Tim Walz's "Sanctuary" Law Could Bankrupt Families and Enable Domestic Violence

On the bright side, it will enrich lawyers

“That march of bigotry and hate stops at Minnesota’s borders. Freedom is on the march in Minnesota, decency is on the march in Minnesota, compassion is on the march in Minnesota.”

-Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (2023)

The Roy siblings draft a sanctuary law

For the past few years, blue states have been touting themselves as “sanctuaries” for minors who want pediatric gender medicine (PGM) in states that have banned it.

These Democrat-run states pass laws that purport to ice out other states when it comes to extradition, subpoenas, and court orders. Some also blow up interstate child custody jurisdiction law.

Since American states are supposed to be “United,” these laws are problematic. Their provisions tend to be toothless, unworkable, unconstitutional, or dangerous to the future of the republic. Like most ineptly-drafted laws, they’re bound to yield confusion and higher legal bills. 

The potential for conflict between parents and between states seems to be a feature, not a bug, for self-righteous politicians who champion these bills. That’s why I call them Showdown Laws.

Showdown Laws vary from state to state. When I wrote about Rhode Island’s 2024 bill in April (it’s now a law), I noted that it did not attempt to wrest child custody cases away from other states that had jurisdiction – perhaps because by that point trans activists had accepted the subject was a total boondoggle.

Well, Minnesota enacted its Showdown Law a year earlier, in April 2023. It does include child custody jurisdiction, among other rotten eggs. The governor who signed this Succession smoothie was Tim Walz. He’s now Kamala Harris’ running mate.

In this post I’ll go beyond the headlines to tell you what Tim Walz actually signed into law regarding child custody. Since the bill was sold to the public alongside an abortion-themed Showdown Law, I’ll also get into the politics of reproductive healthcare. Finally I’ll consider what all this says about Walz.

Minnesota’s Showdown Law also tries to limit cooperation with other states related to subpoenas and extradition. You can read my Rhode Island post to see how I analyze those provisions.

What Is Gender-Affirming Care?

Minnesota defines “gender-affirming health care” broadly to include all “medically necessary health care or mental health care that respects the gender identity of the patient, as experienced and defined by the patient […]” 

The Showdown Law does not define “gender identity.” It actually does the opposite, codifying its subjectivity with the phrase “as experienced and defined by the patient.” So “nonbinary” is on the table. Literally anything is on the table, but judges will probably yell at a lawyer who argues that Frog is a gender. Because that’s irrational.

Custody Jurisdiction

The Showdown Law’s child custody provisions tee up conflict with other states over which one should hear the case, which is called “jurisdiction.” Once a judge decides that her court has jurisdiction, she can issue custody orders.

Custody orders address not only who the kid lives with (“physical custody'“) but who makes medical decisions for the kid (“legal custody”).

Jurisdiction laws don’t actually dictate whether the child should be placed with “affirming” parents or administered gender medicine.

How Child Custody Jurisdiction Should Work

Child custody disputes are heard in state courts under state law (with very rare exceptions). Sometimes it’s not clear which state should hear a case. What if a mother and father got divorced in Rhode Island two years ago, but since then the father moved one town over to Massachusetts and enrolled the kid in school there? What if the parents have lived together for years in Oregon, but it was an abusive relationship and last week the mother finally fled with the kid to stay with her mother in Illinois? What if the family is a bit chaotic, and the kid’s been moving around between both parents and Grandma in three different neighboring states?

Everyone wants these cases to be heard in the most convenient forum, factoring in where the parties live and where the relevant records and potential witnesses are. They don’t want families to drain their bank accounts litigating which state is most convenient.

In the 1960s, states started enacting “uniform” (identical) laws to dictate how jurisdiction would be decided. In the 1990s this model law was updated. It’s now known as the Uniform Child Custody Jurisdiction Enforcement Act (UCCJEA). Every state except Massachusetts has adopted it (Massachusetts’ version is just slightly different).

The point of the UCCJEA is to impose a formula for determining jurisdiction that is as logical and objective as possible. You can draw it up as an elaborate decision tree full of yes-no questions (“has the child been present in the state for six months?” “is this an emergency?”). It directs judges in competing states to get on the phone and talk it out if the answer isn’t clear, to avoid ending up with court orders from two different states.

