No way is the court going to hand over a child to someone who can’t prove either biological parenthood or legal adoption. Nor is the court going to hand over a child to one biological parent without a formal effort to find the other parent and offer that parent an opportunity to argue for custody. Children whose parents can’t be identified will remain wards of the state or be put up for adoption.
However, while it’s pretty clear that a lot of these children had either no biological parent, or only one living at the compound, it’s likely that all of them have parents somewhere who are aware of what’s going on and aware that there’s at least a possibility that one or more of their own children is among the group taken from the ranch. There are likely to be a lot of custody disputes, both between FLDS member and non-member parents, and between members where one parent lived at the ranch with the child and the other didn’t. I’ve already seen one post on the Texas Polygamy message board from a woman identifying herself a wife who was listed in the seized “bishop’s Record” as living in Idaho with at least some of her children, while her husband was living at the ranch. She said she had refused to go with her husband to the ranch and didn’t agree with his decision to move there. But she is apparently still a member of the church and living in an FLDS community in Idaho.
I expect there are other mothers and fathers living apart from their children who will petition for custody now that the situation is “in play”. Before, some couldn’t even find out whether their children were at the ranch, making it virtually impossible to bring legal action to try to get custody of them, and risky because giving the leaders at the ranch notice that an outsider was filing a petition for custody in Texas provided plenty of opportunity for the child to be secretly moved elsewhere.