Lawmakers Discuss FLDS Raid

On Tuseday, a legislative hearing in Austin discussed the raid on the Yearning For Zion Ranch that happened just over a year ago in West Texas.

"Given the extraordinary circumstances, I don't believe the action taken was imprudent."

That was Child Protective Service's response to what went wrong during the 2008 raid on the YFZ Ranch. CPS said it had no choice but to take the more than 400 children away from their families.

"If we could have surgically removed from the compound only those most victimized children, we certainly would have done so," said Anne Heilingenstein, commissioner of the Department of Family Public Services.  "But we didn't have that choice. We were facing the aspect of organized deception."

FLDS members say the only deception in this case came from the state.

"This department didn't want to know the truth. It didn't want to know how many people was there. It didn't want to know legitimate ages," said FLDS member Willie Jessop. "It wanted justification for what it did."

However, if members of the religious sect were hoping for apologies from the few lawmakers who showed up to the hearing, they got a much different response.

To at least one lawmaker, the only thing that went wrong in the raid is the court telling CPS to return the children.  A bill has already been filed that could prevent a similar ruling in the future.

The raid ended up costing Texas millions of dollars.