Does Waco, Texas or Jim Jones ring any bells with anyone? 

Fundamentalists seem to be a popular, rarely touched breed of people.  I suppose The State doesn't want to cause problems with religious freedoms, even if it's at the cost of a child's well-being.  Google "religious compounds with children".  It's scary stuff, and can easily be in anyone's town.  Below is a sample of one of the many OTHER compounds that exist in the continental U.S., alone.   Note the symbolic significance of bread, and how it 's used as a means to make money/support themselves.

http://www.apologeticsindex.org/a14.html

Is the Aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps a religious cult? Are members harboring weapons, recruiting and brainwashing children - things they were accused of doing when their headquarters were in California? Or are the self-proclaimed ''Soldiers of God'' simply people who practice their religious freedom, bake and sell bread and insist on privacy?

Current group members aren't offering any clues, but El Pasoan Bob Heddon, 65, remembers why he beat a hasty retreat after joining the Berino group seven months ago. Heddon, still recovering emotionally from the death of his wife, was looking for Christian fellowship and Bible study. What he found in Berino was something quite different.

Group members wore black uniforms with berets, saluted and addressed each other by military titles.

''There wasn't a Bible in sight,'' Heddon said. ''They had sort of holy roller-type prayer meetings in the mornings and in the evenings where everyone rolled around on the floor and talked in tongues.''

No televisions, no radios, no children's toys were in sight at the schoolhouse, Heddon said. The bottom floor was a huge kitchen, where ''soldiers'' baked hundreds of loaves of bread every morning. The upper floor was full of Wisdom's Cry, a tabloid newspaper published and mostly written by the group's leaders.

Several attempts by the El Paso Times to contact the group by telephone, personal visits and certified mail were unsuccessful. On one occasion, a group member fled into the building when a reporter approached - then declined to answer the door.
(...)

Neighbors said they had no idea how many people live in the schoolhouse or whether there are any children there. Heddon estimated 10 to 12 people lived there seven months ago, most of them adults, a few in their teens. Eight years ago, the group had 25 to 30 members in Sacramento, California, according to news reports.

The group's leaders, Deborah and Jim Green, call themselves ''generals.'' They wrote and published a tabloid newspaper called The Battle Cry in Sacramento, and now publish Wisdom's Cry in Berino. Distributed free by group members and through the mail, the newspaper criticizes other religions, forecasts impending doom for mankind and calls upon group members, God's chosen ''soldiers,'' to carry on.

Critic casts doubt on mission

The Greens are intelligent, crafty people who have become adept at controlling others, said Robert Blasier, a Sacramento lawyer. He said he has represented parents of several group members. Today, he is part of the defense team at the O.J. Simpson trial in Los Angeles.

Deborah Green, who went by the name Lila Green in Sacramento, is especially convincing, Blasier said.

''Lila Green is the real power behind the group,'' he said. ''She's one of those people you look in the eyes and you feel real strange - a Charlie Manson type.''

In the El Paso-Las Cruces area, the group's only obvious contacts with the public are through its publications and when members go out into communities to sell bread. If it weren't for its past, the Aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps might be described as a group of model Berino citizens minding its own business.

Ministry history

In 10 years, the ministry has lived in five different compounds in three states and has changed its name at least three times.

In Sacramento, parents picketed the group's headquarters in the 1980s, claiming children were being recruited and brainwashed, according to a new account in the Sacramento Bee. In 1989, the ministry lost a $1 million lawsuit by default to a former member who said she was brainwashed, imprisoned and forced to divorce her husband and surrender legal custody of her four children. The group called itself Free Love Ministries then, and sometimes the Aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps in its newspaper.

Near Cool, Calif., and at another northern California compound, the group was accused of conducting militaristic training exercises after it was forced to abandon its headquarters in Sacramento. There, the group called itself Free Land Mountain for a while, Blasier said.

In Klamath Falls, Ore., residents were so suspicious of the group that they refused to eat at its restaurant, effectively banishing it from the town in 1992. ''They called themselves the Aggressive Christian Ministry Oregon,'' said Sue Todd, a local church member. ''The girls all wore blue skirts, knee-high socks and red or maroon sweaters. Some had babies. The community pretty much ignored them. They bought a couple houses - left them in shambles.''

Today, in Berino and at another group compound near Gallup, N.M., neighbors are curious, even though there has been no trouble, no reports of weapons and no obvious recruiting activities.
(...)

Horror stories

''It's a mental prison. They tore apart my life,'' said Maura Schmierer of Sacramento. She joined the group in 1982 when its headquarters were in Sacramento. ''They made me give up my children, told all kinds of lies about me . . . made my husband think I was a witch.''

