When Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham issued an executive order in January to end office stays for foster youth, her mandate had a clear condition: All kids who were living in offices must be moved to “safe” and “appropriate” settings that can give them adequate care.

In the weeks since the order, however, the New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department has been sending those kids to live in youth homeless shelters — and refusing to pick them up when shelter staff say they are in danger, according to four shelter managers interviewed for this story.

Individual shelters have received four to five referrals a day from CYFD, according to shelter employees. Many of those referrals are for youth with severe mental and behavioral health needs that shelters are not equipped to handle, the employees said — teenagers who have experienced repeated trauma while in CYFD custody, and have spent years moving from one inappropriate foster placement to another. These same teenagers had been housed in agency offices prior to the executive order.

The referrals to youth homeless shelters come after six years of failed efforts to build a new mental and behavioral health system for New Mexico’s kids. The state’s efforts are part of the 2020 Kevin S settlement agreement, a legal arrangement in which the state also promised to stop housing youth in shelters and other so-called “congregate care” settings.

The decision to abruptly end CYFD office stays has further destabilized children and teenagers, Heather Hoffman, executive director of Youth Shelters and Family Services in Santa Fe, said in an interview. The result, she said, is a “devastating landscape” in which the state’s shelters — voluntary, short-term facilities that do not provide psychiatric care or other services that high-needs youth require — are playing an outsized role. The 11 shelters statewide are mostly nonprofits with CYFD contracts.

 “The acuity of the needs of the youth that are being brought to us are way higher, just kind of off the charts,” Hoffman said.

One shelter described a referral for a youth who identified as being “actively homicidal.” Other referrals have included kids with violent criminal histories, suicidal ideations and psychosis. Often, staff say, CYFD does not share critical information about a youth’s past mental and behavioral health problems before when referring them to shelters.

The results are predictable.

Kids brought to shelters have experienced repeated crises, sometimes in the form of violent outbursts or sexually aggressive behavior that puts the safety of the entire shelter at risk.

Shelter managers interviewed for this story described youth punching walls and destroying property, threatening other shelter residents and staff, and making aggressive sexual advances towards other residents. Most often, the youth will run away.

Shelter managers: Crisis now worse

It’s not a new problem.

A 2023 investigation by Searchlight and ProPublica found more than 1,100 incidents, from January 2019 through June 2022, when someone at a shelter housing foster kids in New Mexico called emergency dispatchers for help with runaways, violent outbursts, disorderly conduct or mental health crises.

Since the executive order ending office stays, shelter managers say the crisis has gotten significantly worse.

“We have had to call the police so many more times since that order, probably more than we’ve had to call in the last six or seven months combined,” Hoffman said.

“It’s just adding PTSD upon PTSD to them, because we have to do this nuclear option of calling the police when normally CYFD could simply come in and de-escalate, take the youth back and work on finding placement.”

In March, CYFD Communications Director Jake Thompson said that the department has developed a new system to find placements for children following the executive order. That system involves working on an individualized, case-by-case basis to identify each kid’s specific needs and determine the appropriate foster placement for them.

“I want to make it clear that the kids are in appropriate care,” Thompson said. “You know, they’re not being shunted somewhere. They are in appropriate care under the new system we have operating.”

CYFD has acknowledged in the past that shelters are not acceptable settings for foster youth.

An appropriate stay in a shelter is “zero” days, Emily Martin, the former head of CYFD’s protective services division told Searchlight in 2022. “Because it’s just another level of congregate care. It’s not family-based. It doesn’t always include the services that are needed.”

CYFD has come under increasing scrutiny for its use of offices, shelters and other congregate care facilities to house foster youth.

On Wednesday, the New Mexico Department of Justice released a blistering report outlining what it characterized as CYFD’s “systematic moral failing” in protecting kids under its care, and for retaliating against employees and others who raise concerns. A substantial part of that report focuses on CYFD’s use of congregate care facilities, which the attorney general described as sites used for “warehousing youth.” That practice has led to lasting physical and emotional harm, the report says — including the suicide of a teenager at a group home last year.

