The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS) is responsible for investigating charges of abuse, neglect or exploitation of children, the elderly, and adults with disabilities.

[1][2] According to federal judge Janis Graham Jack, the Texas DFPS is "a system where rape, abuse, psychotropic medication, and instability are the norm".

[8] The change was made to help "consolidate organizational structures and functions, eliminate duplicative administrative systems, and streamline processes and procedures that guide the delivery of health and human services to Texans.

[10] A follow-up statement with continued criticisms of the Texas foster care system was made in 2006 by the Comptroller and renewed a request to have the governor create a Family and Protective Services Crisis Management Team.

[13] John Kight, chairman of an organization that provided mental health workers to assist FLDS children and mothers from the YFZ Ranch recounted to the Texas governor's office that DFPS' Child Protective Services had seemed out of control at the temporary shelters, describing "how abusive CPS was and how they've trampled all over their rights.

"[14] One of the workers who assisted at the shelter remarked that "wonderful loving women and children are being treated like convicts in a concentration camp by the state of Texas".

[18] In 2011, Children's Rights, a New York-based national advocacy group working to reform child welfare systems, filed a federal class action lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas alleging the DFPS routinely fails to either return children who've been in foster care at least a year safely to their families or to find them safe, appropriate, and permanent new families.