A couple failed to hospitalize their unvaccinated child. Police broke down their door

After police officers busted down the door of a Chandler home to take a toddler with a spiking fever from his parents, advocates and a state legislator are questioning if a new law intended to protect families' rights is failing.Officers pointing guns forced their way into the family’s home in the middle of the night last month after the Arizona Department of Child Safety called police for a welfare check on a child with a 100 degree-plus fever and no vaccinations.The parents had ignored a doctor’s recommendation to take their 2-year-old to the hospital, saying their son’s fever had decreased.Rep. Kelly Townsend, R-Mesa, who helped craft legislation requiring DCS to obtain a warrant before removing a child from their parents or guardians in non-emergency circumstances, said she was outraged by the response of police and DCS officials in the case.“It was not the intent (of the law) that the level of force after obtaining a warrant was to bring in a SWAT team,” Townsend said. Child-welfare lawsuits in Arizona and across the nation, citing the First and Fourteenth amendment, argued for due process and protections against illegal search and seizure.In 2016, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that removing a child without court approval violates parents' constitutional rights.You get your day in court for most crimes, advocates said, why wouldn’t the same apply when removing a child because of accusations of neglect or abuse?By the time Arizona lawmakers approved a child-welfare warrant law in 2017, critics said it had too many loopholes and wouldn’t reduce unjust removals.In fact, the total number of child removals has declined since the law took effect, but only slightly, and it's unclear what role the new law played in the decline.Despite lawmakers approving the warrant law to require greater transparency and address constitutional rights, DCS says it doesn’t track data for when children have been removed due to emergency situations without a warrant. Removing the child must be so dire that there's no time to use the electronic system to gain authorization from a judge who’s on call 24/7.Family advocates calling themselves the Arizona DCS Oversight Group argue what happened to a Chandler family on the night of Feb. 25 is evidence the state is abusing its power and the rights of parents.“If they can do this to one family they can do it to anyone,” said Lori Ford, a member of the self-appointed public watchdog group. The caseworker “advised they obtained a court order for temporary custody in order to take (redacted) to the hospital.” The order was signed at 12:04 a.m. by Judge Tracy Nadzieja, according to police records.Cascio wrote that officers consulted with the police criminal investigations bureau and SWAT."Based upon the court order, the intent of DCS to serve the order, and exigency to ensure the health and welfare of the child, the decision was made to force entry to the home if the parents refused to respond to verbal requests," according to police records. She questioned why the state's attorney and DCS used the parent’s frustration with DCS to label the family as hostile and argue they weren’t cooperating with DCS.“It doesn’t say anywhere that after your kids are taken, after police bust down your door, that you have to be nice to DCS to get your kids back,” she said.It was just before 2 p.m. when the parents walked back into the courtroom.A DCS investigator, a former police officer, took the stand. The state's attorney said DCS contracts with a company to conduct safety reviews and has no control over timelines but that it could take up to 30 days.The guardian ad litem, representing the best interest of the children, told the judge he didn’t see why the children couldn’t be cared for by their grandparents while their parents worked with DCS to regain custody.The judge said the removal was warranted, citing the mother’s refusal to follow the doctor’s orders. Meanwhile, children and their families suffer, she said.“They hold the purse strings, if they wanted to force DCS to make changes that would protect family’s rights they’d stop funding them,” she said.Townsend hopes this case is an outlier, but the only way to know for sure is to review DCS child-welfare check policies, medical providers’ power over families and the DCS warrant process for removing children.This case is more than enough reason to be concerned, she said.“The fact that they got the warrant shows it wasn’t a matter of exigency by definition — it wasn’t something that they were rescuing this child from imminent death,” she said. … We used a SWAT team on a family with a child with a high fever.”On March 15, the father told The Republic that DCS had placed their three children with his parents.“We get to see them again,” he said. “But if the caseworker had called me or knocked, and shown me their warrant, I would’ve let them in.”He said home security video showed police had stated they had a DCS warrant for removal, but the family didn’t hear them because they were sleeping in the back bedrooms with their sick children.The judge’s approval of DCS' request for psychological evaluations has created another barrier to regaining custody of their children, he said.