In the New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department’s office in Hobbs, an eight-year-old boy wandered from room to room, desperately hungry, scrounging for food. An empty feeding tube was taped to his stomach, and a pacemaker implanted in his chest.
With no other foster placement available that could meet his medical needs, he had been living on the couch of a spare visitation room in the department’s office building.
The boy’s caseworker had not fed him or administered his heart medication for 24 hours.
When two CYFD caseworkers not assigned to the boy learned of his condition, they rushed him to the emergency room, where they stayed with him for hours until doctors stabilized him. They discharged him back to the CFYD office later the same night.
These allegations, laid out in a December 2025 lawsuit filed by two CYFD employees and in an interview with the employees’ attorney, are a recent example of a long-standing practice of housing children with highly complex physical and mental health needs in state office buildings. Some of these children have neurological disorders, acute diabetes, and other severe physical or mental disabilities. Some have been wheelchair bound or unable to walk on their own. Others have profound autism.
Few have safe foster placements available to them.
Such cases have vexed CYFD caseworkers and managers for years. Every child living in agency offices has experienced repeated trauma leading to significant mental and behavioral health problems that are beyond the ability of traditional foster homes to handle, even as the state experiences an ongoing shortage of foster families.
For children who also have serious physical disabilities, the challenge of finding a safe home is even greater. Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s recent executive order adds another layer of complexity to this ongoing problem of finding safe spaces.
In the absence of suitable alternatives, CYFD has increasingly placed these children in makeshift living quarters inside state office buildings — where they are cared for not by medical professionals, but by caseworkers with no medical training, according to five current and former CYFD employees interviewed for this story. CYFD has more than 50 offices statewide, but not all regularly house children.
“A lot of these kids we would see in the office were medically fragile,” said Evan Sena, a former CYFD employee who worked in the office until leaving the agency in late 2024. “None of us had any medical training, and yet we were expected to care for these medically fragile kids in our midst.”
Sena said that at any given time during his tenure, between 5-10 children living in the Albuquerque office had serious physical or developmental disabilities. Usually these children were housed in the receiving center, a wing of the office with more comfortable accommodations that are reserved for children under 12. If those children’s behavior became aggressive, they would be sent to live with the teenagers in an adjoining wing, Sena and other employees said.
Staff were expected to administer medications, including insulin, Sena said. Often medications would be mixed up or missed entirely.
A move last week by Lujan Grisham added new urgency to the crisis. On Jan. 19, the governor signed an executive order prohibiting CYFD from housing children in offices by March 1. The order directs CYFD to transfer all youth into “safe, appropriate, and licensed settings.” The order does not provide additional funding or outline steps for safely transitioning children to new settings.
A spokesman for the governor’s office declined to comment on the executive order, referring to an inquiry from Searchlight to CYFD. Jake Thompson, CYFD’s communication director, also declined to comment on the department’s strategy for complying with the order, saying that it was premature to offer specifics because CYFD’s approach is “evolving daily.”
Thompson said that the department has already relocated some children from offices, and fewer than 15 remained in offices statewide as of Jan. 26. “We will certainly meet the governor’s March 1 deadline” for ending office stays completely, he said.
CYFD employees and observers, however, have expressed surprise and concern at the governor’s order, insisting that the “safe, appropriate, and licensed settings” that Gov. Lujan Grisham mandated children in offices be placed in simply do not exist — especially for children with high medical needs.
“We should be dancing and singing about that proclamation,” said Dr. George Davis, the former director of psychiatry for CYFD and a plaintiff in an ongoing legal settlement over the department’s use of offices and other inappropriate placements for foster youth.
“But this could backfire. It’s easily possible to make a fragile system even worse by overburdening it, or by coercing placements” for medically complex kids into foster homes unequipped to handle them.
“We’re talking about major disorders,” Davis said, noting that he has seen children with seizure conditions, severe diabetes, and other serious medical disorders living in offices. “The state has not done what is needed to move these kids to places that can take care of them. We don’t have appropriate placements. Where are they going to go?”
Persistent gaps threaten kids
For years, CYFD has struggled to build the infrastructure needed to safely transition youth out of agency office spaces and into appropriate homes.
Those efforts stem from a landmark civil rights lawsuit known as Kevin S, which the state settled in 2020, promising to stop housing children in offices and other so-called “congregate care” settings — living arrangements that, the lawsuit claimed, were “locking New Mexico’s foster children into a vicious cycle of declining physical, mental and behavioral health.”
As part of that settlement, CYFD agreed to a series of steps that would allow youth to transition out of office buildings and into safe and appropriate homes, including building a new system of outpatient mental health care for children and improving intensive home- and community-based services for high-needs kids.
But CYFD has consistently failed to meet the terms of that agreement — and has instead moved in the opposite direction, according to a Nov. 2025 assessment by independent monitors tasked with overseeing the state’s progress in the Kevin S. settlement.
In 2024, over 700 youth were placed in CYFD office buildings, the monitors found — more than double the number of office stays in 2023 — usually because caseworkers could find no other placements.The majority of those office stays occurred in CYFD’s Albuquerque office and in offices in the southern part of the state.
Another analysis published by an independent consulting firm in Sept. 2025 found major, continuing shortfalls in CYFD’s capacity to manage cases of high-needs foster youth.
