Texas parents reunited with infant daughter 9 months after CPS wrongfully removed her 

A pair of Texas parents have won a wrongful removal case that saw their six-week-old daughter taken by Child Protective Services (CPS) after she experienced medical complications from a traumatic birth. 

Jackie and Juan Boatright took their newborn daughter, Evelyn, to Cook Children’s Hospital in Fort Worth, Texas, after noticing her twitching and vomiting. Evelyn had been born six weeks prior via emergency C-section after 12 hours stuck in the birth canal, which caused trauma to her head throughout the process.  

After conducting an MRI on Evelyn to determine the cause of her new symptoms, however, hospital staff accused the Boatrights of child abuse due to a small brain bleed they discovered in the infant. A hospital referral to CPS caused Evelyn to be removed from her home and placed in foster care.  

The Boatright’s legal team, working alongside Christian organization the Family Freedom Project, represented the family through nine months of legal battles to prove there were other reasonable causes for Evelyn’s brain bleed besides the child abuse the hospital had accused the couple of perpetrating.  

“My daughter is nine months old,” Juanita says in a video posted on the Project’s website. “In the last seven months, I have been unable to rock her, put her to sleep or even give her a bath. I have missed eighty percent of my daughter’s life.”

Court proceedings ultimately revealed misconduct by CPS, as investigators failed to consult medical professionals before making the removal and made no attempts to place Evelyn with a family member in order to avoid a foster care placement.  

“Texas law actually requires caseworkers to conduct what’s called reasonable efforts to avoid removal,” Jeremy Newman, vice president of the Family Freedom Project, stated. “In technical terms, (caseworker) testimony itself necessitated the return of the child because they literally admitted on the stand they didn’t conduct the minimum necessary steps that you have to conduct to do a removal.” 

At the conclusion of the final hearing in the case, three medical experts gave alternative explanations for Evelyn’s injuries, leading the judge to rule in favor of immediately returning the infant to her parents.  

While representatives of the Boatright family have celebrated the outcome of the case, the team has been quick to point out the permanent damage caused by CPS’s failures. 

“In the words of the experts in their field who testified for the parents, the doctors from Cook were dogmatic from the beginning about the idea that child abuse must be the explanation,” Newman said. “The cost of that was that a baby was removed from her family for nine months. The parents have now missed almost the first year of their baby’s life.” 

The Family Freedom Project is a Texas-based Christian organization whose mission is “to defend the God given right of parents to raise their children.”