AUSTIN, Texas—Because of a federal appeals court ruling, child welfare workers will be required to obtain court orders in most cases before removing allegedly abused children from their homes, officials said.

The ruling last month by a three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals will also bar welfare officials from automatically removing all children from the home if one child is alleged to be abused. While unrelated, the ruling came amid scrutiny of the state’s removal of hundreds of children this spring from a polygamous sect.

“The decision will require us to make some extremely difficult decisions,” Carey Cockerell, commissioner of the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, said in an “urgent legal advisory.”

The memo was sent last week to Child Protective Services staff, the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News reported Tuesday in online editions. It said staffers must follow the new policies to avoid being sued for monetary damages.

Generally, CPS removes a child if there’s a threat of immediate danger or sexual abuse and then heads to the court to seek a removal order from a judge.

In the future, the memo states, the state will have to obtain parental consent or a court order first, “unless life or limb is in immediate jeopardy or sexual abuse is about to occur.”

The ruling resulted from a lawsuit against the state of Texas filed by a Fort Bend County couple, Gary and Melissa Gates. Their 13 children had been removed from the home during a child abuse investigation in 2000. A judge returned the children to them several days later.

The federal appeals court dismissed the Gates lawsuit on technical grounds, but agreed that the case could have been handled better. It said that state agencies must “seek to involve the state courts, who act as neutral magistrates in these complicated matters, as early in the process as practicable.”

“In that way, the government may ensure that everyone’s interests are considered, and the least amount of harm will come to the children the government seeks to protect, as well as their parents,” said the opinion by Judge Edward Prado.

The memo said that in the future, child abuse investigators must consider the situation of each child in the home before any of them are removed.

The standard practice of removing all children in a household when abuse was suspected on any single child was the basis for removing more than 400 children from a West Texas polygamist group in April. The children were returned to their parents in June, though one girl—an alleged child bride—was put back in foster care earlier this month.

Gary Gates said the changes will protect families from having their constitutional rights violated.

“The whole reason we started the litigation was because we felt there were wrongs in the system,” said Gates, an apartment building owner and founder of the Texas Center for Family Rights.

But Williamson County District Attorney John Bradley said he believes the department’s new policies are an overreaction to the ruling.

The appeals court ruling applies to the three states covered by the appeals court’s jurisdiction—Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas.