By Sherry Robinson
All She Wrote

Tear it down and start over.

In 2023, after another column about dead children and the failures of the state Children Youth and Families Department, I got an email from Melissa Beery, a family peer support professional who had worked with CYFD. She wrote: “Maybe it’s time to embrace radical change.” She proposed dismantling the department and creating new entities.

Reading the latest report on CYFD brought this email to mind. Earlier this month, Attorney General Raul Torrez released a 216-page report summing up a year-long investigation by the state Department of Justice. If you’ve been wondering what goes on inside CYFD, why children keep dying, why investigative reporters never run out of horror stories, the DOJ has laid it all out in unflinching detail.

The investigation, said the report, “identified systemic failures that have repeatedly endangered the children CYFD is sworn to protect. These failures are not isolated—they are pervasive, deeply entrenched, and too often result in preventable harm.”

Even though state law requires CYFD to put a child’s safety first, the agency repeatedly sends children back to parents despite ample evidence of abuse, neglect and drug use. That practice alone caused the death of seven children during the investigation, and it wasn’t an outlier. New Mexico’s rates of maltreatment, repeated maltreatment, and deaths are above the national average.

I wanted to know about CYFD’s internal culture because I’ve learned that’s where long-standing problems reside in any organization. My theory was that CYFD was in the grip of entrenched, self-serving middle managers who resisted reforms by administrators, the courts or the Legislature.

Well, no. The report makes clear that CYFD suffers from moral rot from top to bottom. It has a culture of secrecy, intimidation and retaliation.

Let’s start with Secretary Teresa Casados, appointed in 2023 not because she knew anything about child welfare but because she was the governor’s buddy. By the time she left last year her ignorance had hurt the department and “left CYFD directionless at a critical juncture,” the report said. Casados disrespected staff, made decisions based on personal grievances, issued conflicting and confusing instructions, and hired friends and family in key positions. Her management style: my way or the highway.

The report didn’t probe Casados’s predecessors, but this governor’s other three secretaries also lacked the kind of expertise needed to run CYFD.

The DOJ investigation paints a department that operates in isolation, follows its own rules only when convenient, and avoids accountability. In any controversy it circles the wagons. CYFD routinely resists or ignores requests from law enforcement, courts, the Legislature and the public. There is no transparency.

The department has dealt with worker shortages by lowering the bar and hiring people without professional training and credentials in social work. They receive little training. From unqualified supervisors they get little oversight, no support and may even be bullied. (One frontline worker committed suicide because of workplace mistreatment.)

After the inevitable bad decisions and mistakes, they leave, usually within the first year. Turnover has topped 30% for the last three years despite pay increases. Those who stay face a heavier case load, mandatory overtime and burnout. The report describes this as “a self-reinforcing hiring crisis.”

It won’t surprise you that CYFD investigations are shallow and that investigators are under pressure to close cases quickly to reduce caseloads. And when a case is closed prematurely, it often bounces back and/or a child is harmed. Again.

Now apply this culture of disrespect, secrecy and retaliation to foster parents. We should all be thankful that these good people step forward to help. But instead of being valued, CYFD treats them like “glorified babysitters,” the report found. The department doesn’t support or listen to them, communicates badly and often misinforms foster parents about their wards. If a foster parent tries to advocate for a child or, heaven forbid, complain, the agency will yank the child for a different placement. It’s no wonder the state has around 1,000 foster homes for more than 2,000 children in state custody. Add this to the department’s half-baked recruiting and you see why foster parents quit at about the same rate they’re recruited.

“It is 1,000% because of CYFD that they don’t have more foster parents,” said a foster parent. “They quit because of CYFD.”

I don’t have space in this column to give you more than a slice of the report, so I urge you to read it yourself. I have no faith that any reforms will succeed in an agency that abandoned its public service ethic. Which is why I keep returning to Melissa Beery’s email of three years ago. Next week I’ll share her perspective.