For four years the Pounds saw their children for just two hours a month. Looking at the children, across the barriers built by CPS always reduced them to tears.
The last time the Pounds saw their children was at the YMCA in Pinellas County. That 'not for profit' is paid 125 million a year, just for that county, according to Pound who says he has researched the subject exhaustively, to 'babysit' kids as they meet their parents in a stark ten by twelve foot room for the two hours they are allowed to be together for those months when they still hoped to be reunited.
The system is intended to separate children, a valuable commodity, from their parents. Mandates to reunite children and parents are consistently ignored as children are processed further and further into the system. What then happens to the children varies, but is in all cases appalling.
Along with the system abuse of families parents attempting to work in the system report that FOIA requests on such routine matters as copies of the Oath of Office and bonds, required by the Constitution, for each judge or elected official or law enforcement officer, are not produced, despite repeated requests. Many ask, over and over again, why such requests should be met with silence and hostility. Parents continue to struggle to regain custody of their children and to exact accountability from those who claim sovereign immunity as government employees from the impact of their acts on ordinary Americans. The claim of sovereign immunity for those employed by government is, according to Constitutional experts such as not employed by government entirely without foundation.
The three families whose cases appear here each report that they will never stop fighting. Each family is presently filing a civil rights suit against those involved in their several cases. In light of yesterday's revelation on child-sex rings, operating across the United States but very present in their own areas of Florida, their questions are ever more anguished as they deal with the echoing emptiness of homes that once held the laughter of children.
