The Utah legislature just recommended a bill that erases the probable cause requirement and enables warrantless search and seizure of CHILDREN from Utah homes.
Actually, there are two bills, HB 105 and SB 124 and they are word-for-word identical. Like the Hydra of Greek mythology, they do this multiple-head approach when they want insurance that the bill will pass.
Let’s see exactly what they did. The bill defines a new warrant class, an “investigative warrant”:
(b)The juvenile court may issue an investigative warrant authorizing a peace officer or a child welfare caseworker to view a child, view a child’s home environment, examine a child for signs of abuse or neglect, or interview a child regarding the child’s health, safety, or welfare, if it appears to the juvenile court upon a verified petition, recorded sworn testimony, or an affidavit sworn to by a peace officer or child welfare caseworker, and upon the examination of other witnesses if required by the juvenile court, that there is probable cause to believe that:
(i)there is a credible threat to the child’s health, safety, or welfare;
(ii)it is necessary to view, examine, or interview the child to ensure the child’s health, safety, or welfare; and
(iii)the peace officer or child welfare caseworker has made diligent efforts to ensure the child’s health, safety, or welfare by other legal means but has been unable or not permitted to view, examine, or interview the child to ensure the child’s health, safety, or welfare.
Let’s break it down simply enough for anybody to see what this is. The first paragraph uses a lot of fancy language with little or no concrete meaning: “verified petition”, “recorded sworn testimony”, etc. Verified by whom? This is not defined. Recorded? Empty. This bill is already using scam language.
The Bait and Switch
Notice in condition (i) that the bill literally says “there is probable cause to believe that there is a credible threat”. Probable and credible are two completely different standards of evidence. “Credible” simply means “believable”. Something that has a 5% chance of being true might be believable, but it is not probable. Probability has a specific, mathematical meaning. It means that more than 50% of the time, you are right. This is measurable and hence enforceable. If officers are wrong more than half of the time, they can be held accountable for being too aggressive and violating people’s rights.
Also, there is a category error here. “Probable cause” does not refer to just any old thing being probable; it refers very specifically to the completed or ongoing commission of an actual crime being probable–and even then, not just any crime. The warrant must be supported “by oath or affirmation and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized”. That is, if the officer cannot articulate what the nature of the alleged crime is and what specific contraband would confirm the probable cause he claims to have, and if he is not right more than half of the time, he cannot enter with the weight of law on his side. Probable cause never meant anything else under the Constitution.
Condition (ii) in the bill is unenforceable, especially when “safety” and “welfare” can be and usually are broadly defined by governments. A gang of bank robbers can “have probable cause to believe that it is necessary” to rob a bank. A rapist can “believe that it is necessary” to assault someone, even “for her own good”. This provision does not lend any due process or robustness to the claims. There is no check or balance added here, just subjective and unmeasurable belief.
Condition (iii) amounts to this rhyme from the nursery tale:
Wolf: “Little Pig, little Pig, let me come in!”
Pig: “No, no, not by the hair of my chinny chin chin.”
Wolf: “Then I’ll huff and I’ll puff, and I’ll blow your house in!”
That’s what this bill is. It allows forced entry into the homes of Utah parents and guardians, with only a piece of paper that says that someone in the government believes there is a “credible threat”, that it is “necessary” to check on the child, and that they’ve already tried to get in through less invasive means.
The bill’s sponsor has claimed that this is not a forced removal warrant. That is hardly consolation when a fake warrant could be used to obtain a “more real” one, effectively eliminating the requirement to obtain a real warrant in the first place. It normalizes illegally obtained evidence, and greatly increases the hazard of planted evidence. There is no real check against it.
Notice that there is also no qualification given to the source of the threat. The government can allege that a child was being threatened by a so-called climate emergency, by a television ad being played in their home, or literally any condition they could try to rationalize as a “credible threat to the child’s health, safety, or welfare”, and use that as an excuse for deadly force to extract the children. “We’re from the government and your parents’ radical religious views threaten your welfare“. Promises, reports and statistics from the past are hollow. When you ease up on checks and balances or give a government new powers, it is only a matter of time before those powers are abused.
They admit that this is a different warrant class by asserting that the “investigative warrant” is not the same as a warrant that would be required for forced removal of a child. However, this is almost identical to the tactic used in last year’s HB 273, which uses warrantless searches and fake digital surveillance warrants to obtain massive amounts of private information using arbitrary dragnet reverse keyword searches of people’s Internet histories, and then uses that illegally obtained information to go and get a “real” warrant. Warrant requirements by design protect people against unreasonable search and seizure. Forcing access to information before satisfying the threshold of probable cause is a complete inversion of due process. The fact is, those are not real warrants. They are unaccountable suspicions. The sponsor of that bill was Representative Ryan Wilcox.
There is at least one more troubling feature of the bill:
(d)A peace officer or a child welfare caseworker who is executing a warrant under Subsection (3)(a) or (3)(b) may request other persons to assist in executing the warrant.
Who are those “other persons” they might recruit? Mercenaries? Foreign nationals? The WHO? The UN? Are they deputizing neighbors? There is no telling in advance.
Combine this with the new law enforcement officer masking requirement bill SB136, and we’re getting very close to the territory of armed, unidentified burglars demanding that you let them access your children or else.
There is a 0% chance that all such encounters will be bloodless. This bill violates constitutional evidence requirements, needlessly endangers parents, children, officers and caseworkers, all to force access to homes and children without even requiring evidence (let alone probable cause) of a crime. This is a literal child trafficking bill.
Speak against it in tomorrow’s hearing at 2 p.m. in the House Judiciary Committee:
https://le.utah.gov/committee/committee.jsp?year=2026&com=HSTJUD
Links to the bills:
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