New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham in a statement Wednesday evening said a new report from the state Department of Justice excoriating the state’s child welfare agency “captures a system of the past.” The governor also defended steps taken by her administration to address problems she described as endemic to child welfare systems everywhere.
Following a year-long investigation, NMDOJ on Wednesday released a 214-page report that documented numerous cases of abuse, including 14 children who died while in the custody of the state Children, Youth and Families Department. The report concluded that CYFD has prioritized “family reunification” over the safety of the children in its care, among a host of other systemic issues. New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez also announced he would be suing the agency for allegedly misusing state confidentiality laws to hide those systemic failures.
While Lujan Grisham said she shares in New Mexicans’ “heartbreak over these disturbing allegations,” she said the report does not reflect the current state of the agency.
“The disturbing episodes recounted in the document occurred before our new cabinet secretary, Valerie Sandoval, assembled a dedicated and talented new leadership team,” Lujan Grisham wrote, adding that the team has “rebuilt” relationships with advocates and attorneys to improve outcomes.
Lujan Grisham also noted that child welfare “failures” are not unique to New Mexico and “exist in every state, driven by decades of structural gaps, misaligned federal and state law and systems ill-designed to keep pace with the complexity of the families they serve.”
She also highlighted some of her administration’s reforms in response to those issues, such as ending the practice of housing children in CYFD offices by executive order, increasing foster parent payment and extending foster care eligibility from age 18 to 21.
“The Attorney General’s report is shocking but shock value doesn’t solve the problems, and our response is to keep doing the important daily work of keeping New Mexico’s children safe,” Lujan Grisham concluded.
CYFD Communications Director Jake Thompson in a statement said the agency is still reviewing the NMDOJ report, which it did “not have opportunity” to review before its release. However, the statement notes, the report “underplays or ignores significant, measurable progress the department has made in the last seven months.”
That progress, Thompson said, includes hiring 250 new staff members in the past six months; closing thousands of already completed cases; and working to increase the number of foster homes.
In a call with Source NM Thursday, Sean Sullivan, the lead attorney who authored the NMDOJ report, said he stood by the findings, which he said describe “longstanding and pervasive issues.”
“I was disheartened to see that they were more interested in a point-by-point rebuttal to those issues,” Sullivan said of the Lujan Grisham administration’s responses. “I just think it begs the question, do they want to get this system right? Or do they want to be right?”
He noted the report was a product of more than 20,000 documents and 150 interviews with current and former child welfare workers, former foster children, nurses, detectives and others.
“This report is not the opinion of one or two people,” he said. “It is the consensus of those people that work with CYFD each and every day.”
Sullivan said the NMDOJ recognized recent hires and efforts to boost foster parent recruitment, but said the systemic issues remain.
“I certainly commend the progress, where it has been made, but I think it would be very difficult for CYFD or the administration to suggest that we are anything but really close to the starting blocks as opposed to the finish line,” Sullivan said.
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