FATHER DEPRIVED OF HIS CHILDREN BY CHILD PROTECTIVE SERVICE VOWS TO FIGHT ON IN FEDERAL COURT
by Sharon Rondeau
(Dec. 15, 2013) — In an article on Saturday, The Post & Email published an interview with Jeffrey Henderson, who has been struggling with his wife to regain custody of their children from the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) for nearly three years.
Henderson’s court-appointed attorneys did not appear in person for an appeals hearing last week which was won by the county and determined that the five elder children will be placed with prospective adoptive grandparents who are unknown to the children.
The three youngest children, two boys and an infant girl, are in the care of a homosexual couple who want to adopt them.
Henderson will be attending law school beginning next month, having vowed to learn the legal system so as to help other parents whose children have been taken unjustly by child protective services, of whom there appear to be thousands across the nation.
Based on Henderson’s earlier contention that the appeal was “destined to fail” with his court-appointed attorneys, The Post & Email asked Henderson if he believes his attorneys lost the case “on purpose,” to which he responded, “Absolutely. Their number one argument was ‘jurisdiction.’ It’s always the best argument; it should always be the first argument, but it was never brought up.
“They first have what’s called a jurisdictional hearing, and they denied Erica and me a jurisdictional hearing on every occasion. The first time, we were in jail and they had the hearing without us. We weren’t even allowed to be there. When they took the baby last year, we were there for the jurisdictional hearing, but they threw us out and had the hearing without us.”
THE POST & EMAIL: Then of course they rule that they have jurisdiction.
MR. HENDERSON: Right. There is no argument. These are not really court hearings; they’re administrative hearings where you’re assumed to be guilty and you have to prove your innocence, and they take jurisdiction without your being able to argue it. The argument of jurisdiction, or what’s called the demurrer, is in the California constitution. If you read the Welfare and Institutions Code, it talks about, over and over, having the demurrer hearing, where the parents have the right to demur, which means to object.
Where is the contract? There are two courts which operate within the U.S.: one of them is criminal court, and the other is civil court. These family court hearings are civil. The number one argument should be: “The community says that my children can’t participate in a religious ceremony of drinking wine. But what does that have to with me? At what point in time did I have any kind of agreement with this community of so-called people who said that my family cannot participate in the wine-drinking ceremony? Where is that published? It’s not in any law; it’s not in any Welfare and Institutions manual; it’s just something that they brought to court one day and they said, “We don’t think it’s right that you allow your daughter should be able to drink wine.” And that won the day. That was the argument that won the day. It’s not in a law book; there was no way I could have read about it and learned about it so that I could have said, “I better not do this because I might lose my kids.” The statute doesn’t exist. They make it up as you go along, and if you argue with them, then they make you out to be some kind of anger-management psycho; then they evaluate you and send you to these classes. Even though I completed everything, at the very last hearing that this appeal was on, the judge said, “I don’t feel that he’s been rehabilitated” and denied me my right to be reunited with my children.
THE POST & EMAIL: Rehabilitated from what?
MR. HENDERSON: They’re saying that I haven’t learned my lesson and I’m probably going to give them wine again, that I haven’t learned anything from the process.
THE POST & EMAIL: Was Erica at the appeals hearing?
MR. HENDERSON: No, we weren’t allowed to be there, and they said that only attorneys were allowed to be there. We have letters from the attorneys saying that they weren’t going to be present at the appeal and would just submit on the papers. And really, it was just a complete snow job.
THE POST & EMAIL: So does that mean that your attorneys didn’t even show up?
MR. HENDERSON: They didn’t even show up. The court allows them to do that: submit on the papers, and they say it’s to “expedite the process.” But this appeal has been going on for nine months, and children’s appeals are put right in there with arguments between civil litigants; there’s no rule that says that if a child is involved, it goes to the front and it gets ruled on first. That doesn’t happen. And they do this for a reason; they make sure that the family is worn down; that the children are well-adjusted into their new environment.
It’s an atrocity. The whole process has taken me to a very dark place, and I’m really having a hard time dealing with the fact – not that my government is crooked; I’ve always known that they’re lazy; I recently figured out that a small percentage of them, higher-ups, are crooked, and now I’m dealing with the fact that I’m the one who’s chosen…Of all the families who have gone through this, I have a chance to go to law school. Now it’s my duty.
I didn’t want to be an attorney. I’m a graphic artist; I design websites, but I’m being forced to be the tip of the spear, to go to law school, to fight this. And my children – they’ve been chosen by destiny, by the Supreme Architect of the universe, to be the victims of something that they had nothing to do with. It’s really sad, and I can’t do anything about it.
THE POST & EMAIL: If they can’t substantiate any abuse or neglect, are the children being placed for adoption because they were railroaded through the system?
MR. HENDERSON: There was no way I could stop it. From the first time that the train left the station, I’ve been trying to derail it; I’ve been trying to slow it down. I’ve been able to document it. And that’s the one thing: It’s going to be golden when I go back and point out at every point, because I did my research through the history of the case, how they did it and how they messed up. But the fact still remains: I’m going to miss my daughter’s Bat Mitzvah; I wasn’t able to teach my sons how to throw a football; their first day of school when they got beaten up by going to an all-Mexican school…they’ve ruined our lives as a family. And did I deserve that? Probably not. Nothing is guaranteed to us, and it’s really sad to know that the government doesn’t care about families. All they care about is money, and that’s why they should not be in this business.
