"That's all we were asking for, is to keep everything the same until we could find out what was going on," said Julie Balovich of Texas Rio Grande Legal Aid, who represents a group of FLDS mothers and filed the court motions. "We could speak up for the children and the parents. Some of our clients' children are being split up, and we're pretty outraged."

Balovich said one of her clients has five children — and three of those children are going to different homes.

"My clients are absolutely distraught," she told the Deseret News.

Family plans

Acting on a call to a family crisis shelter in San Angelo, authorities went out to the FLDS Church's YFZ Ranch earlier this month to investigate claims that a 16-year-old girl named "Sarah" was pregnant and in an abusive marriage to a 50-year-old man.

Authorities have not found the girl but said that once they arrived on the YFZ Ranch, they observed other signs of children being abused. That led to an order from the judge, removing all of the children from the compound.

"It's obvious, if you look at the record, there have been some underage marriages," Parker told reporters on Tuesday. He said marriages at the YFZ Ranch were not arranged by priesthood holders but rather were the decision of the girl and her family.

Parker cited a recent change in Texas law that once allowed girls to marry at age 14.

"It was a change in the law directed specifically at the FLDS people," he said.

Child welfare workers have said they would be placing children in foster care once they finished taking DNA samples from them to help prove their identities. Their parents are giving similar samples to help establish maternity and paternity.

The DNA sampling will continue today, but child protective services refused to say if more children would be leaving the coliseum for foster homes. With some of the children already in facilities across the state, Azar said child protective services will begin creating individualized plans for each child.

"We'll start to assess what their educational needs are, what level of mental and physical health care they'll need, counseling, set up a curriculum for their education," he said. "We'll set up a plan for each one."

Parker said attorneys in Texas are considering a number of options, including moving the cases from Tom Green County to Dallas, where a number of judges with family law backgrounds had volunteered to handle the cases.

As the child custody process goes forward, individual plans could include visitation from their parents, but Azar said that's "not a bridge we've crossed yet." On Tuesday, Azar said the other children in the coliseum appeared to be doing well, despite having stayed in a makeshift shelter for so long.

"We're trying to get these children into a more normal setting as quickly as possible so they can be provided what they need to flourish and we can continue investigating what happened in their lives," he said.

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Contributing: Aaron Falk

E-mail: bwinslow@desnews.com