Child abandonment in New Mexico: Was a crucial opportunity missed?

This is the Paso del Norte border crossing - where the New Mexico 
family police agency told a 15-year-old to cross the border alone to unite with
his mother. Instead, he crossed several lanes of traffic and ran.

Did the New Mexico child welfare agency fail to offer help when extended family (or maybe it was godparents) couldn’t cope with a child’s behavioral problems? Did that set off an awful chain of events? These are not rhetorical questions. Maybe it didn’t happen that way. But New Mexico media should be asking. 

There is fury in New Mexico, as there should be, over how the state family police agency, the Children, Youth and Families Department, handled the case of a 15-year-old boy. They got a court to award custody to his mother, whom the child had not lived with for at least nine years and who had just been deported to Mexico. Then they took him to a border crossing and said: Go cross the bridge – alone – and meet your mother. 

The 15-year-old didn’t want to go. Instead, he crossed several lanes of traffic, went back to the United States, fled to Texas, was held in a shelter there and then, ultimately, reunited with his mother in Mexico. 

In short, CYFD committed child abuse and child abandonment.  

There were three crucial blunders here; the third of which, perhaps the most important, has gotten no attention. 

1.     1. It shouldn’t be necessary to even say this one: You don’t abandon children at an international border and, in effect, throw them away. Whether placement with the mother is right or wrong, this is inexcusable. 

2.     2. The child did not want to return to his mother in Mexico. The return to the mother was approved by a court. But where was the child’s lawyer? In New Mexico, children age 14 and over are entitled to their own lawyers. Those lawyers are supposed to tell the judge what the child wants. It’s not clear how vigorously they are required to advocate for the child’s wishes. 

What should have happened is that the child’s lawyer should have fought tooth and nail for the child’s wishes, making the best possible case on the child’s behalf. That’s not because the child was necessarily right. It’s because deciding what’s best is what judges are for, and they are most likely to make the right decision if all sides are allowed to make the strongest possible case for their positions. 

Did that happen here? We don’t know. In New Mexico, these court hearings are supposed to be open, but this one reportedly was closed. 

Is there a vital failure no one is talking about? 

3.     3. The most important failure may have happened a month or two earlier. News accounts vary, but it appears that this child was living either with relatives or family friends acting as godparents. According to one story: 

The boy was hospitalized in May because of behavioral health issues. When he was discharged in June, however, no one was able to take him in.

According to another account, which refers to the caretakers as godparents, those godparents were willing to keep the boy’s siblings, but not him.

Why?

We don’t know. But there are many cases in which caretakers, whether parents, extended family, foster parents or adoptive parents, simply find a child’s behavioral problems so difficult, they feel they have no choice but to surrender the child. That’s what happened, for example, to a child in Baltimore, Kanaiyah Ward. Her mother was desperate to get her help. Instead, Maryland’s family police agency dumped her in a hotel where she committed suicide. In the New Mexico case, the child also has a heart condition. 

If, in fact, this was the case here, if this was another case of overwhelmed family/guardians who felt they could no longer care for the child, CYFD might have avoided this entire crisis by offering Wraparound services – intensive help in which the family is provided whatever it needs to cope with any behavioral and medical conditions. Yes, sometimes caretakers are so overwhelmed, and so rightly distrustful of family police agencies, that it takes some convincing. Once again, I give you my favorite example. 

But did CYFD even try? 

It doesn’t look that way. And no wonder: CYFD is deluged by false reports, trivial cases, and cases in which poverty is confused with neglect, so the agency lurches from crisis to crisis. That, in turn, is caused by advocates of a take-the-child-and-run approach who use Trump-style smear tactics to encourage the needless separation of more and more families. 

In other words, by so deluging the agency, some of the very people screaming most loudly about what happened to this 15-year-old, such as the state Attorney General, may have worsened the conditions that set this latest crisis in motion in the first place. 

Because the only thing we know CYFD actually did was to ship the boy off to a foster home, after which the mother expressed interest in custody, after which CYFD got a court to award custody, after which they dumped the child at the border. 

Should the child live with his mother? 

Most New Mexico media certainly don’t seem to think so. They point out that the mother had two “substantiated” allegations of child abuse against her, most recently in 2021. But substantiated means only that a caseworker checked a box on a form. There were many more allegations, but those were unfounded, meaning they couldn’t even meet that minimal standard. So, what did the mother allegedly do in those two “substantiated” cases? Did the mother allegedly beat and torture her children? Was her poverty confused with neglect? Or did her behavior fall somewhere in between? 

