http://www.freep.
Angry court takes duped parents'
side
BY BRIAN DICKERSON
FREE PRESS COLUMNIST
Foiled in its efforts to terminate the parental rights of a Guatemalan couple, Michigan's Department of Human Services conspired to have the couple deported, then opened a new neglect case against them.
The ploy might have worked, too, but for the Michigan Court of Appeals, which ordered the Guatemalan family reunited and blistered DHS for its conduct in a scathing opinion issued this week.
Hugo Diaz and his wife, Floricelda, were supporting their two young children, an adult daughter and two grandchildren when DHS workers knocked on the door of the couple's Warren trailer two summers ago to investigate allegations that Diaz was molesting his granddaughters, then 2 and 4 years old.
An investigation failed to substantiate the charges, but DHS workers, alarmed at the children's congested living arrangements, successfully argued that the children should remain in state custody until their Spanish-speaking parents had undergone parental training.
Springing the trap
Macomb County Family Court Referee Deborah Brune ordered DHS to arrange a visitation between Hugo Diaz, his wife and adult daughter and the four children, who ranged from 2 to 10 years in age. But when the three adults arrived for the promised rendezvous, they were met instead by federal immigration agents, who detained them for being in the United States illegally. Within weeks, all three adults were deported -- sans children -- to Guatemala.
At a subsequent hearing to consider renewed neglect charges against the newly deported parents, Referee Brune angrily rejected the DHS's argument that the parents had abandoned their children, noting that the department itself had precipitated their deportation.
But she reluctantly terminated the couple's parental rights anyway, concluding that the state's "morally repugnant" conduct had made it impossible for Diaz and his wife to care for their kids.
A catch-22 defused
Luckily for Hugo Diaz, his court-appointed attorney, Maryanne Spryszak, wasn't about to let the matter drop there.
"To me, what the state had done in this case was shameful," Spryszak told me in a phone interview.
Wednesday, a unanimous state Court of Appeals panel agreed, concluding that DHS had moved against Diaz, his wife and daughter only precipitating the crisis that made it impossible for them to look after their children.
"The record establishes that [the parents] were bonded with their children and did not want to leave the children behind," Judge Kathleen Jensen wrote for the indignant panel. But because the children remained in state custody, she noted, Diaz, his wife and his daughter "were apparently never given the opportunity to take the children with them to Guatemala."
DHS spokesperson Colleen Steinman said only that the department's lawyers are studying their options for an appeal.
With any luck, Diaz and his family -- who have been separated for nearly two years -- will be reunited in Guatemala before the State of Michigan can wreak any more havoc in their lives.
Contact BRIAN DICKERSON at
248-351-3697 or
bdickerson@freepres
Here is the Court of Appeals opinion. DHS will go to any length to kidnap and sell children?