Friends of the family of Kayla and Hannah Diegel informed CNAV yesterday of a strange, and shocking, judicial policy in Maricopa County, Arizona. Melissa Diegel and (until recently) her daughters live in Maricopa County. An allied child advocacy group obtained video showing a juvenile court judge instructing other judges on how to issue child removal orders to ensure federal funding. In summary, this judge told his fellow judges to issue an out-of-home child removal order, whether the circumstances fully warrant this or not. The reason: Departments of Child Protective Services do not receive federal funds for in-home child removal orders. Thus the federal government gives courts a money incentive to separate children from their families. Thus the federal government corrupts juvenile courts across the country.

Details of the child removal class

The Maricopa County Courthouse. Photo: User Wars on Wikimedia Commons; CC BY 3.0 Unported License

The caption for the video identifies the judge as Judge Mark H. Brain. He serves in the Superior Court of the State of Arizona, in and for the County of Maricopa, Juvenile Department. He has sat on the bench since May of 2011.

The video comes from “Defend Parental Authority in Arizona,” who have this page on Facebook. In the video, Judge Brain specifically tells his students:

If you are removing a child, a contrary-to-the-welfare finding is mandatory. If you do not make that finding when you remove a child from a placement, you forfeit federal funds. You can get away with it under State law; you can catch up later; things will get fixed. But…the federal government says if you didn’t make that finding right at the outset, first time through, you’re not going to get any federal money for those services, ever.

He went on to talk about private child removal orders. Sometimes one member of the family seeks to remove a child from the home of another.

If you don’t go through and check some boxes or make a finding somewhere in the original orders, CPS is going to have a kid they can’t pay for.

Note that carefully: check some boxes. Judge Brain says those words fifty seconds into the video. After that, an officer with the Arizona Department of Economic Security describes such a case.

A Facebook user, commenting on the video, said:

I saw this video on the azcourts.gov website over a year ago and immediately wanted to burn down the juvenile courthouse with the judges in it. It’s funny how those dependency training videos for new judges are not there on the revamped site anymore. It’s full of incriminating statements by the crooks spearheading the whole scheme.

CNAV did search for the video on the Arizona Courts site. We did not find it.

What this means

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As we mentioned, Kayla and Hanna Diegel live in Maricopa County. A Maricopa County juvenile court judge (CNAV does not know which judge) removed the Diegel sisters from their mother after a doctor alleged child medical neglect. Advocates for the Diegels have suspected from the start the child removal order happened for one reason only: to make them wards of the state and enroll them in a study of their rare disease condition without their mother’s consent.

This video does not bear directly on the issue of abuse of children for genetic research. It goes to a more far-reaching problem. Federal funding for Child Protective Service agencies now skews the juvenile courts into making out-of-home child removal orders. Even when the evidence does not warrant such drastic action, juvenile judges do it merely to ensure federal funding to CPS to handle the child’s case.

This video did not discuss whether the federal government commits itself in an open-ended way to finding whatever CPS decides to do. If so, the federal government has caused the breakup of many families without good-enough reason. And one likely bad reason might be to enroll the children in rare-disease genetic research.

This practice should alert parents, and friends of parents, everywhere to write their Senators and Representatives. Tell them not to fund Child Protective Services by such an open-ended program. This clearly has a consequence no person of good will could ever intend.

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