Maria Espinoza, a 16-year-old girl who was blind, nonverbal and developmentally delayed, was totally dependent on her mother, Doraelia Espinoza.
But Espinoza repeatedly failed to care for the girl, and in May 2022, Maria starved to death. Espinoza admitted to police she hadn’t changed, fed or cared for her daughter in a week, according to court records and other reports. When she died, Maria weighed only 40 pounds and was found with maggots on her genitals.
The girl’s “death was not the result of a single oversight, but the tragic culmination of years of poor judgment, policy violations” and inaction by the New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department, the state Department of Justice wrote in a scathing 224-page report published Wednesday.
The report documents the cases of at least 28 children involved with CYFD, such as by being placed in foster homes or other facilities, or because their families were investigated amid allegations of brutal abuse or neglect.
CYFD has twisted its core function of safeguarding vulnerable children into a habit of allowing them to stay in the homes where they were abused or neglected, sometimes leading to tragic consequences, investigators wrote. They cited a trend of insufficiently qualified employees serving in leadership and front-line positions, and flawed investigative practices in abuse and neglect cases, and said the agency prioritizes covering up its mistakes, leaving children in danger.
The Justice Department’s investigation was launched about a year ago, after 16-year-old Jaydun Garcia died by suicide at a state-contracted group home for foster children despite repeated requests from other youth for staff to check on him.
“Had CYFD provided the appropriate support and resources that Jaden so desperately needed, I have no doubt my family and I would not be here today,” Carla Garcia, Jaydun’s aunt, said at an Albuquerque news conference Wednesday, when Attorney General Raúl Torrez announced the report on his agency’s investigation.
“I hope to one day see CYFD adhere to their promise of protecting kids in their custody, and that Jaydun’s death is not in vain, and is the catalyst for much-needed change,” Garcia said.
Torrez said he plans to work with state lawmakers to pursue legislative reforms of the child welfare system, but he believes the Roundhouse must rebuild CYFD from scratch.
“I am of the view that the Legislature should start with a blank piece of paper,” he told a crowd at the news conference. “… Instead of trying to redesign a broken house, start with a blank sheet of paper and build what you think needs to exist from the ground up, and then see if you can map that on to the existing structure.”
He added, “I’m not sure that you can, to be perfectly honest with you, in part because it’s not only a structural problem, it’s a cultural problem.”
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said in a statement Wednesday she shared in New Mexicans’ heartbreak over the allegations in the report, adding she would “never minimize the tragedy of any child that CYFD has failed to protect.” She also acknowledged child welfare agencies fail — “sometimes tragically.”
However, she said the Justice Department’s report “captures a system of the past,” arguing many of the incidents described in it happened before current Cabinet Secretary Valerie Sandoval brought in a new, experienced leadership team and meaningful change.
Lujan Grisham cited several recent successes by her administration, including the state’s elimination of the practice of housing foster children in CYFD offices this year and the removal of roughly 170 children exposed to substances at birth from dangerous homes.
She also said the state has increased payments for foster families by 25% and has in recent years extended the time foster youth are eligible for services.
“Child welfare failures aren’t unique to New Mexico — they 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,” Lujan Grisham wrote. “I have always known that. And unlike some, I haven’t just talked about it.”
‘Poor leadership’
Doraelia Espinoza had been reported to CYFD seven times before her daughter’s death; nurses, social workers and police officers expressed concerns Maria and her siblings were living in filthy conditions, were not being supervised and were being deprived of food, records show.
Yet CYFD time and again conducted weak investigations and allowed the children to remain in Espinoza’s care, according to the Department of Justice, which used a pseudonym for Maria in its report.
The agency did not identify any of the children or families involved in the cases it investigated, instead using pseudonyms to protect their identities — though many of the cases are easily recognizable as high-profile examples of egregious child endangerment.
The Justice Department said it also granted anonymity to CYFD workers and foster families interviewed as part of the investigation to protect them from retaliation.