It’s easy to miss in the news accounts, but the mother actually was living in the United States until June, when she was deported to Mexico on “drug-related charges.” What charges? Was she convicted? Did she have a meth lab in the basement? Was she dealing fentanyl? Or was she smoking pot – which, though legal in New Mexico, is still grounds for deportation. Or, again, was it something in between? 

The one thing we do know is that CYFD is guilty of at least one unconscionable failure – abandoning a child at the border. It may be guilty of much more. And some of those pointing their fingers at CYFD may share responsibility.

Foster care in California: Your tax dollars at work

 

Private foster care agencies in California want nearly total immunity from 
lawsuits by survivors of abuse in placements they oversee. But they'll settle
for a taxpayer bailout.

Private foster care agencies in California and elsewhere have been trying to get near-total immunity from lawsuits by survivors of abuse in homes or institutions they oversee – or at least a taxpayer bailout for their insurance costs. Here’s an example of who could be shut out. 

This is what allegedly happened to six children in a foster home in San Bernardino County, California, according to a story in the San Bernardino Sun: 

The children, according to the lawsuit, were routinely beaten with belts, cords, wooden sticks and other objects; bound with duct tape; and punched, kicked and choked until the point of unconsciousness. Socks were stuffed into their mouths to prevent anyone from hearing their screams, the suit alleged. And the children were deprived of food and water, forced to stand for hours holding books or lie in dark rooms, and sexually abused and coerced into sexual acts under threats of violence, it further alleged. 

The suit also alleges that county social workers, the foster family agency and school district employees repeatedly missed or ignored warning signs, including visible injuries, disclosures of abuse, missed welfare visits and complaints from the children. [Emphasis added for reasons discussed below.] 

This is what allegedly happened in another San Bernardino County home where a four-year-old autistic child died: 

The lawsuit filed July 7 by the family of 4-year-old Avery Habelitz alleges San Bernardino County Children and Family Services, two foster family agencies and multiple social workers ignored repeated warnings that Avery, who was autistic and nonverbal, required specialized care unavailable in her foster placements. 

The lawsuit alleges Avery was removed from her parents’ home and placed in foster care in Apple Valley, despite an individualized behavioral treatment plan calling for 32 hours a month of one-on-one behavioral therapy, 50 hours of social skills training, 20 hours of supervision and 15 hours of oversight by a board certified behavior analyst. 

Those services ceased after she entered foster care and were never resumed despite repeated warnings that interrupting treatment could worsen her self-injurious behaviors and other developmental challenges, according to the lawsuit. [Emphasis added.] 

Why the emphasis on the fact that those sued include a total of three “Foster Family Agencies” (FFAs)? Because these private agencies, which oversee many group homes and institutions and some family foster homes, have been waging a campaign to slam the courthouse door in the faces of survivors of abuse and their families. The same is true in several other states. Too many news organizations have bought the snake oil that the FFAs have been selling. 

At the heart of the issue is the fact that insurance companies have realized there is so much abuse in foster care that it’s a high risk – for them. So they’ve raised premiums. 

So the FFAs went running to the California Legislature seeking either or both of two things: near-total immunity from lawsuits by those who say they were victimized on their watch or a bailout in which taxpayers would chip in a whole lot of money to help them pay their insurance premiums. 

They did not get the immunity. They did get a bailout – to the tune of $31 million that could have been spent actually helping families. And now they’re after another. Private foster care agencies are seeking much the same in New York, Illinois and elsewhere. 

What is most shameful in all this is the credulous complicity of many news organizations. In story after story, private foster care agencies have been portrayed as God’s gift to children, and their closing supposedly would be some sort of catastrophe. That’s the agencies’ party line. One expects them to make such claims. But one news organization after another has accepted those claims without question. 

But, for reasons discussed in detail in the columns to which I’ve linked above, none of it is true. On the contrary, the closing of such agencies should be seen as an opportunity to rethink a system over reliant on their group homes and institutions and the foster families they supervise. 

So please, California journalists, and those dealing with this issue in other states: Before you write your next OMG-the-sky-will-fall-if-the-FFAs-don’t-get-relief story, take a moment to think about those six former foster youth who survived and the family of Avery Habelitz who did not. Then think about the thousands of others across the country who have been abused while under the “care” of FFAs and their counterparts in other states. Who really deserves our attention, our sympathy and our compensation, the children or the agencies?

Illustration by ChatGPT

NCCPR in Bridge Michigan: Can Michigan learn the right lessons from two child welfare cases?

Two cases involving Michigan’s child welfare system have been in the news lately. So far, Michigan lawmakers are ignoring one and learning the wrong lessons from the other.