Among the gaps: CYFD has no mobile crisis response and stabilization programs and no step-down programs to transition high-needs children into lower-level treatment. Less than 50% of counties had residential programs or treatment foster care, a type of specialized foster home for kids with especially high needs.
Crucially, the assessment found, CYFD does not have a system in place for assessing foster children’s needs. As a result, the department did not ensure the physical health needs were met for 30 percent of the children surveyed. Fewer than half of the children surveyed received accurate assessments of their mental and behavioral health needs.
In the absence of that infrastructure, CYFD has frequently placed youth with severe mental health conditions in youth homeless shelters, a 2022 investigation by Searchlight and ProPublica found — a practice that led to suicide attempts, youth running away, and other mental health crises. When those youth ran away or were expelled from shelters, they would be placed back in agency offices.
Children with severe physical health needs have sometimes been placed in hospitals because caseworkers lacked alternative placements, employees interviewed for this story said.
Further complicating the problem is a persistent, crippling turnover rate among protective service workers. A recent report by the Legislative Finance Committee showed that CYFD’s turnover rate for protective service workers reached more than 50% in April of 2025. Assessments by the Kevin S. monitors and the independent consulting firm also underscored this shortage.
Employees interviewed for this story pointed to the stress of caring for medically complex children as one reason for CYFD’s staff exodus.
“We’re social workers, not doctors,” said a current employee. Searchlight is not naming this or other employees because they are not authorized to speak with the media and could be fired or disciplined if identified.
“We don’t know how to feed these kids that are on G tubes or need real medical attention,” the employee said. “We don’t know how to take care of them, and we’re forced to take care of these kids.”
Caseworkers have been assigned to mandatory overtime on nights and weekends and are directed to work frequent shifts in office buildings, even as they juggle crushing caseloads. Often workers call in sick for mental health reasons, employees said, leaving coworkers to pick up the slack. As staff struggle with burnout, many leave. The resulting shortfall has put children with medical needs in a dangerous position, as caseworkers find themselves unable to provide the oversight they need.
“I’ll be frank, with more than 50 kids on my caseload, there’s no way if I have a kid in the office that I would be able to go down there at eight o’clock every morning, and 8 pm every night, to verify that this kid is taking their medications,” said another current employee. “The expectations that are put on us are entirely unrealistic.”
These problems have left a perilous gap for the children ordered to leave the office, employees and advocates say.
“These kids are in the offices because CYFD has nowhere else to put them,” said Maralyn Beck, executive director of the New Mexico Child First Network, a foster care advocacy organization. “For years, CYFD has not been able to do what’s needed to get them into safer placements, and now they are expected to find homes for them in 45 days, including the kids that are in wheelchairs or who can’t walk or feed themselves? These kids need support, not an unfunded mandate with no plan.”
Dangerous placements
Gov. Lujan Grisham’s executive order comes after intensifying criticism of CYFD’s use of office spaces as foster placements, spurred by a series of dangerous incidents involving youth and employees.
Youth living in offices have been the subject of countless 911 calls, for incidents ranging from mental health crises to violent altercations and physical assaults. Drugs, sometimes including fentanyl, have been found in offices on almost a weekly basis, according to CYFD employees. Youth frequently run away from the office, sometimes remaining on the run for months at a time.
The day before Lujan Grisham’s executive order, police responded to a sexual assault at CYFD’s Albuquerque office, allegedly perpetrated by a teenager in foster care against a CYFD caseworker.
It was at least the third such assault in the Albuquerque office in as many years, beginning with a high-profile case in Dec. 2022 involving a 10-year-old boy with a cognitive impairment who was assaulted by a teenager living in the office.
CYFD has been unable to find a suitable home for the victim of that assault in the years since — a struggle that highlights the department’s difficulty in transitioning traumatized or disabled youth out of its offices.
After placing him in several out-of-state residential treatment centers, CYFD resorted to housing the boy in its Las Cruces office space, according to his attorney, Alison Endicott Quiñones. While there, he has experienced repeated mental health emergencies — at least 10 times, he has been taken to a psychiatric hospital then discharged back to the office, his mental health declining with each office stay, Endicott Quiñones said.
The boy’s experience represents an ongoing pattern. Statewide, more than 60 youth were discharged from acute care hospitals into CYFD offices in 2024, according to a report by independent monitors. Youth released from hospitals to offices have included gunshot victims and children with severe psychiatric disorders, employees said.
What if kids don’t want to leave the office?
In the past, CYFD caseworkers have sometimes been frustrated by youth who refuse to go to foster placements that become available. Some worry that a provision in the New Mexico Foster Child and Youth Bill of Rights could make placing teenagers in settings outside the office difficult.
“The lack of stability is profound,” Endicott Quiñones said. Caught in a cycle between hospitals and offices, children miss school, stable housing, and are constantly in a state of fight-or-flight. The resulting mental and behavioral health needs make finding an appropriate placement even more difficult, she said.
“This executive order is dangerous, it’s performative,” Endicott Quiñones said. “What are we going to do with the kids when we don’t have a system in place? Are we going to drop them off at the governor’s mansion?
Correction: An earlier version of this story stated that the 10-year-old boy had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital at least 10 times since his sexual assault. The story has been updated to reflect that not all of those trips resulted in a full hospital admission.