Very true. I used to volunteer with an advocacy group that helped parents whose kids were wrongly taken by CPS and what I saw of the system scared the crap out of me. It does some good work but the sheer stupidity of some of the employees, the arbitrary powers and lack of due process was the stuff of nightmares.
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There's a number of stories about children being taken from parents for dubious reasons, who end up dying in foster care:
Removed from parents because the father smoked marijuana at night when the child was asleep, child murdered by foster care parent with a history of violations: http://fox43.com/2014/11/06/2-year-old-taken-away-from-paren...
Removed from parents for "drug use and homelessness", died from neglect in foster care: https://www.abqjournal.com/1113809/caregiver-arrested-in-dea...
Removed from parents because baby had a bruise from when he bumped his head while feeding, died in foster care: http://fox40.com/2017/08/17/after-baby-dies-in-foster-care-b...
I read that last one and I'm not sure the "free range parenting" bill would even cover that. That was a case of, baby had a bruise and a doctor arbitrarily decided it was a willful injury by the parents. A process as aribtrary and random as that seems pretty broken and after that the foster process failed catastrophically. But I doubt "free range parenting" shuts down the entire process of removing kids from environments that are detected (rightly or wrongly) as directly physically abusive.
It is frightening. And it varies significantly by state.
For example Utah (where I foster) has 2.8 per 1,000 children in foster care, while neighboring Nevada has 6.7 per 1,000. New York has 5.0. California has 6.2. [1]
The ever-conservative Utah legislature puts a very high priority of children living with their legal parents. As long as there's no imminent health risk (abuse, hard drug use, severe neglect), parents virtually always keep custody.
I really wish it were like that in more places.
Traumatic situations for children should not be taken likely. But being forcibly removed into state custody is also a very traumatic event. You've got to be confident that the latter is the lesser evil.
[1] http://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/6243-children-in...
As someone who has been a foster parent and worked with a sort of advocacy group as well, I can tell you it isn't any better on this side.