Read the full commentary in Bridge Michigan.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending July 21, 2026

● The child welfare establishment loves to tell us that there is no racial bias in the system and children are never taken because of poverty alone – they claim there must have been something like drug abuse. This story from The Marshall Project exposes both those lies. And see also their story about one state – New Jersey – that has reformed its practices. 

● NCCPR’s commentary in Bridge Michigan: Two cases involving Michigan’s child welfare system have been in the news lately. (You’ve heard about one of them.) So far, Michigan lawmakers are ignoring one and learning the wrong lessons from the other. 

● In Arizona, where foster children are institutionalized at a rate more than quadruple the national average, there’s been another expose of widespread problems at two of the institutions. But the only solutions authorities can think of are to blame the kids and make the places more like jails. I have a blog post about it. 

● Meanwhile, The Imprint reports that Utah finally is shutting down one of the state’s notorious “troubled teen industry” institutions. 

● There’s still another study out showing the transformative power of cash. This one concludes: 

We find that a $1000 annual increase in total expected state safety net support is associated with a 4% decline in state-year CPS investigations among children of all ages and those under age 5, with similar associations for neglect and physical abuse investigations.

● And ABC News reports that 

A new bill in Washington, D.C., would allow foster youth to help define their own families — and it's crafted by the very young people it seeks to serve. 

Former and current foster youth helped create the Support, Opportunity, Unity and Legal Relationships Act, known as the SOUL Act. It's a Washington, D.C., bill that would allow teens -- ages 16 and up -- to legally enlist multiple guardians, blood relatives or other trusted adults for support without having to completely cut legal ties to their birth parents. …

Trouble at an Arizona residential treatment center? It must be the kids’ fault! Send in the drone!

Between January 2022 and September 2025, youth institutionalized at Canyon State Academy for boys or Desert Lily Academy for girls, adjoining residential treatment centers in Queen Creek, Arizona, ran away an average of at least once every two-and-a-half days – more than 600 runaway incidents in all, according to Phoenix television station KNXV. 

And runaways aren’t the only reason police keep showing up. In 2022 another Phoenix television station, KSAZ reported that police were at Canyon State Academy almost daily: 

From Jan. 12 to Oct. 4, officers responded to CSA 239 times. The leading type of call is a missing person, making up about 22% of the calls.  

18% of calls went for unknown trouble. 10% for follow-ups and 9% for assaults. 

The rest of the calls are scattered among several categories, including welfare checks, sexual assault and molesting. 

They were at Desert Lily Academy another 118 times. 

But the only things the state of Arizona and local authorities can think of to do about it are: 

● Blame the kids.

● Make the places more like jails. 

At no point, it seems, has anyone in power asked the obvious question: Why are so many children so desperate to leave these places? But then, given Arizona’s fondness for tearing apart families in general and institutionalizing children in particular, those are questions no one in power in the state seems to want to face. 

The two institutions are run by a nationwide chain known as “Rite of Passage.” They run an assortment of services including residential treatment facilities and juvenile prisons. In addition to Arizona, news accounts over many years have raised questions about Rite of Passage facilities in Nevada, Florida, Colorado, Arkansas and Maryland. 

Yet when asked about all those runaways, the Arizona family police agency, the Department of Child Safety, said, in effect: Well, what do you expect from such troubled kids? Or as the agency put it: 

Call-for-service data does not necessarily indicate wrongdoing by the facility or staff. Many reported incidents reflect the significant behavioral and emotional challenges presented by the population the facility serves. 

That echoes the standard party line of the residential treatment industry: These kids are sooooo difficult that there is simply no alternative except to institutionalize them. As we have documented repeatedly, that’s BS. There’s nothing residential treatment can do that can’t be done better, and at lower cost, with Wraparound programs. And the residential treatment model itself is inherently harmful to children. 

The two Rite of Passage facilities said that the high number of runaway reports is because they are such careful, responsible facilities that they make sure to report any incident that even might involve running away immediately! They said much the same in response to the 2022 story. 

They also brag about being a so-called Qualified Residential Treatment Program. That is a new category of institution created by the federal Family First Prevention Services Act.  That law was supposed to strictly limit federal reimbursement for institutionalizing children. But the institutions lobby carved out a great big loophole: so-called QRTPs are exempt from the limits. Supposedly, that’s because they have to meet rigorous standards. But the standards are a joke. 

And, of course, all this evades the question: Why do all those young people keep running? 

That 2022 story offers some clues: 

"I remember, like the staff saying, ‘It's our goal to like, make you hate it here, so you never want to come back,'" former student, Christopher Nixon, said. … "It's just not a safe environment, and they're just tired of being there. At that point, they want to go home." 

