is an overhaul and restructure to bring them in line with lawful investigation practices, to maintain Constitutional Rights and proper training for Agents who never had children, and psychological evaluations to find and replace the Agents who were themselves abused as Children and see abuse in every home regardless of the situation. This is not, I repeat, not a rare occurrence. I will supply statistics to support this and how this has escalated. I will also supply the sources.
Departmental income has become more important to CPS and their offices than actually finding abused children and protecting them. Each and every time they remove a child from the home, they get paid from the Federal Government. Here they are:
1. Public Law 93-247 known as the Mondale Act of 1974.
2. Public Law 96-272 known as the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980
3. Social Security Title IV-E funds.
The ASFA- Public Law 105-89 known as American Safe Families Act of 1997 is one of the most horrific laws on the books today. While it sounds nice in the title, when you get through the legal jargon, what this means is so wrong. If you ever had a child removed from your house by CPS, even UNFOUNDED and you are innocent, they will take that child in minutes after the child is born! Babies are highly adoptable and the Federal Government pays out $6,000 to the CPS office who conducts the legal kidnapping and gets them adopted quickly without regards to the biological Mother and her family. Since she was investigated once, they do this in the “best interests of the child” as she is a “potential” abuser.
The largest targeted type of families are folks with low incomes, children on SSI and are minorities. If you even have one of those three issues, you are a target for CPS to illegally investigate you. While these things are a surefire magnet, they have been known to do illegal investigations against families if they were reported falsely with malicious intent. Example is an ex-wife wants to get even with her ex-husband and his new family, she could report them and put them through Hell.
Why are the reasons CPS Agents actually find so little true abuse?
1. Agents who never had children and don’t understand that a few toys in the corner of the room is not a hazardous mess.
2. Agents are not trained in real evidence recognition. In fact, no Agent in CPS has any training in evidence, the Constitution or criminal justice. They are given anywhere from 3 to 6 months of training, being taught that it is ok to break into a Home without probable cause or exigent circumstances.
3. Agents are trained to use subjective speculation and not objective factual reporting.
4. The Agents do not get psychological evaluations. A number of Agents who were abused as a child themselves see abuse in every home they go into, even if it’s not there.
5. Most States do not require Agents to have a degree in Social Sciences. Any degree will do, doesn’t even have to be related to the field.
6. The Agency has no checks and balances. A field Agent can lie to a judge or police officer with absolutely no proof and have it entered as factual evidence in a court of law!
7. Agents are trained to believe they are immune from the authority of the First Amendment, Fourth Amendment, Fifth Amendment, Sixth Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment. They violate this in every investigation done nationwide.
Here are the statistics and sources to support these facts:
Number of Cases per 100,000 children in the United States. These numbers come from The National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect (NCCAN) in Washington.
CPS- Physical Abuse (160) Sexual Abuse (112) Neglect (410) Medical Neglect (14) Fatalities (6.4)
Parents- Physical Abuse (59) Sexual Abuse (13) Neglect (241) Medical Neglect (12) Fatalities (1.5)
As you can see, children are abused far more in care than at home. The calculated average is for every 1 abused child removed from an abusive home, there are 17 unabused children removed from loving non-offending homes nationwide.
Constitutional Violations and Court Rulings that CPS Ignores to this very day!