Key to the UCCJEA’s success is that it’s “uniform.” In theory judges in two different states will never both think they should have jurisdiction, because they’re interpreting the same words. Ideally, the parents won’t even have to litigate the question of jurisdiction because the UCCJEA is so clear. Their lawyers will be able to predict how a judge would rule and encourage an out-of-court agreement on where the case should proceed. This saves the parties time and money.

That system has functioned OK for decades. But today’s Showdown Law proponents have higher priorities than order and efficiency. They want their state to win.

Minnesota Rips the Uniform

Minnesota’s Showdown Law amends its UCCJEA. It’s not uniform anymore. There are now deviations related to initial determinations (meaning, orders where the family hasn’t been to court before) and emergency jurisdiction.

Initial Determinations

The UCCJEA places initial jurisdiction in a given state when certain conditions are met. Let’s say the parties are a non-affirming mother and an affirming father, the family has lived in Texas for the last ten years, and now the father is filing suit in Minnesota. The conditions for moving ahead in Minnesota instead of Texas (simplified a bit):

1. The child moved from Texas to Minnesota more than six months ago OR they moved more recently but Texas declined to exercise jurisdiction “on the ground that [Minnesota] is the more appropriate forum”

AND

2. The child and at least one of the parents “have a significant connection with [Minnesota] other than mere physical presence”

AND

3. “Substantial evidence is available in [Minnesota] concerning the child’s care, protection, training, and personal relationships[.]”

Minnesota’s newly-amended law adds that (2) is satisfied when the child is “in [Minnesota] for the purpose of obtaining gender-affirming health care[.]” It moves the Texas father one step closer to getting his case heard in Minnesota, but not all the way there. He still has to worry about (1) and (3). 

Emergencies

The more significant amendment is to emergency jurisdiction, which allows courts to override the other rules if the child is present in the state and has been abandoned or abused. Minnesota’s new law adds another circumstance: “the child has been unable to obtain gender-affirming health care[.]” When this happens, the Minnesota judge is supposed to throw out all other considerations and find it’s her job to hear the case.

Go back to our Texas-Minnesota family. Imagine the affirming father just showed up in Minnesota yesterday with the kid, claiming the kid is trans. Jurisdiction clearly belongs back in Texas but for the argument that Texas’ lack of pediatric gender medicine is an emergency.

If the Minnesota judge finds out that the non-affirming mother has filed suit in Texas, she should call up her Texas counterpart:

“[The Minnesota judge] shall immediately communicate with the court of [Texas] to resolve the emergency, protect the safety of the parties and the child, and determine a period for the duration of the temporary order.”

On that call, Minnesota Judge will be calling the case an emergency. Texas Judge will read her own state’s UCCJEA (regardless of her politics or feelings about PGM) and say that there is no emergency. Under Texas law, Texas should have jurisdiction and Minnesota Judge has no business issuing any custody order. Both judges are obligated to assert jurisdiction.

The solution could be that the judges each make orders about which parent should have custody, but the orders are identical (for example, they both rule that the father should have custody and the mother can take the kid from 9am Saturday to 9pm Sunday). The judges would be reaching this conclusion not because the law dictated it, or because they independently worked out that was in the best interests of the child, but because they recognized that Minnesota’s new law put them and the family in an insane situation: 

If the judges didn’t issue the exact same order, either the parents would be violating one court’s order or one of the judges would have ignored her state’s jurisdiction law.

This is how legal systems decay.

Batterer’s Delight

The Showdown Law helps out domestic abusers in a few ways.

Because the definition of gender medicine includes “mental health care,” parents can say their child needs it no matter how young they are. After all, a baby unsnapping his onesie is trying to tell you he’s a girl. Any schemer in a red state could kidnap their 3-year old, move to Minnesota, and score a custody order from a Republican-hating judge by crying crocodile tears and waving a copy of The Gender Creative Child.

(I practiced domestic violence family law and have reviewed orders from gender-brained family court judges. I have no doubt this will happen.)

Also, the UCCJEA lets judges take domestic violence into account and decide the perpetrator’s state is an “inconvenient forum.” Minnesota law now overrides that. Judges can never decide that Minnesota is an inconvenient forum, where a parent claims a kid is trans, if the alternative is a state that limits PGM. 