Keith Plummer was in ... Desert Lily Academy. … Plummer says the students just wanted their independence. "They want their freedom. We’re kids. I want to go ride my bike around the neighborhood, I want to take my scooter and just go to a park," she said. 

Ignoring those answers, or not even posing the question, allows one to view solutions only in terms of making the facilities more like jails. The local police chief, Randy Brice, sure sounds like he’s talking about escaped prisoners. According to KNXV: 

Brice said there are still ways to improve security, including expanding camera coverage and better tracking kids as they move from place to place. 

Brice says he’s also worked to speed up response times to missing child calls. 

“As soon as a call comes out there, the drone is en route. We have cameras all around the facility on our street cameras,” Brice said. “We're seeing about 90% of the runaways -- we're catching within minutes to maybe an hour or two.” 

If it never occurs to anyone to ask if residential treatment is necessary, and if you stigmatize and stereotype all the institutionalized kids, no wonder the only solutions you can think of are cameras and drones. 

And sadly, that kind of thinking is deeply embedded in the culture of Arizona family policing – the kind of culture in which some workers thought it would be funny to come to work wearing  t-shirts that said “professional kidnapper.” 

● Though Arizona has improved, it still tears apart families at a rate 15% above the national average, even when rates of child poverty are factored in.

● Maricopa County (metropolitan Phoenix) tears apart families at the highest rate among America’s ten largest cities and their surrounding counties.

● Arizona takes a huge proportion of its federal funds under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program (TANF) money that is supposed to help poor families become self-sufficient and diverts it to running the family policing system. Some of the money went to a huge rate increase for foster parents.

● Arizona institutionalizes 45% of the children it takes – a rate more than quadruple the national average.

● The state gave a 30% rate increase to a group home operator that donated generously to the campaign of Gov. Katie Hobbs.

● The first person Hobbs named to run the family police agency opposed the rate increase. He was fired after only weeks on the job. 

No wonder the Arizona family police agency doesn’t seem to want to even look into whether there might be problems at the two residential treatment centers from which all those children keep running away. 

And no wonder the only answer from local authorities is: Send in the drone!

Illustration by ChatGPT

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending July 14, 2026

There’s more about the trauma inflicted on the children of former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg as a result of a malicious, false anonymous child abuse report:

● In Medium, Kristen Weber, senior director of child welfare at the National Center for Youth Law, writes:

Pete Buttigieg’s story captured national attention because it happened to someone many Americans know. Our response should be to remember the millions of families whose stories never make the news. 

● On LinkedIn, Shereen A. White, director of advocacy & policy at Children’s Rights, and Kelley Fong, assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine, and author of Investigating Families, write: 

If we take the rights and dignity of children seriously, then we must examine not only whether suspicions of harm are addressed, but how our response itself affects the very children we are trying to protect. … A child welfare system worthy of its name should be just as careful about the harms it creates as the harms it seeks to prevent. 

● The problems with reporting laws extend beyond the need to replace anonymous reporting with confidential reporting. Mandatory reporting also is a huge problem. Also from Children’s Rights, in the New York Daily News:

One solution before the [New York] State Legislature is the Supporting Families Together Act. Today, mandated reporters can face criminal and civil penalties for not reporting — a threat that drives over-reporting. Professionals across the state have told us that fear of penalties compels them to report even when a child’s safety isn’t at stake. This bill would remove those penalties, letting professionals use their judgment to connect families with help while still allowing any genuine safety concerns to be reported.

In this week’s reminder that the horror stories go in all directions: 

From WSB-TV, Atlanta:

Law enforcement officials have arrested a former Ridgeview Institute employee accused of sexually assaulting a 15-year-old girl while she was receiving treatment at the facility. … Records obtained by Channel 2 Action News from the Smyrna Police Department show detectives have investigated 40 alleged sex crime cases since 2021. Six of those investigations were opened this year. Three remain active, and four have been cleared by arrests.

NCCPR in the Washington State Standard: How curbing foster care has saved children’s lives

How many times have you heard it? A child “known to the system” dies, and someone says: “See? Because you’re not taking away as many children, and throwing them into foster care, it’s causing children to die!” 

We’ve known all along it’s not true. And now, thanks to new research from Washington State, we know something else: Washington State’s limited efforts to stop tearing apart so many families have saved children’s lives – anywhere from six to 22 per year. At the same time, by increasing the proportion of foster children placed with relatives instead of strangers, the state has saved another 10 to 30 children’s lives per year. ... 

Read the full column – with a link to the research – in the Washington State Standard