America has long prided itself on the notion that we are a free people in a free land. You can pack up your car and move from Boston to Boise, Providence to Phoenix, without filing paperwork with bureaucrats or seeking permission from state overlords. It’s so basic to our national identity that we hardly think of it. Yet in Massachusetts, that right — the right to move freely about the country — has been criminalized in one of the most shocking family court cases in recent history.
The Rivera family’s ordeal has already been documented in the New England Emmy-nominated film Taken: State-Sanctioned Kidnapping. But what the cameras could not fully capture is the grinding, relentless cruelty of a system determined to break them. Ruth Rivera, a mother of five, is today allowed to see her children just twelve hours a week, under supervision. She has never stood trial, never been convicted of neglect, never been found guilty of laying a hand on her children. The children’s father, Izzy Rivera, suffers the same fate. These are parents with no record of abuse, no conviction, no court finding of wrongdoing — yet they are treated as criminals, confined to narrow visitation as strangers supervise the brief moments they have with their own children.
If that weren’t enough, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is now pursuing criminal cases against Ruth and Izzy — not for hurting their children, but for leaving the state. That’s right: Their “crime” is that they crossed state lines without permission from a bureaucracy that never legally served them, never held lawful custody over their children, and never had the authority to tell them where they could or could not live.
Here is the constitutional bedrock Massachusetts seems eager to ignore: Traveling freely between states is a fundamental constitutional right, protected under the Privileges and Immunities Clause of Article IV and the Commerce Clause and reaffirmed by the 14th Amendment’s Due Process and Equal Protection guarantees. The Supreme Court has consistently held this freedom to be essential. In Saenz v. Roe (1999), the Court declared that the Constitution protects “the right of a citizen of one State to enter and to leave another State.” In Shapiro v. Thompson (1969), the Court struck down laws that penalized people for exercising that right, ruling that freedom of movement is “a virtually unconditional personal right.”
In short, no American has to ask for permission to leave Massachusetts. No one must bow before a family court judge before crossing into New Hampshire or Rhode Island. And no state agency — least of all Child Protective Services — has the authority to redefine constitutional liberties out of existence.
Yet that is exactly what Massachusetts did to the Riveras. Worse still, they didn’t just claim that the Riveras left illegally; they went so far as to lie to Texas authorities, asserting that the Riveras had “kidnapped” their own children. Imagine that: parents, never found guilty of any harm, accused of kidnapping the very children they brought into the world. This is not law enforcement; it is law perversion.
And it exposes a deep rot in the child welfare system. CPS has become a rogue agency, one that acts not as guardian of children but as predator of families. In Massachusetts alone, more than 10,000 children are in state custody. Many of them, like the Rivera children, are not rescued from abusive homes but seized from intact, loving families on flimsy allegations, manufactured evidence, or outright bureaucratic spite. Judges sign off on removals with rubber stamps, police enforce orders without question, and attorneys who challenge the system find themselves stonewalled or threatened.
The Riveras’ plight is not just a family tragedy. It is a national test case. If the state can declare parents guilty without trial, strip them of their children without evidence, and prosecute them for exercising the most basic right of American citizenship — the right to move freely within the Union — then none of us is safe.
The Constitution was written precisely to prevent this kind of tyranny. Our founders knew that liberty lost in one sphere quickly bleeds into others. Today, it is the Riveras forbidden to leave Massachusetts; tomorrow, it could be any parent, any family, caught in the gears of an unaccountable state.
Related: The Case Against Child Protective Services: Why It’s Time to Abolish CPS
As a federal lawsuit against CPS and its collaborators moves forward, the Rivera case should be watched by every American who still believes in family, in freedom, and in the rule of law. The question is not only whether Ruth and Izzy Rivera will be reunited with their children. The question is whether the Constitution still means what it says — that Americans are free, not subjects, and that no bureaucrat can tell us when and where we may live.
Because if Massachusetts can criminalize motherhood and outlaw mobility, then the idea of America itself is on trial.
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