Child Welfare Agency Weaponized against Buttigieg

We’ve seen and heard about it countless times before. But this time, the target was someone famous.

Last week, former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg shared the account of recent events in which his family was the target of a knowingly false and malicious report of child abuse. 

“You’ve probably heard of ‘swatting,’” Buttigieg’s Substack account begins, referring to the “dangerous kind of hoax” in which “someone anonymously calls 911 with a false report” and then waits for chaos to ensue.

“Now imagine the same concept, but with Child Protective Services instead of a SWAT team. Hadn’t thought of that? Neither had I…”

But at the Parental Rights Foundation, we have. (Consider this law review article by Dale Margolin Cecka, and this one from Doriane Lambelet Coleman, for example.)

We’ve seen it, heard about it, and formulated a model law that states can adopt to prevent it from happening again. So far, New York and Texas have adopted our Confidential Reporting model, which requires anyone making a report of child abuse to identify themselves first.

Buttigieg and his family didn’t have that kind of protection.

When a child welfare investigator and a police officer arrived at his home, he naively showed them in, surrendering his Fourth Amendment rights without a fight. When they told him his adopted children would need to sleep elsewhere that night, somewhere away from him, he complied. When they demanded that his children be brought to the agency’s offices the next day to be interviewed with no family members present, he complied with that, too.

Finally, late the next day, the police and investigator sat him down again and explained—for the first time—the allegations that had been leveled against him: “An anonymous caller had contacted CPS. The caller said that he had spoken to a woman who claimed to have met me at a conference several years ago in Alabama, where she said I told her I had committed unspeakable violent crimes, and the caller believed my children were at risk,” Buttigieg said in his Substack. “That was all.”

Now, there are so many problems with this, from the sudden emergence of “imminent risk” for the children based on information from “several years ago” (it was fine for several years, but now suddenly the children are in danger?) to the fact that the whole thing is at best a second- or third-hand account.

But all those problems would have been negated if only the system had required the caller to identify themselves. Had they done so, most callers would have declined to share such a far-fetched and clearly contrived “concern.” And if one had made the call anyway, he or she would themselves be under investigation by now for the false report, and likely facing jail time.

Instead, the perpetrator will slink away under the veil of anonymity while Secretary Buttigieg and his family are left to clean up. 

“Even though the accusation was absurdly and obviously false, and was promptly rejected by law enforcement,” Buttigieg again shared in his Substack, “I still worry about the harm it has done.”

I have never met Mr. Buttigieg, but I am sure he and I disagree on many more issues than we agree on. He and I lead very different lives and hold many conflicting values; we are definitely on opposite ends of the proverbial boat.

But the Fourth Amendment is intended to apply equally to every household.

And that means his home should not have been invaded without (1) a warrant based on probable cause, (2) a credible imminent threat, or (3) his free and voluntary consent. 

This “threat" was years old, which discounts any chance of “imminent threat.” Instead, perhaps the government could have taken a couple more hours to get a warrant—if any judge would give them one. (And, sadly, there are bad judges out there who would have.) Instead, the police officer and the investigator used coercion and the threat of family separation to secure “consent” that is neither free nor voluntary.

This violation of the Fourth Amendment should never have happened.

The sad truth is that people use anonymous reports to weaponize the child protection system because they can. And if we don’t close that gap, the next story may include another of your political adversaries—or it may include one of your friends. It may even include me or you.