There are certain topics I’d give anything to avoid.
I’d love to spend every episode talking about faith, resilience, prepping, family—anything that uplifts. But then there are the conversations that drag you, kicking and screaming, into the darkest corners of our country, and once you see what’s there, you can’t unsee it.
That’s what this interview with my friend Ryan Matta did to me.
Ryan’s fearless. Stubborn in all the right ways. And allergic to controlled narratives. Whether it’s human trafficking, government corruption, cartel operations, the border, foreign policy—Ryan will go where other people won’t. And he doesn’t rattle easily. When he tells me that something’s the darkest material he’s ever worked on, I listen.
His new documentary, “Never in America,” is about Child Protective Services—CPS—the three-letter agency nobody wants to talk about, but which may be the most sinister of them all. Not because the people inside it are uniquely evil (though some are), but because the system itself has been engineered into a machine that destroys families on an industrial scale.
I thought I understood government corruption. I’ve covered the FBI, CIA, DOJ, CDC. I thought I’d seen the worst. But nothing—nothing—prepared me for what Ryan revealed about CPS.
It is one thing to believe the government is incompetent. It is another to realize it is kidnapping children—hundreds of thousands of them—every single year.
And most Americans have no idea.
This essay is my attempt to process what I learned from Ryan: the story of Baby Cyrus, the numbers that made my stomach drop, and the horrifying picture of the foster system that emerged as he dug deeper. It’s not comfortable to read. It’s not comfortable to write. But if you’re a parent, a grandparent, an aunt, an uncle, a human being—this matters.
Because what Ryan revealed forces us to confront a reality that sounds like dystopian fiction, except it’s happening right here, right now, in our country.
And the first time you hear it, it breaks something inside you.
The Case That Pulled Back the Curtain: What Happened to Baby Cyrus
If you’ve never heard of the Baby Cyrus case, you’re not alone. Despite becoming one of the most viral CPS cases in American history, it received almost no mainstream media coverage—because it exposed something the system desperately wants hidden.
The family at the center of it—Diego, his daughter Marissa, her husband, and their baby boy—are the picture of a normal, loving American family. Diego himself is a longtime pastor with a huge extended family and deep community roots. These aren’t parents living on the edge of society, hiding from law enforcement, or struggling with addiction. These are the people we assume would be the least vulnerable to state overreach.
But when CPS wants your child, your virtue doesn’t protect you.
Baby Cyrus had a medical condition—cyclic vomiting syndrome—a rare disorder with no cure, where a baby can vomit 10, 20, 30 times a day for several days at a time. The parents were doing everything right: taking him to doctors, monitoring him constantly, protecting him from choking dangers, and trying desperately to find solutions.
Then one nurse noticed the family didn’t vaccinate.
And that’s when everything changed.
Ryan told me that the nurse’s entire demeanor shifted. Suddenly the parents weren’t seen as competent or caring—they became suspects. The hospital ordered them to attend a series of classes and weigh-ins, even forcing them to give Tylenol, despite the known harm. After several exhausting days, the mother woke up with a migraine and called to reschedule one of the mandatory classes. She left a voicemail.
Four hours later, CPS was hunting them.
No returned call. No conversation. No due process. Just a full-blown manhunt for a family whose “crime” was rescheduling a class.
They were already planning to move to Florida two months later. Out of pure fear—fear I now see was justified—they decided to leave early, hoping that if they got out of the jurisdiction, CPS would close the case. They had broken no laws. They had no charges against them. The only “danger” was that CPS wanted to seize their child, and they wanted to prevent it.
When they went to visit a friend—who happened to be a retired sheriff—law enforcement illegally geo-tracked their phones. They surrounded the home with nearly twenty squad cars.
Twenty.
Squad.
Cars.
For a pastor, his daughter, her husband, and a baby.
Ryan showed me the footage: guns were drawn, family members were ripped from vehicles, the sister mistaken as the mother was dragged out a window, cuffed, insulted, and arrested even after proving she wasn’t the mom. The real mother was threatened, cornered, forced to hand over her baby “the easy way or the hard way.” After she complied, they arrested her anyway.
Can you imagine handing your infant to a stranger with a gun pointed at you, knowing what the state is capable of—and then being arrested for complying?