Schmierer left the group, then called Free Love Ministries, in 1987. She filed a $20 million lawsuit alleging she was forced to divorce her husband and surrender legal custody of her four children. Her lawsuit also accused the group of holding her captive in a 5-by-12- foot wooden shed with a low ceiling that prevented her from standing upright.

''They claimed that God had judged me, so they excommunicated me and put me in a shed in the basement,'' Schmierer, now 47, said.

A year later she was awarded a $1 million default judgment against the Greens, the ministry and other group leaders. She regained custody of her two youngest children, but two others remained in the group with their father, she said.

Schmierer said her daughter, Rebecca, 26, returned home five years ago. Her son Nathaniel, 19, left the Gallup, N.M. compound in the middle of the night and came home six months ago. Her ex-husband, Steven Schmierer, is still with the group in Gallup but has changed his name, she said.

Maura Schmierer said her son Nathaniel had been with the group about 13 years, moving with it from California to Oregon and finally to the group's compound in Gallup. After he returned home to Sacramento, he estimated there were a total of about 30 people in the group's compounds at Berino and Gallup. Many of the group members he described, she said, ''are the same ones as when I was there nine years ago.''

Blasier represented Schmierer in the lawsuit. He said no one from Free Love Ministries showed up in court to contest it. As part of the judgement, the court seized the group's four houses and three small art stores. A lien also was acquired on the group's properties near Cool, in northern California.

All the properties were found vandalized after the group left them, he said.

Former group members said the Greens consider themselves prophets, chosen people who hear messages directly from God.

''They separate themselves from the world, believing the world is evil,'' Maura Schmierer said. ''They have some Christian principles, but they totally take Scripture out of context - far out in left field. They've made statements like every other church in America is going to hell.''

Searching for answers

Newcomers to the group often are people who are spiritually lost, looking for answers or help, said Doug Shearer, senior pastor at New Hope Christian Fellowship in Sacramento. He said his church has helped several refugees from the Aggressive Christianity Missions Corps get their lives back together.

''They're forced out of marriages, away from children. It's a wretched thing,'' Shearer said. ''And these types of organizations tend to get worse over time. They tend to develop a paranoia, a persecution complex.''

Blasier, who said he has helped at least 10 families try to retrieve children from the group, said the ministry's control techniques were typical of cult-type brainwashing. New members are forced to divorce themselves from the past, destroy mementos and photos, and reject all family ties. He said group members also are deprived of sleep, which induces a state of submission in many people, according to cult researchers.
[...more...]

El Paso Times, June 25, 1995

Raid of polygamist compound delivers daunting task for Child Protective Services

01:27 AM CDT on Sunday, April 13, 2008

By EMILY RAMSHAW and ROBERT T. GARRETT / The Dallas Morning News
eramshaw@dallasnews.com
rgarrett@dallasnews.com

Caseworkers, attorneys and guardians responsible for the hundreds of children removed from a West Texas polygamist compound last week are now grasping the reality of their workload – hundreds of painstaking interviews, thousands of pages of records and an ever-growing sense that they may be in over their heads.

Child Protective Services, which has never had a case this big, has dispatched close to 700 employees, or about a tenth of its statewide staff. Agency leaders say the situation is under control.

Women and children from the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints compound in Eldorado are now in San Angelo.

But former child welfare officials and outsiders who deal with CPS have their doubts. Since a complete overhaul of the agency four years ago, CPS still struggles to retain workers and keep an eye on foster children. Some fear a new operation of this size could drain the agency's limited resources and divert attention from existing cases.

"A case like this has a ripple effect. It's not just caseworkers, but foster parents, and law enforcement, and attorneys, and guardians, and judges," said Cathy O. Morris, a child welfare lawyer retired from CPS. "There are a lot of components to the system that will all be stretched. Right now, it's mind-boggling to even contemplate."

Child welfare workers acknowledge they've got an incredible challenge. Hundreds of them have been sent to West Texas, leaving regional offices short-staffed and their own cases in others' hands as they investigate the extent of abuse and neglect inside the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints religious ranch in Eldorado.

Investigators expect that many of the girls in their custody – some as young as 13 – have been forced into plural marriages with adult men, some of the girls repeatedly raped and beaten. Several girls have babies or are pregnant. And workers may struggle to even determine the ages and parents of the 416 children in custody, as the youths they must interview are conditioned to see them as the enemy.

Feeling prepared

Although the workload looks daunting, CPS officials say they can handle it. The agency dramatically increased the number of investigators on staff in recent years. And they've got help – from victims' rights groups, volunteer attorneys and the emergency funding authorized Thursday by Gov. Rick Perry and top state leaders.