1. It’s unconstitutional for CPS to conduct an investigation and interview a child on private property without exigent circumstances or probable cause. – Doe et al, v. Heck et al (No. 01-3648, 2003 US App. Lexis 7144)
2. All CPS workers in the United States are subject to the 4th and 14th Amendment – Walsh v. Erie County Dept. of Job and Family Services, 3:01-cv-7588
3. Police officers and social workers are not immune for coercing or forcing entry into a person’s home without a search warrant. Calabretta v. Floyd (9th Cir. 1999)
4. The mere possibility of danger does not constitute an emergency or exigent circumstance that would justify a forced warrantless entry and a warrantless seizure of a child. Hurlman v. Rice (2nd Cir. 1991)
5. Police officer and social worker may not conduct a warrantless search or seizure in a suspected child abuse case absent exigent circumstances. Defendants must have reason to believe that life or limb is in immediate jeopardy and that the intrusion is reasonable necessary to alleviate the threat. Searches and seizures in investigation of a child neglect or child abuse case at a home are governed by the same principles as other searches and seizures at a home. Goodv. Dauphin County Social Services (3rd Cir. 1989)
6. The Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures extends beyond criminal investigations and includes conduct by social workers in the context of a child neglect/abuse investigation. Lenz v. Winburn (11th Cir. 1995)
7. Making false statements made to obtain a warrant, when the false statements were necessary to the finding of probable cause on which the warrant was based, violates the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement. Aponte Matos v. Toledo Davilla (1st Cir. 1998)
What can be done to change this for a better, more healthy Child Protection System?
I. Child Abuse is a Crime, not a touchy feely civil complaint and should be investigated as a crime.
II. Have the abuse allegations investigated by a Detective or Police Officer, who are trained for this as a career, whereas CPS workers are not. All investigations are joint ones with said Officers of the Law and with warrants properly issues under probable cause.
III. Re-train Agents to respect and obey the laws of the Constitution of the United States. If a family is guilty of abuse, a legal investigation will find it.
IV. Repeal the Mondale Act, Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act, Title IV-E rewards to CPS from Social Security and the American Safe Families Act. Remember, they are not what the title sounds like and has been the root core of many loving homes losing their children to a system that will abuse them.
V. Make CPS legally investigate those who sign up to be foster parents. They do not do this today, and many foster parent who want the money for fostering them are actually child abusers who never get caught!
VI. All interviews to be audio and video recorded just like it happens with the police!
VII. Hold CPS Agents and foster parents and the records keeper responsible for every child who vanishes or dies in their care for their location.
VIII. Also investigate the person or persons reporting the abuse, and if done maliciously with intent to disrupt a family, prosecute the reporter to the fullest extent of the Law regarding making false claims to Government Agencies to affect an unnecessary and costly investigation.
IX. Abuse is a Crime, guarantee the accused retain their right to face their accusers in a court of law. As the system currently is, this is not done.
X. The Children are to be tracked on a weekly basis, so no more children vanish in the system.
XI. If a disabled, mentally retarded or sick Child is put into Foster Care, the Child’s current Physician will need to provide a copy of the diagnosis and treatment, and medications, if any, will be provided as prescribed by the Physician. All appointments must be kept while in Foster Care. Any violations without a very good reason will result in the Foster Parents losing their certification for Foster Care.
XII. If a Foster Child dies while in Foster Care, there will be an Investigation by the FBI and all parties responsible for the Death of a Child will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
XIII. There will be a National Database where all known abusers are recorded and can be accessed by Law Enforcement. Everyone who is found not guilty won’t have their Convictions and Abuse Reports listed. It will be illegal to keep records of any sort on innocent individuals or families. If they are convicted in a court of law by a jury of their peers, then the report of abuse they are guilty of will be the only report listed.
Currently, none of this is done, and innocent families who are not guilty of anything are losing their Children based on the word of others where there is no burden of proof for Prosecution, for the sake of getting Federal Funds for tens of thousands of dollars. The few truly abused children are ending up in a system where they are worse off than where they came from, even to the extent of being killed. Also, the innocent children who are never abused are also killed.
Injustice against one American is injustice against all Americans. Help us put the Justice back into Child Protective Services and get them focused on finding and saving abused children. It’s time we removed them from the profitable business of tearing loving non-offending families apart.
DCFS in IL is not a family protection agency. It is a family destruction agency for profit with corrupt and incompetent courts backing them up. We need TOTAL TRANSPARENCY and supervision of the courts and agencies. First however, we need to have an intense investigation to follow the money and name the profiteers!
MOST importantly we need rapid repeal of the above laws that give the corrupt state and agency abusers of children huge profits, reducing the families to poverty.
Sincerely,
Dr. Linda Shelton
9905 S Kilbourn Ave
Oak Lawn, IL 60453-3539
Dr Linda Shelton 