“The child welfare crisis is not an unavoidable reality, but the direct result of poor leadership, indefensible choices, missed interventions, and a widespread lack of transparency,” investigators wrote. “CYFD’s shortcomings go beyond mere bureaucratic mismanagement — they represent a systematic moral failing — measured in children continuing to be abused, neglected, and lost.”
When the investigation was launched, Torrez said the probe would cover more of the general issues facing CYFD, leading to Wednesday’s report.
Alongside the findings, Torrez’s office also filed a lawsuit against CYFD alleging the child welfare agency intentionally obstructed its investigation by improperly citing confidentiality laws designed to protect children’s privacy in abuse and neglect cases.
The Justice Department also alleged in the lawsuit CYFD uses those confidentiality laws to intimidate staff and foster parents expressing concerns about its practices.
The report presents a slew of recommendations for CYFD to address the systemic issues, in particular urging the child welfare agency to accelerate the hiring of “mission-critical staff” and prioritizing the recruitment of licensed social workers. It also recommended the agency improve investigations by conducting unannounced visits at families’ homes and retraining workers to use investigative tools that help determine the risks children face.
CYFD spokesperson Jake Thompson said the agency was not able to review the Justice Department’s report before Wednesday and hadn’t yet analyzed the findings or recommendations.
But he said CYFD has already made progress on each of the systemic issues identified in the report, providing new resources for foster families and creating a new program for specialized foster care.
Thompson also disputed some of the issues the Justice Department cited, such as CYFD relying too heavily on group homes and other congregate care settings.
“We are still reviewing the attorney general’s report, but it’s clear that it underplays or ignores significant, measurable progress the department has made in the last seven months,” Thompson wrote.
‘Hiring crisis’
The Justice Department’s report identifies eight systemic failures at CYFD, including unqualified leaders and workers, inappropriate removals of children and reunifications with families, reliance on unsuitable housing for foster children, and insufficient support for foster parents.
Amid an ongoing crisis of turnover among CYFD’s front-line caseworkers, the agency has increasingly recruited people who are not qualified to do their jobs and moved away from hiring experienced, licensed social workers, the Justice Department said.
That agency cited comments from former CYFD managers, including Romaine Serna, a deputy division director who resigned in May; she had expressed concerns that rapid-hiring events led the agency to recruit people it shouldn’t have.
One new employee smoked marijuana with a child, Serna said, and another showed up drunk for a visit with a family.
Nathan Burton/The New Mexican
“Accounts from these CYFD employees and others reveal a self-reinforcing hiring crisis,” Justice Department investigators wrote. “Faced with high caseloads and poor retention, CYFD lowers employment standards to quickly fill vacancies, often hiring individuals without relevant credentials or experience.”
The Justice Department’s concerns about unqualified employees also reached the top levels of leadership at CYFD, with investigators saying several people formerly in senior positions had reported former Cabinet Secretary Teresa Casados’ “limited understanding of child welfare issues negatively impacted the Department’s performance.”
Those negative impacts, the report said, left CYFD “directionless at a critical juncture.”
Thompson said CYFD has made significant progress in addressing its workforce issues, hiring nearly 250 new caseworkers in the past six months, closing thousands of completed cases, and implementing new training and support to help retain staff.
Lujan Grisham also described CYFD’s new leadership as “dedicated and talented.”
“This team has rebuilt CYFD’s relationships with advocates, attorneys and community partners who now are rowing in the same direction as they transform New Mexico’s system for protecting our most vulnerable children,” she said.
The problem of an unqualified CYFD workforce is accompanied by the staggering rate at which New Mexico children are exposed to abuse and neglect compared with the rest of the country, the Justice Department said. A recent report by the Legislative Finance Committee found 13.9 children out of 1,000 have experienced maltreatment in 2024. The national level is 7.2.
