The American Civil Liberties Union of Texas and Jackson & Walker LLP have filed a lawsuit against the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, on behalf of a Texas family, asserting that the agency’s rules violate the family’s constitutional rights to due process.
The department’s rules allow people to be put on the central registry for child abuse and neglect without providing those accused of these serious allegations with the opportunity to be heard. The department’s rules also create a category of accused people who are neither found to be innocent nor guilty of the allegations against them and provide them with no method of appeal to clear their name.
The lawsuit states that these denials of due process allow the department to retain records accusing people, who may be innocent, of child abuse and neglect that third parties such as law enforcement, doctors, and school administrators can gain access to. This violation of privacy can cause irreparable harm to families through family separation and reputational damage and can take years to remedy.
The plaintiffs in this case are a Black married couple who chose to take the advice of their Texas licensed midwife over that of a pediatrician, for a condition Texas midwives are licensed to treat. These parents were accused of medical neglect by their children’s doctor and separated from their newborn child for three weeks for exercising their constitutionally protected right to choose how to care for their children. At the end of the investigation, the department dropped the case, returned the baby to her family, and put the parents on the central Registry for child abuse and neglect. It took over a year from the start of the investigation for our clients to be removed from the central Registry, just for them to be put in a category of administrative limbo.
Our clients request that the court invalidates the department’s rules that allow them to unilaterally make legally significant decisions without regard for the law and deny those affected by the decisions a method of relief.
