Lawsuit: Tennessee DCS took kids after traffic stop without a valid court order

by Anita Wadhwani, Tennessee Lookout
February 13, 2025

A Georgia mother whose five small children were taken from her after a traffic stop has alleged Tennessee Department of Children’s Services workers acted without a valid court order in violation of the law, new filings in a civil rights lawsuit said.

Bianca Clayborne filed suit last year on behalf of herself and her children, who were placed in foster care for 55 days following the February 2023 traffic stop in rural Tennessee.

Clayborne, her partner and their five children were on their way to a funeral in Chicago from their home in Atlanta when a Tennessee Highway Patrol officer pulled them over in Coffee County for tinted windows and a slowpoke violation, an incident report said.

Claiming to smell marijuana, troopers searched the car, finding fewer than five grams, according to the report.

Possession of small amounts of marijuana typically result in a paper citation in Tennessee. Instead, troopers arrested Clayborne’s partner, Deonte Williams, cited Clayborne and asked the mother to follow them in her car with her children to the Coffee County jail to bail Williams out. Williams admitted to the possession, but Clayborne denied she had used marijuana.

Tennessee DCS workers can be held liable for role in taking kids from parents after traffic stop

In the jailhouse parking lot, social workers confronted Clayborne in her car before forcibly taking away her children, who ranged in age at the time from a seven-year-old to a four-month-old breastfeeding baby.

The incident received widespread attention and raised questions about whether the family, who is Black, received disparate treatment because of their race. In the days after the Tennessee Lookout first reported the traffic stop, Tennessee Democrats, the Tennessee Conference of the NAACP and others demanded the children be returned home.

Williams later pled guilty to a single simple possession charge. The charge against Clayborne was dismissed.

Now the ongoing lawsuit against those who participated in the children’s removal – among them Tennessee Highway Patrol troopers, Coffee County Sheriff’s deputies, and caseworkers with the Department of Children’s Services – makes a series of new allegations that the process used to remove the children violated the law – and that DCS and Coffee County officials destroyed evidence and created a false paper trail to cover their tracks.

“These public officials illegally tore apart and terrorized Clayborne’s family,” the lawsuit said. “They acted outrageously and unlawfully. Their actions caused severe emotional trauma to Clayborne and each of her five children.”

A spokesperson with the Tennessee Attorney General’s office, which is representing Department of Children Services caseworkers and THP troopers named in the lawsuit, did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday.

Attorneys representing Coffee County and its employees argued in legal filings that the new claims are barred by a statute of limitations. They did not respond to requests for comment by the Lookout on Wednesday.

‘Momma is not going to give them up without a fight’

Tennessee law requires that DCS workers seeking an emergency removal of children from their parents file a sworn petition in court that details evidence of children being abused or neglected. Then a juvenile judge must issue a written order before any efforts to separate children from their parents is carried out.

That didn’t happen in this case, the lawsuit alleges.

Instead, a DCS caseworker who had no first-hand contact with Clayborne or her children placed a call to Coffee County General Sessions Judge Greg Perry about the traffic stop — a call that was outside the formal legal process.

A Black family fights to get their kids back from Tennessee Department of Children’s Services

Coffee County officials separately contacted Perry to question whether they could legally separate Clayborne from her children.

At the time, Clayborne was parked in the Coffee County jail parking lot, where county sheriff deputies had placed spike strips around her car to prevent her from leaving – an illegal exercise of police power to detain an individual who was otherwise not under arrest, not subject to any court order and free to leave with her children, the lawsuit said.

“Well momma is not going to give them up without a fight,” Coffee County Sheriff Investigator James Sherrill told Judge Perry, according to a recording of the call obtained from the county by Clayborne’s attorneys.

“If we get in the middle of this, there’s going to be a damn lawsuit,” Sherrill said.

In response, Perry said officers could arrest Clayborne for disorderly conduct. And, the judge said, “you won’t get in a lawsuit…because I’ve got judicial immunity.”

Perry told Coffee County officials his verbal order to remove the children was enough.

Tennessee law does not recognize oral orders from judges to remove children from a parent’s custody, the lawsuit noted.

“Tennessee does not permit children to be taken from their parents based on a private telephone call to a judge,” legal filings said.

“Instead, when DCS believes a child should be removed from their home, DCS must file a proper petition and make factual allegations under oath to support the drastic relief of removing a child from their family — and the law requires that the removal can only happen after procuring a valid court order.”

Perry is not named as a defendant in the lawsuit, which nevertheless alleges he acted with “no lawful authority.”

Perry did not return a message left with his office seeking comment about the allegations.

Lawsuit alleges DCS effort to “paper over” the record

The children were taken from Clayborne’s side as she waited to bail Williams out of the county jail about six hours after the traffic stop.