Cyrus was taken to the hospital. The parents were jailed. And in any other CPS case, that would’ve been the end.
The vast majority never see their children again.
But this family had two rare advantages: an enormous network of church members and activists, and a close friendship with Ammon Bundy, who was running for governor of Idaho at the time. He mobilized protests overnight. Hundreds of people surrounded the hospital. Thousands sent complaints. The story spread like wildfire across independent media.
Eight days later—an unheard-of outcome in CPS cases—baby Cyrus was returned home.
But the victory was bittersweet. St. Luke’s Hospital then sued Bundy and Diego for tens of millions of dollars, claiming the protests cost them revenue because they “had to shut down for safety.”
To this day, Diego is still fighting off lawsuits that would bankrupt a billionaire—representing himself, because hiring legal defense would destroy his family financially.
The state couldn’t keep the child.
So they’re trying to destroy the family instead.
What No Parent Wants to Believe: Our Government Is Kidnapping Children
Hearing the details of the Baby Cyrus case shook me, but what unraveled next went much, much deeper.
This wasn’t an isolated story.
It was a symptom of a monstrous system designed to tear apart families, funnel children into state custody, and in far too many cases… into the hands of predators.
I want to say this carefully. I don’t believe every CPS worker is evil. Many think they’re helping. Many joined because they care about children. But the structure—the incentives, laws, funding streams, and legal shield around CPS—creates machinery that rewards child removal and punishes family preservation.
And the numbers tell the truth.
Ryan shared the statistic that left me sick:
An internal CPS audit from 2019 found that 83.3% of the time, CPS was in the wrong when removing a child.
Let me say that again:
Over 83% of the children taken by CPS should never have been taken.
Last year alone, CPS removed 480,000 children.
If 83% were unnecessary, that means approximately 400,000 American children were wrongfully seized.
And here’s the statistic that should haunt this entire nation:
Fifty-four percent of those children never see their parents again.
That’s over 200,000 children a year—just vanishing into the system.
Imagine a foreign government kidnapping 200,000 American children a year. We’d call it war. But when our own government does it, it gets filed under “child welfare.”
This isn’t welfare.
This is state-sanctioned abduction.
The Foster System: A Pipeline to Trafficking
It would be one thing—still horrific, but one thing—if these children were being placed into safe, healthy foster homes.
But Ryan’s research showed something far darker.
He told me statistic after statistic, each one landing like a blow to the gut. I could hear in his voice that he’d lived with this information long enough to stop being shocked, but not long enough to stop being angry.
Here’s what he uncovered:
A massive percentage of trafficked children—sexually exploited, missing, abused—come directly from the foster care system. Not from the streets. Not from foreign countries. Not from broken homes.
From state custody.
Let me put this plainly:
The government is taking children from loving families and placing them into environments where they are far more likely to be raped, abused, trafficked, or disappear entirely.
Fifty-five children go missing from foster care daily. Daily.
Where do they go?
“Ran away” is the official line. “Placed with a sponsor.” “Transferred.” “Unknown.”
But Ryan gave example after example of what actually happens.
A thirteen-year-old “runs away.” A foster parent shrugs. CPS shrugs. Law enforcement shrugs. But no one asks the harder question:
Did she “run away,” or was she sold?
The foster system has become the perfect hunting ground for predators because children inside it lose the two protections that matter most:
A parent and a witness.
No one is watching. No one is accountable. No one is coming to save them.
Ryan told me about cases where girls from the foster system ended up chained in basements, raped daily, starved, tortured. About migrant girls trafficked after border crossings, dumped into HHS facilities, then sold to “sponsors” who were never vetted. About staff inside group homes who prey on kids because the system gives them access and near-total immunity.
I’ll never forget him explaining how a trafficker intentionally burns cigarette marks into a little girl’s arm—not just to hurt her, but to brand her mind with trauma so deep that she can never forget what he did to her. That was one example among many he’s encountered.
And I sat there listening, thinking:
We’re not a free country if this is happening.
We’re not a moral country.
We’re not even a functioning country.
We are a nation that allows its government to feed its children into hell.
How the System Got This Way: The Money Machine Behind CPS
One of the most stunning parts of Ryan’s research was discovering why CPS behaves this way.