CYFD’s failures are in part fueled by the agency’s overcommitment to keeping at-risk families together, the Justice Department said. While Child Protective Services workers are obligated to make reasonable efforts to keep families together, the agency said, they must prioritize a child’s safety and not send a child back to a home where they are likely to be hurt again.
“CYFD’s failures to make timely and common-sense decisions that prioritize child safety has been a central driver of New Mexico’s child maltreatment crisis,” investigators wrote. “In many cases, CYFD’s chronic inaction has led to extended delays in removing children from dangerous environments, or not removing them at all.”
Thompson disputed that CYFD places higher priority on keeping families together than on children’s safety. He noted federal and state laws require the agency to attempt to reunite families when there are no indications serious harm will come to children.
Still, he lamented the tragic cases detailed in the Justice Department’s report.
“The death of any child is a tragedy. We grieve the loss of every life and share in the heartbreak endured by family and friends,” Thompson said.
Hiding failures
In many of the most severe abuse and neglect cases discussed in the report, CYFD made efforts to hide its failures, including by doctoring investigators’ accounts, the Justice Department said.
In the case of James Dunklee Cruz — a 4-year-old Albuquerque boy, named in the report as “Leo M,” who was beaten to death in 2022 — the CYFD investigator’s written account of what happened was heavily cut down by a supervisor and county office manager. James’ mother, Krista Cruz, and two others were convicted in his death.
“When children are injured or killed, CYFD’s instinct is not transparency, but self-preservation — deflecting blame, concealing poor decisions, and protecting its image instead of confronting mistakes and embracing lessons that could prevent future harm,” Justice Department investigators wrote.
The Justice Department said CYFD also obfuscated its investigation over the past year, resisting requests for child abuse and neglect records and releasing only some of the information requested. CYFD often cited an “inappropriately broad reading” of state laws protecting children’s privacy in abuse and neglect proceedings.
“CYFD’s approach was consistent: deflect, delay, and withhold,” the Justice Department wrote. “… CYFD’s application of confidentiality operates more as an impediment to transparency and accountability than as a genuine safeguard for the privacy of children and families.”
Lujan Grisham and Thompson did not directly address questions about the lawsuit or allegations CYFD intentionally obstructs transparency.
Lawmakers respond
State lawmakers expressed outrage at the Justice Department’s findings, but also ideas on how to move forward.
“This report is painful to read. These are real children — returned to dangerous homes, left without visits for months, warehoused in office buildings, failed at every turn by an agency that chose to protect its own reputation over their lives,” Sen. Crystal Brantley, R-Elephant Butte, wrote in a statement. “As a mother and as a lawmaker, I find this unconscionable.”
House Speaker Javier Martínez, D-Albuquerque, said he did not disagree with Torrez’s suggestion to rebuild CYFD from the ground up, noting he has sponsored legislation in recent years to move control of the child welfare agency out from under the governor to an independent commission.
He also indicated CYFD is spread too thin to be effective, given it manages both protective services and juvenile justice programs — a point also made by the Justice Department in its report.
“The truth of the matter is, the agency has long outlived its usefulness, quite frankly,” Martínez said. “The fact that we have the same agency dealing with foster children also dealing with criminal justice is insane, and that has to change.”
Sen. Michael Padilla, an Albuquerque Democrat who grew up in New Mexico’s foster system, said the ongoing failures of CYFD detailed in the report were “unacceptable for the protection of New Mexico’s children.”
However, he noted CYFD has struggled for many years and said the blame did not lie with Lujan Grisham’s administration.
He also said he plans to propose legislation next year that would move governance of CYFD to a board of regents rather than the governor. The panel should include people experienced in child welfare, he said, such as a behavioral health specialist and a foster parent, and that it should have an executive director to closely oversee the child welfare system who would not turn over when a new governor is elected.
“I think this allows for long-range planning, budgeting, financing, goal-setting and development for the people that do this very important work,” Padilla said.