When the Child Welfare Act went through, it was Jimmy Carter signing this “protect children act,” and he said, “This has the possibility of causing overreaching government” but he’s going to sign it anyway, because they wanted to protect babies from being abused by terrible homes. It was supposed to be for very extreme situations, but now it’s become a total takeover, like the kindergarten of the Nazi child indoctrination. They’re taing over our children. It was supposed to be for just a few people to get some help with housing, who needed help. They offer the world; they don’t have the funds for it; but they still take your children.
THE POST & EMAIL: It sounds like a racketeering enterprise.
MR. HENDERSON: It’s a racketeering enterprise. They offer services, just like Obamacare…I cannot liken it enough to Obamacare. It’s a perfect comparison, because they’re offering “You can keep your own plan; your benefits are going to be low-cost;” and then they get it through, and then once it’s through, it doesn’t matter now. The fact that “we lied” and it’s not going to help children; it actually hurts children; it used to be that your child was five times more likely to be abused in DCFS custody; now it’s seven times more likely to be abused than if they had left the children in the alleged abuser’s home. They don’t care about these statistics because they want to abuse the children. In my opinion, they want abused children. It’s like the deliberate dumbing-down…the making of abused children helps their system; they want children to be dependent on the government.
THE POST & EMAIL: Abused children would have a harder time being independent, confident…
MR. HENDERSON: Strong, smart…They hate that. I never thought like this, but now it’s so clear to me how the government has been planning this in their underground bunkers or think tanks or whatever, to deliberately create a subclass system to do their bidding, to be their little minions.
THE POST & EMAIL: Does this mean that the adoption of hte children will start right away?
MR. HENDERSON: Yes, my daughter has already gone to her grandmother’s, and she has already started the adoption process.
THE POST & EMAIL: Does your daughter know her well? Has there been a relationship there?
MR. HENDERSON: Never heard of her grandmother, never seen her before…her grandmother has already told my daughter that she is not Jewish. Even though Judaism or religion is a choice; you choose to convert or choose to be what your family was. Her grandmother is teaching her that she has to be a Jehovah’s witness; it’s already started.
THE POST & EMAIL: How long has your daughter been with her grandmother?
MR. HENDERSON: About three weeks.
THE POST & EMAIL: Would the grandmother have had to apply to adopt her some time ago?
MR. HENDERSON: It’s all done clandestinely. DCFS has been working with her for what seems to be years now…Now that I’m looking back through the papers, this was their plan all along, to adopt out the babies and send the older children to Erica’s mother and Erica’s father, who are in two different places. It’s the same thing that happened to Erica: DCFS came in when Erica was eight days old and accused the mother of being abusive; they said the father needed to go to a drug rehab, and they separated Erica from her father. That’s why she hasn’t seen him since she was a baby. It’s a recurring process; they keep doing this to destroy families.
THE POST & EMAIL: Did Erica grow up in a foster home?
MR. HENDERSON: No, she grew up with her mother and stepfather, and there were problems. I loved my wife almost totally out of that nonsense. But my problem with that is: not only did her stepfather do the same thing to her oldest son, who they ended up stealing from Erica, but I’m afraid it’s going to happen to my daughter, because she’s in the house now.
THE POST & EMAIL: Is that boy your child?
MR. HENDERSON: No, Erica was married before me, and he abandoned her and her baby. That is actually the beginning of our story. when I first met her, she was living by herself. The guy she married is actually in prison now.
California has done such a good job of destroying families that it’s hard to pin down where this is all coming from. I can’t believe it’s so rampant…you have problems with CPS in Texas, New York, Florida, and you hear about it here and there in Washington and Oregon, but California is the epicenter, where they literally have a five-story courthouse that they call a “children’s court,” but it doesn’t exist. It’s in no legal paperwork whatsoever, but it’s the “children’s court.” Technically, it’s a modification of a juvenile court, but the children’s court doesn’t exist. How can you fight an entity, a machine, that doesn’t exist?
THE POST & EMAIL: The Post & Email has covered a lot of corruption in Tennessee, where the courts contort the laws in a way so as to get someone indicted or convicted.
MR. HENDERSON: My heart goes out to people from Tennessee, because at least in California, for the first year of my fight against these people, I was able to make a lot of money and fight them toe-to-toe, and make sure that at least I didn’t lose my ability to document everything.
When it comes back to my federal lawsuit, which is going to happen, I have it well-documented and I’ve caught them; there’s no way they can escape; it’s on the record what they’ve done. But here’s the problem: they don’t care about the damage they’ve done, because individually, and even as a corporate entity, they (specifically, DCFS of California and the corrupt individual government agents [social workers]) will not be held accountable. Once I win the lawsuit, that lawsuit is paid by the taxpayers of the county. So the government agents will continue to do the same thing and probably even worse. They get better at what they do but worse and worse every year. If there’s a lawsuit, they don’t have to pay anything out. Even if one individual person gets dinged for his pension, the machine keeps rolling, and the purpose, in my opinion, is to bankrupt the country, to take money from the taxpayers until they don’t have anything left and the machine is still in place.
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Editor’s Note: The Post & Email will present the third and final part of this interview later this week.