State Intervention

The Showdown Law protects parents where a state has sought custody (meaning, tried to take the kids away) because the parents affirmed the kid. It applies to all other states but for ease of reading, I’ll plug in “Texas”:

“A law of [Texas] that authorizes a [Texas] agency to remove a child from the child's parent or guardian because the parent or guardian allowed the child to receive gender-affirming health care … must not be enforced … in a court in [Minnesota]. A court order for the removal of a child issued in [Texas] because the child's parent or guardian assisted the child in receiving gender-affirming care in [Minnesota] must not be enforced in [Minnesota].”

What if a Texas dad shows up in Minnesota claiming that Texas is after him because he sent his kid to a gender-affirmative therapist – but actually Texas wants him for physical abuse? I think the Minnesota judge would sort it out eventually but not right away. Family court is chaotic and it takes a while for records and witnesses to roll in (in 2015 we still had to use fax machines and no one had yet figured out how they worked).

When I practiced family law, I’d often meet mothers of children subject to custody orders that their ex had conned out of the judge on an “emergency” basis when she wasn’t present in the courtroom, or when she was present but got railroaded. (Abusers tend to be charming and great liars.) My coworkers or I would scramble to get back into court and secure a better-informed order, but the whole ordeal could take a week or longer.

I don’t think red state judges are actually ordering kids into foster care because their parents took them to Drag Queen Therapy Hour. It’s likely that this law will do more to empower abusive parents than to protect affirming parents.

Endangering Kids, Executing Zygotes

Minnesota’s Showdown bill was marketed to voters with a similar bill purporting to protect out-of-state women seeking abortions in Minnesota. This is a common play. Rhode Island’s Showdown Law actually combines the two concepts into a single law.

During the same period that conservative states have banned PGM, they have also restricted abortion access. Hospitals in these states refuse to properly treat women who are suffering miscarriages or dangerous, doomed ectopic pregnancies, because the proper care could be construed as an illegal abortion. This incapacitates and pains women for days, on top of inflicting a psychic burden of carrying around a dead or dying fetus. The predictable infections that follow cause medical chaos and can threaten the women’s lives.

This infuriates blue-state liberals. Their elected leaders milk the situation by championing Showdown Laws that, for example, protect doctors from extradition for abortions performed in the “sanctuary” state. No state has ever sought such extradition.

The barbarism inflicted by these red states on pregnant women was pioneered by Catholic hospitals throughout the country. To this day, Catholic hospitals deprive pregnant women of normal and necessary care, leading to the same scenarios we see now in anti-abortion states. These tax-advantaged “nonprofit” institutions (which get out of following pension laws because they’re religious) are growing in power through mergers. In rural areas, they may be the only game in town.

Tim Walz hasn’t piped up about Catholic hospitals in Minnesota. Just Republican abortion laws in North Dakota.

Did Tim Walz Mean It?

So Walz gleefully signed a bill that’s likely to open the door to batterer high jinks, run up legal bills for families, and degrade the legal system. It also might give affirming parents an edge in child custody lawsuits over non-affirming parents located in states that ban PGM, by giving them entree into Minnesota’s (presumably) more trans-happy courts. Finally, the marketing of it was basically a call for dismantling the United States of America.

What does that say about Walz?

Even many lawyers don’t seem to realize how nuts Showdown Laws are. Walz is not a lawyer.

Tim Walz might actually care about “LGBT” people. New York Times:

“At Mankato West High School in Minnesota in the 1990s, he sponsored a gay-straight alliance and has said it was important at that time for the sponsor to be ‘the football coach, who was the soldier and was straight and was married.’ When he won his House seat in 2006 in a conservative district, he ran on support for same-sex marriage.”

Many old straight people, of course, think trans is as biologically-rooted as gay and somehow similar to it. So Walz might feel a genuine affinity toward the trans-kid cause.

I’m not excusing Walz for signing the Showdown Law. I am trying to rate him in a meaningful way – is he better or worse than the average Democratic politician? The same, I guess. He grandstands, believes opposition to PGM is hateful, and doesn’t heed any advisors who know how laws work. This is the Democratic party in 2024.

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Related: Rhode Island Democrats Try to “Shield” Ivy League Doctors

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