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David Knight with Dwight Mitchell - Split Circuit Court Decisions Pave Way for Supreme Court to Stop CPS Taking Children Without Due Process


Article: Split Circuit Court Decisions Pave Way for Supreme Court to Stop CPS Taking Children Without Due Process


Published on August 21, 2020
By David Knight



Bureaucrats have been ignoring due process and the rule of law for many years now, destroying our Constitution by pretending their “rules” are “civil”, not “criminal”, and therefore you are not entitled to due process or protections in the Bill of Rights.  They can take your property in the War on Drugs without a conviction or even charging you with a crime.  They call it “civil” asset forfeiture. It’s criminal theft by government without any due process.  You have to sue to get your property back — if you can afford to sue.


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But the bureaucracy can do far worse than stealing your property. For years, CPS has been taking children from their parents without any due process, based solely on allegations.

On the Thursday August 20, 2020 show David Knight reports, “The Democrat and Republican parties have turned a blind eye to child separations in this country. We talk about the danger of red flag legislation, where they ‘take the guns and do the due process later’ as the president said. We know that’s a very dangerous idea, yet they’ve been doing that through CPS with children for a very long time. They take the child and ‘do the due process later’, months later. In most cases the children caught up in the system are traumatized and in some cases they’re abused. The vast majority of people CPS investigates haven’t done anything wrong and are eventually vindicated, but it takes a very long time. It takes a long time just to find out what you’ve been charged with because they don’t tell you, they ignore all the rules of due process.”

Knight was joined by Dwight Mitchell, who founded the Family Preservation Foundation to provide free legal assistance to families facing separation by the government. Knight states, “Dwight Mitchell has a wealth of information at FamilyPreservationFoundation.org. The last time I talked to Dwight he had just put together a series of videos educating people about CPS and what to do if you get a knock on the door from them.” (You can see the 35 Key Tips and Lessons Learned Regarding CPS here https://familypreservationfoundation.org/education/35-key-defense-tips.html)

Knight continues “This has really been kept under the carpet by mainstream media. The public perception is, ‘we need to protect children from abusive parents’, which is true, but only a small percentage of the parents CPS investigates are even alleged to have committed physical or sexual abuse, and most of them aren’t found guilty. The vast majority of parents aren’t even accused of anything like that, yet they still take the kids away and put them in the system where many of them are physically or sexually abused.”

Dwight Mitchell replied “What’s so interesting about that, you said ‘only a very small percentage’, there’s only 4% nationally that have allegations of sexual assault and only 12% that have physical allegations. So 84% of the children that are taken by CPS are based on what child court calls ‘negligence’, and what that means is literally anything we want.”

“Negligence” by CPS’s standards could mean anything from missing too many school zoom classes to not getting a vaccine. Mitchell relays the story of one of the families helped by the FamilyPreservationFoundation.org, “[She] was sitting on the front porch with a 1-year-old baby, her daughter was riding up and down the street on a bicycle with a helmet. The neighbor didn’t see the mother on the front porch, called CPS and said the child was outside unsupervised without the parent. And this started a whole CPS investigation when the parent was sitting right there on the front porch, the neighbor just didn’t see her.”

“We had 41 parents sign affidavits or declarations that they were being affected by CPS with statutes that were literally ‘chilling’ their parental rights to rear their children. We all know that CPS and the court system is not supposed to interfere with parents and their ability to raise children unless there is a significant reason.” Continued Mitchell. “Stop CPS from legally kidnapping children, it’s a catchy slogan because kidnapping itself is illegal, you can’t really legally kidnap a child, but that’s actually what’s going on. They’re taking the children out of the home without due process based on allegations, meaning CPS doesn’t even have to prove the allegations are true to remove children from the home in Minnesota. It’s just purely based on allegations, and the judge gives them 60 days to prove the allegation. So your child is sitting in foster care, you don’t know where, you may or may not get visitation rights based on the allegation, you have to wait 60 days to go to trial.”

“Just based on these allegations the social worker can put you on the state registry that says ‘we’ve substantiated the allegations of abuse’, before trial. And you stay on this registry for 10 years, you can’t get a job working with children, or at hospitals, or anything of that nature.”

Knight: “The Family Preservation Foundation is trying to do something about this, they have a legal complaint about what’s happening in Minnesota. Tell us a little about this case.”

Mitchell: “If you’re in Jersey, they cannot take your child unless they can substantiate the allegations. Minnesota doesn’t do that, they come in and take your child right away, the same night. Then they say ‘we have 60 days to prove the allegations’. That’s one of the heinous things about the Minnesota law system.”

“In 2000 the Supreme Court actually laid down the case law in the Trexel lawsuit that says that in order for you to separate a child from their parent strict scrutiny had to be involved. You had to apply this case law if you were looking at any lawsuit dealing with the removal of a child from a family home because it is sacred. It’s one of our most sacred institutions and the foundation of our country. In our initial lawsuit, the district court didn’t use Trexel, they used a 1998 case law dealing with police officers called the County of Sacramento. So we argued to the Appellate court that they’re using the wrong case law.” Continued Mitchell.

“We were confident the Eighth Circuit Court was going to overturn it. When I say they were hammering the defense, it was question after question after question. We were just so confident it was going to be overturned that when we received the opinion upholding the County of Sacramento’s case law, we were just flabbergasted, we were shocked. So we sat here and looked at other case laws, the Sixth Circuit, just this year in March of 2020, had a CPS case and they used Traxler, as they were supposed to, to decide the case. So right now what we have is a circuit split, that’s really where the Supreme Court comes into play.” Said Mitchell

Knight concluded, “This is why I think it’s so important for people to look at these videos you have on FamilyPreservationFoundation.org. People don’t understand that we don’t have a legal system or due process anymore, we have bureaucracies and rules. They say because we have a rule and it’s not a law you don’t have due process, you don’t have a presumption of innocence, you don’t get presented with the charges against you, protection from excessive punishment no longer applies. It happened with the ‘War on Drugs’, it happens with Civil Asset Forfeiture. When people hear about this type of thing happening with CPS they are outraged, because it does shock the conscience of anyone who hasn’t had their conscience seared with a hot iron.”

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Family Preservation Foundation believes every child deserves a happy, healthy and safe future with their family and loved ones. We are working to save the children of America. Since our founding, we’ve changed the lives of many children in in the United States. We give children a healthy start in life, the opportunity to learn and protection from harm. We do whatever it takes to save our children – every day and in times of family crisis – transforming their lives and the future we share. We are a top-rated charity.

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