It isn’t just incompetence.
It isn’t just corruption.
It isn’t just ideology.
It’s money.
In 1997, the Clinton administration passed the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA). Before ASFA, states didn’t have a massive funding structure to support removing children. After ASFA, state governments could access huge amounts of federal money—but only if they increased child removals and adoptions.
That means the state gets financially rewarded for taking your kid.
Police departments get quotas.
Caseworkers get quotas.
Courts get overloaded.
Judges rubber-stamp removals.
Foster agencies get paid per child.
Adoption agencies get paid even more.
Every level benefits from one thing:
Separating a child from their biological parents.
You don’t build a machine like that accidentally.
And once billions of dollars are flowing through it, you don’t shut it off without a fight.
The Part No One Wants to Admit: The People Doing the Taking Are “Just Following Orders”
One of the most troubling aspects of the Baby Cyrus case wasn’t the bureaucrats. It was the cops.
I’ve been a strong supporter of law enforcement for most of my life. I still believe many officers serve honorably. But that night, when twenty squad cars surrounded a pastor’s family at a gas station, ripped a young woman from her seat, arrested a mother who had broken no laws, and seized a baby at gunpoint—
They weren’t heroes.
They were order-takers.
That moment forced me to look at policing differently. Good officers can do terrible things when the system tells them they must. History proves that over and over. And CPS relies on this compliance.
Every kidnapping they perform is carried out by someone with a badge who believes they’re “just doing their job.”
Evil doesn’t always wear a villain’s mask.
Sometimes it wears a uniform and follows protocol.
The Bigger Picture: A Society Destroying Its Own Foundation
As Ryan and I kept talking, something clicked for me on a deeper level. This isn’t just about CPS. This is about the deliberate dismantling of the nuclear family in America.
Because if you want to control a population, weaken its culture, and destabilize its future, the fastest way is to sever the bond between parent and child.
What happens when you remove hundreds of thousands of children from stable families?
You create generations of traumatized adults.
You create people who struggle to form families of their own.
You create citizens who depend on the state, not each other.
You create easy prey for traffickers, criminals, and predators.
You create exactly what the architects of this system want.
And that realization is what sealed it for me:
This isn’t incompetence.
This isn’t oversight.
This isn’t accidental.
It is engineered.
So What Do We Do?
I asked Ryan what he tells parents who are terrified after learning all this.
His answer was heartbreaking in its simplicity:
Never let CPS into your home without a warrant. Never call CPS unless your child is in immediate, physical danger. Never assume “it could never happen to me.”
Once they are in your life, the system is designed for you to fail.
The other answer—the one both of us kept returning to—is education. Awareness. Sunlight. The only reason Baby Cyrus made it home is because thousands of people saw what was happening and refused to stay silent.
When the state fears public outrage, it retreats.
When the state knows no one is watching, it advances.
Ryan made this documentary so people could see the truth with their own eyes. I’m writing this essay for the same reason. If we want our country back—if we want to protect our children—we have to be willing to look at the evil being done in plain sight.
Because one day, it might not be “someone else’s kid.”
It might be yours.
Or mine.
And if that day ever comes, you will pray that the rest of America is awake enough to fight for your family the way thousands fought for Baby Cyrus.
Conclusion: The Fight Ahead
I walked away from my conversation with Ryan shaken, angry, and deeply moved. Not because I’m naïve about government corruption—I cover it every week. Not because I needed another reason to distrust federal agencies—I already distrust most of them.
But because the magnitude of this one is bigger than almost everything I’ve covered:
The government is kidnapping children.
The foster system is trafficking them.
The courts are rubber-stamping it.
The media is ignoring it.
And the public barely knows it’s happening.
That’s not a broken system.
That’s an evil system.
And if we don’t expose it, if we don’t talk about it, if we don’t demand accountability—then we become complicit in its silence.
I can’t live with that.
Ryan can’t live with that.
And if you’re reading this, I’m guessing you can’t either.
So watch his documentary. Share it. Talk about it. Prepare your family. Know your rights. And refuse to let fear silence you.
Because the truth is uncomfortable.
But losing our children would be far worse.
And if there’s one thing I know about America—it’s that when our children are threatened, we rise.
It’s time to rise.
