Five Republicans in the New Mexico state Senate convened an hourslong “task force” hearing Wednesday focused on reforming the state’s troubled child welfare agency.
The lawmakers heard from former Children, Youth and Families Department employees and a child currently under state care and the recently confirmed head of the state’s new independent oversight office.
How to manage CYFD has become a key point in New Mexico’s gubernatorial race, particularly after reports that agency staffers earlier this year took a New Mexico teenager out of foster care, dropped him off at the U.S.-Mexico border in El Paso and instructed him to walk alone into Ciudad Juárez to reunite with his estranged mother.
“This is not a department with a few rough edges. It’s a system in crisis,” Sen. Nicole Tobiassen (R-Albuquerque) said.
Wednesday’s task force meeting came just one day after Democrats in the state House of Representatives unveiled their child well-being plans for the upcoming legislative session, including a proposal to implement a three-person commission to oversee CYFD. Many of the Democrats’ proposals mirrored the dozens recently recommended by the New Mexico Department of Justice.
“I appreciate the Democrats coming out yesterday and finally talking about this,” Sen. Jay Block (R-Rio Rancho) said during the hearing. “However, the Democrats keep silencing our voice by not hearing our bills in committee.”
A former CYFD employee also spoke before the panel of Republican lawmakers. Evan Sena, who left the agency in 2024 and recounted his experiences in the state attorney general’s April investigative report, said he was alarmed by the lack of structure provided to kids in state custody.
“I’ve been exposed to drugs, been threatened, I’ve had way too many kids in my caseload,” Sena said. “There was an amount of turmoil that I’ve never seen in a state agency or any agency or workplace I’ve been to.”
In New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez’s investigative report, Sena is quoted as referring to CYFD office spaces, which controversially functioned as overnight homes for some kids in CYFD custody, as “third world.”
In January, Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham banned the practice of overnight office stays, saying in an announcement that “children who have experienced trauma deserve safety, stability and dignity — not sleeping in offices.”
That same month, Lujan Grisham appointed Dawn Walters to lead the state Office of the Child Advocate. Walters spoke before the panel of Republican lawmakers Wednesday and told them that she believes many of New Mexico’s issues with child well-being extend beyond CYFD.
The child welfare and foster systems as a whole, she said, can be difficult to navigate for the family members of children in them. She laid out several major observations from her first several months on the job, including that there is no one-size-fits-all approach for family reunification and that family members are often contacted inconsistently or too late into the process.
She said she often hears that the system is “not only extraordinarily difficult to navigate…but it’s also extremely traumatic.”
The Office of the Child Advocate, which is administratively attached to the New Mexico Department of Justice, is a relatively new form of oversight for CYFD. In fact, Wednesday marked the 135th day of “building a new government office, essentially from the ground up,” Walters told lawmakers.
Its nascency led to some questions over who Walters reports to and how to correct course if the office ever had an ineffectual leader.
“Don’t take this the wrong way — I’m just curious,” Block said to Walters, “How do we remove you?”
After reminding Block with a laugh that “it’s only day 135,” Walters said the state attorney general has the authority to remove anyone in her position for violating certain provisions of the 2025 law that created her office.
Walters’ term is currently set to run through 2031.
“My goal is to build an office that is credible, thoughtful and relentlessly child-focused,” she told lawmakers.
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