It was sometime after the children were taken into state custody that a DCS attorney filed the necessary legal paperwork. The time stamp on the petition was obscured, a further step to hide that legal paperwork had been filed after the children had already been taken from their mother in violation of state law, the legal filings said.

“Presumably aware they had not followed any legal ‘process,’ the DCS Defendants immediately began to paper over the record to make it look like they had followed the law — when in fact they had not,” the suit said.

The same DCS attorney continued to communicate with the judge one-on-one about the case, despite standard court rules that bar communications about an active case that do not include all parties.

Mother of five kids taken by DCS after traffic stop files lawsuit

Weeks later, after the family’s then-attorney learned about the private communications between DCS and Perry, the DCS attorney and the judge engaged in a series of late-night texts after 11 p.m. to discuss how to avert a lawsuit, legal filings said.

The attorney, who is not named as a defendant in the lawsuit, was terminated by DCS in 2024 for her conduct in a separate case that involved helping a DCS caseworker submit a “sworn petition falsely alleging that a child was drug-exposed to justify” removal of that child, the filing said.

U.S. District Judge Clifton Corker has yet to rule on whether the new claims filed by Clayborne’s attorneys may go forward.

Corker ruled in August that DCS caseworkers can be held liable for their conduct in the case, including for claims they violated the family’s Fourth Amendment Constitutional protections against unlawful search and seizures and the family’s legal claims of false arrest and false imprisonment.

The new filings also seek to add additional DCS caseworkers and Coffee County officers involved in the incident whose identities were only made known to the family after the initial lawsuit was filed.

The family is represented by prominent Nashville civil rights attorneys Abby Rubenfeld, Tricia Herzfeld and Anthony Orlandi.

First Amended Complaint

Tennessee Lookout is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Tennessee Lookout maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Holly McCall for questions: info@tennesseelookout.com.

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Foreign aid freeze halts University of Tennessee international agriculture program

by Cassandra Stephenson, Tennessee Lookout
February 12, 2025

A University of Tennessee program supporting agriculture education in developing countries is on hold while President Donald Trump’s administration reviews U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) spending.

The university’s Smith Center for International Sustainable Agriculture leads the Agricultural Leaders of Tomorrow (ALOFT) program for Southeast Asia. U.S. volunteers travel to Cambodia, Thailand and the Philippines to provide 2-week technical training to support resilient food systems for institutions involving youth, according to the university’s website.

USAID’s Farmer-to-Farmer Program awarded the Smith Center five years of funding for ALOFT in 2023, but the program is currently under a stop work order, said Tom Gill, the Smith Center’s director.

The 18-person ALOFT consortium gathered for a kickoff meeting in Siem Reap, Cambodia in November to make plans for years 2-5 of the project, according to a blog post published in January.

Those plans are now in limbo.

Spending at USAID, an agency that oversees the bulk of U.S. foreign aid distribution, is being scrutinized by a newly branded Department of Government Efficiency under Trump adviser Elon Musk. The setup spurred a litany of legal questions over the limits of DOGE’s authority and its access to federal systems.

Trump ordered a 90-day freeze on foreign aid last month, placed all USAID direct hires on leave and closed the agency’s headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Unions representing USAID employees and nongovernmental organizations that receive USAID funding responded by filing lawsuits. 

While Trump has called for USAID’s closure on social media, a federal judge on Feb. 7 temporarily blocked the administration’s plans to put 2,200 workers on leave and withdraw USAID’s overseas presence.

“We continue to closely monitor the situation and evaluate any potential impact on the University as new information becomes available,” University of Tennessee spokesperson Melissa Tindell wrote in an email to the Tennessee Lookout on Tuesday.

USAID provides funding for research grants and other programs to many state universities, including University of Tennessee. The funding freeze also paused a $22 million University of Louisiana AgCenter research project to make climate resilient sorghum, millet, wheat and rice, the Louisiana Illuminator reported.

The University of Tennessee chronicles its participation in the Farmer-to-Farmer program with a series of blog posts featuring program volunteers. 

Kristen Johnson, an assistant professor and nutrition specialist, traveled to Cambodia in 2022 with a group of UT Extension volunteers.

“Having the opportunity to do international work is a valuable thing because it could help agents better serve the diverse communities in Tennessee,” Johnson said in one blog post. “When you can learn how individuals in other places approach the same concept, you find that the way they do things might enhance the way you’re doing things and vice-versa.”

In fiscal year 2023, the United States distributed nearly $72 billion in foreign aid — roughly 1.2% of the entire federal budget — according to federal records. USAID distributed around $43.8 billion of those funds.

Tennessee Lookout is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Tennessee Lookout maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Holly McCall for questions: info@tennesseelookout.com.