A New Mexico Department of Justice lawyer who recently authored an extensive report on the state’s child welfare agency said an outside expert’s criticism of that report is “misguided” and “hyperbolic.”
Earlier this month, Attorney General Raúl Torrez held a news conference to discuss the findings from a scathing 214-page report on the Children Youth and Families Department. Among other takeaways, NMDOJ found that CYFD prioritized “family reunification at virtually any cost – returning children to dangerous caregivers with histories of substantiated abuse or chronic neglect.”
The report said that 14 children had died in state custody in the last two years, and detailed numerous instances of abuse, such as the starvation death of a blind and non-verbal 16-year-old girl, who was the subject of seven CYFD referrals in five years.
CYFD officials and Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham disagreed with the report’s findings, with the governor saying it “captures a system of the past” and defended steps taken by her administration to address the problems she said are endemic to child welfare systems across the U.S.
Source NM recently ran an April 16 opinion piece by Richard Wexler, the executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, which argued the report’s conclusions were “dangerously wrong,” saying that it “cherry-picked” abusive cases and ignored the real driver of child welfare issues: where a family’s poverty is confused with neglect.
In a follow-up interview, Wexler said studies show that investing in more programs to address family poverty will allow better outcomes for children, without having to be moved into foster care.
He argues Torrez’s argument is seeking to “take the child and run.”
“Torrez’s thesis is dangerously wrong because it will overload the system,” Wexler said. “It will do enormous harm to the children needlessly taken and overloaded workers are going to have even less time to find the children in real danger.”
Wexler further said addressing cases of poverty will free up the state to find cases of maltreatment and worsened neglect.
“There are times when domestic violence, mental health and substance abuse can, and should be, cause to remove a child,” Wexler said. “But the notion that that is anywhere near universal – that is what’s enormously damaging.”
Sean Sullivan, an NMDOJ attorney who was the lead author of the report, defended its findings, and called Wexler’s criticism “not only misguided, but hyperbolic.”
“What you see in practice is either children are not removed from those dangerous circumstances, and they’re put on hollow safety plans that aren’t actually overseen by the department,” Sullivan told Source NM. “Or they are temporarily removed, and there is this rush to prematurely reunify them with families before those families have taken advantage of the services that they need to.”