he State of New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department, 1031 Lamberton Place NE in Albuquerque, photographed on Friday December 18, 2015. (Dean Hanson/Albuquerque Journal)
This is the first story in a series looking at child welfare in New Mexico.
New Mexico has ranked consistently near the bottom when it comes to child well-being. The Children, Youth and Families Department, which is supposed to protect the most vulnerable children, has also battled scandals, secrecy, and staffing instability for decades. In the first of a series, KUNM looks deeper into the legacy of these longstanding challenges and how they affect families in the foster care system.
Kevin S. was 12 in 2009 when he entered foster care the first time. He went into custody again in 2016, this time at the request of his mother. But placements weren’t always available and many nights he actually slept in offices of the Children, Youth and Families Department or CYFD.
Children who enter into foster care are often already grappling with trauma. Attorney Tara Ford, co-founder of Pegasus Legal Services for Children, said family disruption and multiple unstable placements can make that even worse.
“There is the trauma related to the child and family getting entangled in the system, and then there’s the trauma that the system causes,” said Ford.
A 2018 lawsuit by Kevin and 13 other foster youth was just the latest litany of these ongoing issues with New Mexico’s child welfare system. The children, ranging in age from 1 to 17, accused CYFD and what was then the Human Services Department of re-traumatizing them because of the lack of behavioral health services, and safe and stable home placements. A number of them were sent to facilities outside the state, including Kevin.
“My kids who were out of state, I visited every single facility. It had nothing to do with what our kids needed,” said Bette Fleishman, the lawyer for Kevin and others in the suit. “One of the facilities with one of the plaintiffs was really bad. I got him moved and about a week later it got closed down by the licensing people.”
Kevin S. and Chris W. were both 14 at the time of the suit. Court filings show they both enjoyed being active, were interested in music, and had goals for their future.
During his first time with CYFD, Kevin spent two years in a residential treatment center in Texas. He re-entered foster care in 2016, where he said he received insufficient medical and behavioral health treatment. The lawsuit states CYFD was aware of abuse both from staff and other residents. And when Kevin slept in CYFD offices he would run away and was sometimes found weaving in and out of traffic.
Fleishman said that has become the norm.
“These kids sleeping in offices, which had just been unheard of. Literally for days sleeping on the floor with no food, with no shower,” she said.
Chris also entered into foster care in 2016 while grieving his mother, who died due to complications of asthma. Chris had problems getting health care and was also placed in facilities outside New Mexico. He even spent time in juvenile detention after he ran away and was missing for nearly a month.
In the legal filings, Chris expressed hope that one day he would be reunited with his two brothers, who are also in CYFD care, and they would have a permanent home.
Co-Counsel for the Kevin S. team, Sara Crecca said she has clients who are separated from their biological siblings, but they often find that family dynamic with other foster youth, like her client Rudy.
“He got some friends who are like his family that really made him feel like he had the connections he needed that weren’t provided for him,” Crecca said.
The Kevin S. case was settled, but then re-opened for arbitration last year. The mediator in those arbitration proceedings released his report recently and found issues that put kids in custody in quote “irreparable harm”. Those included high workforce caseloads, lagging foster family recruitment, poor data reporting, and a lack of well-child checks.
Ford said the state has lost ground since the settlement.
“We’ve had difficulty bringing enough resources to bear and we’ve had a lot of difficulty aligning those resources,” said Ford.
Unfortunately none of this is new.
Legislative records from the 1980s highlight systemic challenges and a growing concern that child abuse and neglect were worsening in the face of government inaction.
A 1980 class action suit against the Human Services Department represented foster children who argued their civil rights were being violated, when the state failed to develop permanent plans for their placement. The lawsuit eventually evolved into a consent decree in 1983.
State Rep. Eleanor Chávez, D-Albuquerque, worked as a social worker for the state during that time. She said the state agreed to improve in areas like training for social workers, finding permanent housing for foster kids, and setting caseload standards.
“The department was actually under a federal consent decree and was able to see the improvements that consent decree required of the department at that time, in terms of licensed social workers being hired and really in terms of reducing the amount of time that kids are in foster care,” said Chávez.
But even with the consent decree government efforts around foster children lacked coordination.
That prompted former Gov. Bruce King to create the Family Policy Task Force in 1991. This group within the Legislature would focus on ensuring that policies and resources would prevent kids from entering into care in the first place by stabilizing families, ultimately creating what’s now known as the Children, Youth and Families Department in 1992.
Former State Sen. Jerry Ortiz y Pino said this was a huge step forward because gaining the support of lawmakers was a hard fight.
“They got the money. They got the resources. Mostly they got the support to try it. And then they were able to meet all the benchmarks for the consent decree,” Ortiz y Pino said.
CYFD brought together the responsibilities of five state agencies into one cabinet-level department focused on vulnerable children and families. It was the first of its kind in the nation.
“We had an agency that would bring together child-serving functions of the government and that would really lead those efforts,” said Ford.
One initiative was the move to Medicaid Managed Care Organizations, which provide health care coverage to foster children. These organizations were supposed to streamline the complex health needs of foster children, especially serious behavioral health problems.
“Once managed care really became the mechanism by which New Mexico was serving children, youth, and families, again it became really central to align those resources between CYFD and HSD, to make sure that we were creating a system of care that children and families well,” Ford said.
Ortiz y Pino would later become division director of the Child Welfare Program, which became CYFD, where he saw that consent decree finally lifted in 2005.
“We had reduced our caseloads, we had enough professionals in the department, we had enough foster homes. We really lived up to the demands of that consent decree” said Ortiz y Pino.
According to CYFD’s annual report in 2005 over 2,500 kids were in foster care. In 2024, that dropped to just a little over 2,100 kids. But Ford says making lasting change would prove to be an uphill battle.
“Conditions facing children and families in New Mexico are enduringly harsh,” Ford said.
This story is the first in a series. It was funded in part by the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism. Support for this coverage comes from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.