YFZ Ranch

The Yearning for Zion Ranch, or the YFZ Ranch, was a 1,700-acre (690-hectare) Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) cult community of as many as 700 people, located near Eldorado in Schleicher County, Texas, United States. In April 2014, the State of Texas took physical and legal possession of the property. As of 2019, the property was in the process of being sold to the Dallas-based firm ETG Properties LLC, who were already leasing it for use as a military and law enforcement training facility.

The YFZ Ranch was situated 45 miles (72 kilometers) southwest of San Angelo and four miles (six kilometers) northeast of Eldorado. The Ranch was settled by members of the FLDS Church who left Hildale, Utah and Colorado City, Arizona under increasing scrutiny from the media, anti-polygamy activists and law enforcement officials.

Speaking in Sunday church services on August 10, 2003, Warren Jeffs declared that the blessings of the priesthood had been removed from the community of Short Creek (Colorado City and Hildale). Following the sermon, Jeffs suspended all further religious meetings but continued to allow his followers to pay their tithes and offerings to him. He then turned his focus to what he called "lands of refuge": secret communities that he had started to build up. Jeffs referred to Yearning for Zion Ranch, one of the lands of refuge, by the code name R17.

The YFZ Land LLC, through its president, David S. Allred, purchased the ranch in 2003 for $700,000 and quickly began development on the property. When he purchased the property, he declared that the buildings would be a corporate hunting retreat. Allred stuck with the deceptive story even after William Benjamin Johnson, a Hildale man, was alleged to be shooting all the white-tail deer on the ranch and, after an investigation, was fined for hunting without a license. Later, ranch officials disclosed that the hunting retreat description was inaccurate; the buildings were part of the FLDS Church's residential area.

The ranch was home to approximately 500 people who relocated from Arizona and Utah communities. It housed a temple, a waste treatment facility, a 29,000 sq ft (2,700 m²) house for FLDS Church president Warren Jeffs, a meeting house, and several large log and concrete homes. There were generators, gardens, a grain silo, and a large stone quarry that was cut for the temple. According to preliminary tax assessments, about $3 million worth of buildings had been built. The sect was fined over $34,000 for environmental violations in connection with buildings on the ranch, mainly due to its failure to obtain the required permits for its concrete-mixing operations.

The temple foundation was dedicated January 1, 2005, by Jeffs.

On March 29, 2008, a local domestic violence shelter hotline took a call from a woman, identifying herself as "Sarah", and claiming to be a 16-year-old victim of physical and sexual abuse at the church's YFZ Ranch. Investigators eventually established by tracing the calls that they were placed by a much older woman, Rozita Swinton, who had been arrested for previous hoax calls posing as abused and victimized girls. The call triggered a large-scale operation at YFZ Ranch by Texas law enforcement and child welfare officials, beginning with cordoning off of the ranch on April 3. SWAT teams, tactical vehicles, and police helicopters were deployed to the ranch in anticipation of armed resistance from the church members, but there was none. Authorities believed the children "had been abused or were at immediate risk of future abuse", a state spokesman said. Troopers and child welfare officials searched the ranch, including the temple's safes, vaults, locked desk drawers, and beds. They found evidence leading them to believe that the beds were "in a part of the temple where 'males over the age of 17 engage in sexual activity' with underage girls". A religious scholar later testified in court that he did not think sexual activity occurs in the temples of FLDS sects, and that temple service "lasts a couple of hours, so all the temples will have a place where someone can lie down". Child Protective Services (CPS) officials conceded that there was no evidence that the youngest children were abused (about 130 of the children were under 5), and evidence later presented in a custody hearing suggested that teenage boys were not physically or sexually abused.

CPS spokesman Darrell Azar stated, "There was a systematic process going on to groom these young girls to become brides", and that the children could not be protected from possible future abuse on the ranch. Interviews with the children "revealed that several underage girls were forced into 'spiritual marriage' with much older men as soon as they reached puberty and were then made pregnant". After Judge Barbara Walther of the 51st District Court issued an order authorizing officials to remove all children, including boys, 17 years old and under, from the ranch, eventually a total of 462 children went into the temporary custody of the State of Texas. The children were held by the Child Protective Services at Fort Concho and the Wells Fargo Pavilion in San Angelo. Over a hundred adult women chose to leave the ranch to accompany the children. Children under the age of four were allowed to stay with their mothers until DNA testing to identify family relations was finished; once DNA testing was completed, only children under 18 months were allowed to stay with their mothers indefinitely.