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moved from homes to protect them, "all too often over the years, South Dakota state officials have a history of unwarranted and unnecessary long-term removal of Indian children from Indian families."
• Congress passed the Indian Child Welfare Act in 1978 because of the once high number of Indian children being removed from their homes by public and private agencies.
• Brewer said that when state officials remove children without proof of neglect into non-Indian homes, the Native American children suffer emotional trauma, anxiety and depression.
• "For years Pennington County, courts, judges and the Pennington County's attorney have allowed the state of South Dakota and the Department of Social Services to take children -- Indian and non-Indian -- from their homes and family and place them in foster homes for months at a time, without requiring the state to produce any meaningful evidence in a fair and meaningful hearing," Brewer said. "This is an abuse of state power."
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• SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) -- Authorities have apprehended an inmate who failed to return to a minimum-security prison in Sioux Falls.
• State Corrections officials say 30-year-old Travis Thorngren was apprehended Thursday in South Sioux City, Neb. He went missing Monday from the minimum-security unit at the South Dakota State Penitentiary in Sioux Falls. He had been serving a five-year sentence on a grand theft conviction in Lincoln County.
• Another inmate, 19-year-old Cody Summerside, was apprehended by local authorities on Monday near Rapid City. He had left the prison on March 8 to search for a work release job and didn't return. Summerside was serving a four-year sentence on a Meade County drug charge.
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• RAPID CITY, S.D. (AP) -- The president of a South Dakota tribe suing the state's Department of Social Services says Native American children suffer trauma and depression when they are wrongly removed from their homes.
• Oglala Sioux President Bryan Brewer says the state has for years removed In

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