 In response to the New Mexico Department of Justice report, Gov. Lujan Grisham said on Facebook that “it’s important to note that the Attorney General’s report captures a system of the past.” The post on Wednesday cited the executive order ending office stays as an example of “bold, structural change” that has moved the child welfare system forward.

“As evidenced by her executive order prohibiting office stays for children in CYFD’s care, the governor is wholly committed to ensuring that all New Mexico children have a safe and nurturing place to live,” Michael Coleman, a spokesman for the governor, said in an email to Searchlight. “While accomplishing this remains challenging in some cases, Gov. Lujan Grisham is confident that CYFD’s leadership team is working overtime, in collaboration with many public and private partners, to address the problem in a way that protects children and those entrusted with their care.”

 “We will not come pick them up”

The executive order banning office stays forced a shift in CYFD’s approach to shelters for foster placements.

In the past, CYFD would pick kids up at the shelter following a crisis and, often, take them to the department’s office until a caseworker could find an alternative placement. But the order has put CYFD workers in a desperate position, with unprecedented pressure to find housing for kids even as appropriate homes for high-needs youth are in desperately short supply, according to CYFD employees interviewed by Searchlight.These employees asked not to be named because they are not authorized to speak with the media and could face retaliation.

Now, shelter managers say, the department is refusing to take kids from shelters following dangerous incidents.

“All the shelters have gotten this direction repeatedly, that we are required to accept this referral, and we’re required to keep the child,” said one shelter manager who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation by CYFD. “If we call and say they are not safe, or other youth are not safe at our facility, the workers say, well, you have to keep them. So we will not come pick them up.”

Instead, CYFD has implemented a new policy, put in place after the executive order: Before a child can leave a shelter, the department must hold a “discharge meeting” with shelter staff to discuss the child’s case.

Often, shelter employees say, CYFD will schedule a discharge meeting days after a dangerous incident occurs. In many instances, CYFD requires multiple followup meetings before agreeing to discharge a kid — sometimes leaving children in unsafe conditions for more than a week. During those meetings, shelter staff say they are pressured to keep a child that they feel is not safe in their facility. If they don’t comply, employees say, CYFD threatens to investigate their license.

In at least one instance, CYFD initiated a licensing investigation against a shelter for discharging a client, according to that shelter’s manager. The investigation was dropped after the department found no violations, the manager said.

In an email to Searchlight, CYFD communications director Jake Thompson said the discharge meetings are a necessary step in ensuring that children’s placements are handled properly.

“Before the governor issued an executive order ending office stays, some providers, including shelters, frequently refused to accept children or abruptly discharged them to CYFD,” Thompson said. “In many of those instances, CYFD had no other option but to keep children in our offices until an appropriate placement could be identified. Those days are over. We are striving now for proper discharge planning. Also, if we learn of potential licensing violations, it is our responsibility to investigate.” 

Emails shared with Searchlight show that since the executive order, shelter staff have repeatedly contacted CYFD to schedule urgent discharge meetings after serious incidents involving aggression, self-harm or unsafe sexual behavior. CYFD caseworkers took days to remove the kids from the shelter, often because they could not find any other placement, the emails show.

In some cases, shelter staff said in interviews, youth have run from shelters and CYFD has not scheduled discharge meetings for days, leaving kids on the streets. In others, CYFD has asked shelters if it’s possible to have a child picked up by police to give them more time to find another foster placement, employees said.

In several instances, shelter employees have called in reports of child abandonment against CYFD for kids who have been left at shelters after dangerous incidents or who have gone on the run, without CYFD coming to pick them up.

The situation is untenable, shelter managers say, and threatens to destabilize the system of youth shelters for kids that will need them in the future.

“With them now requiring this discharge meeting and kind of threatening your license, you know, holding that over their head — this doesn’t feel like a partnership or a collaboration,” said Bowen Belt, director of the San Juan County Juvenile Crisis Center in Farmington.

“And a lot of these kids, they need one-on-one care. They need somebody to care for them and look over them all day, every day. Shelters can’t do that.”