Victims of CPS seek class-action lawsuit participants

Letter to the community,

Tahoe Victims of CPS has joined together with families on the West Slope of El Dorado County to form the El Dorado County Victims of CPS. All parties involved are either advocates for CPS reform, or families that have had their constitutional rights violated by CPS.

First and foremost, we do not want any more children removed from innocent parents; but we also want to ensure that social workers employed by Child Protective Services’ Investigative Unit have the proper training.

We have heard from numerous parties in the community that social workers are hired off the street with no training, and the funding is not available to properly train these social workers. So what we have are employees of the county that enter people’s homes by intimidating them, and removing children without a search warrant. Not only are the families traumatized by these actions, but also social workers then falsify the facts in their report to the court to cover up their illegal activities, a fact confirmed by a number of court-appointed family court attorneys.

Law enforcement, whom we support whole-heartedly, has somehow been misinformed that they need to support these illegal acts. We encourage all law enforcement officials called to a home by a social worker, to ask where the search warrant is, unless exigent circumstances exist that put the child in harm’s way. We do not want our wonderful law enforcement members, or even social workers for that fact, leaving themselves open to criminal prosecution and civil lawsuits.

El Dorado County is a great place to live, but as residents, we need to live here without the fear of renegade social workers misinterpreting the Child Welfare Codes, which were written to protect children from gross neglect, abuse, and possible death. We want our county’s CPS to be the model that other counties and states can mirror.

We are inviting any resident of El Dorado County, past and present, to write us with their experiences of violations by Child Protective Services and their interest in a class-action lawsuit against Child Protective Services for violation of their constitutional rights, namely the 4th and 14th Amendments.”

The mailing address is:

El Dorado County Victims of CPS

P.O. Box 22

Placerville, CA 95667

Ernie Claudio, co-founder of Tahoe Victims of CPS