"This is not CPS going it alone," agency spokeswoman Marleigh Meisner said.

It's unclear what the operation will cost the agency, but the Texas Division of Emergency Management is spending about $30,000 a day on food, personal products, toys and medical services, Ms. Meisner said.

Child welfare workers aren't the only ones facing a tremendous workload. The West Texas legal system is hardly built for such an influx of cases.

Stretched thin

The Schleicher County Courthouse, centered in the two-stoplight town of Eldorado, has three employees. Last week, they worked with giant stacks of records – and two typewriters – to file the child custody cases into their system, before getting help from neighboring Tom Green County.

"You see my staff," said Peggy Williams, the county clerk. "We've had more cases filed here in a week than we've seen in a whole year."

In the larger community of San Angelo, court employees struggled over the incessant hum of the copy machines to field calls from lawyers, and to serve papers to the parents of children in state custody, many of whom had similar names.

"The work's just fixin' to begin," District Clerk Sheri Woodfin said.

Meanwhile, state officials are working overtime to secure legal counsel for each of the 416 children before Thursday's custody hearing. Nearly 75 lawyers between San Angelo and Eldorado have offered their services. So far, at least 50 North Texas lawyers have joined up, said Alicia Hernandez, director of the Dallas Volunteer Attorney Program.

If a judge decides the children should be in foster care, CPS will hit a new set of hurdles.

The foster care system has been troubled in recent years. The state has had problems overseeing private placement agencies and finding enough beds for children removed from their birth parents.

In routine cases, child placement agencies try to keep siblings together and house them in comparable religious and geographic settings. But some of the sect children have as many as eight siblings, making this unlikely.

And advocates fear that putting another 416 children into foster homes will mean other youth aren't removed from dangerous settings. Roy Block, former president of the Texas Foster Family Association, said that in his 18 years as a foster parent, he's seen that happen every time foster beds are scarce.

"You can just look at the charts: When there are capacity issues, there are less children removed," said Mr. Block, whose family has offered to take children and mothers from the compound into their San Antonio home.

CPS spokesman Chris Van Deusen said he's confident no existing cases are suffering. Experienced employees are being deployed only where they can be spared, he said, leaving all regions with most of their staff intact. In the Dallas office, child welfare advocate Madeline McClure said, 18 investigators have been deployed, six at a time.

Agency officials say there is not a plan in place for foster parents yet. They haven't ruled out putting the children in foster homes outside of Texas. And there appears to be growing support for housing many of the children with their mothers in camplike retreats or larger residential homes.

State officials said Friday that the mothers and children will remain in San Angelo shelters through Thursday's custody hearing.

'Broken system'

The massive child welfare action comes at a turbulent time for CPS, still recovering from disasters years ago. In 2004, Mr. Perry called it a "broken system," after the gruesome deaths of several children that child-abuse investigators visited and chose to leave with their families.

The fatal beatings of three North Texas foster children between 2005 and 2006 underscored another serious shortfall: the state's faulty oversight of a mostly privatized system of foster home recruitment and training.

Last year, lawmakers poured an extra $91 million into the department, approving the hiring of nearly 1,100 people to help fix foster care. That same year, CPS reversed a decade-long trend, getting more children out of state care – through adoption or reunification with biological parents and relatives – than it took in. Before the West Texas case, CPS was on track to remove 13,500 children from their homes, down from more than 17,000 a few years ago.

But CPS' reputation has suffered, as has its employee morale. Last year, more than 40 percent of investigators quit. The vacancy rate for CPS investigators in Dallas County in January was 43 percent, said Ms. McClure, the child welfare advocate.

"They really do come together and stick together during crises like this," she said of the CPS staff. "It's when there's an ongoing burden, a never-ending light at the end of the tunnel, where people burn out and give up. "

To do this right, former CPS program administrator Susan Etheridge said, the agency needs to summon the "whole team." Private foster placement agencies. Mental health counselors. Children's advocacy centers. And maybe even large, church-affiliated children's homes.

The outpouring of state and local support – from individual families to large foster care providers – has given agency officials optimism. One child-placing official, Irene Clements, said calls are coming in to her private agency from families as far away as Wisconsin asking to help.

"People come out of the woodwork," she said.

The scope of CPS

In the West Texas raid, 416 children were removed over the course of two days. That's a little more than one-half of 1 percent of the agency's workload in the last fiscal year, when 71,344 cases of abuse were confirmed. On the other hand, it is slightly more than two usual days' worth of CPS-confirmed abuse cases statewide, all happening in one small area.

SOURCE: Department of Family and Protective Services