The recent report on child welfare issued by New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez uses ugly, Trump-style tactics to stereotype families caught up in the system, misunderstands basic data and is likely to worsen the very failures it highlights, according to a national child advocacy organization.
“One year ago, just as Attorney General Torrez was beginning his investigation of the New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department, we warned that his investigation would fail if it left people out,” said Richard Wexler, executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform. “He left people out. The investigation failed.”
NCCPR released a comprehensive rebuttal to Torrez’s report Monday. These are the key points:
- His report is largely right about the failings of CYFD: It is an agency lurching from crisis to crisis, incapable of truly protecting children.
- But his report is dangerously wrong about the reasons for those failings. Torrez alleges that the system deliberately leaves children in danger because CYFD supposedly is hellbent on preserving families “at almost any cost.” He calls it a “systemic moral failing.”
- Ignoring a mountain of contrary evidence, Torrez makes his case by taking a page from the Donald Trump playbook. Trump tries to boost support for his horrific immigration policies by reveling in the most gruesome stories concerning immigrants, stories that are, of course, entirely unrepresentative of immigrants as a whole. Torrez uses the same tactic. He relies the same way on horror stories about birth parents who torture and murder their children – stories that bear no resemblance to the overwhelming majority of parents who lose children to foster care.
- In 2024, in 80% of cases in which children were forced into foster care in New Mexico, there was not even an allegation of physical or sexual abuse. In 59%, there was not even an allegation of any form of drug abuse. Far more common are cases in which family poverty is confused with neglect. In fact, in New Mexico in 2024, more children were placed in foster care because of inadequate housing than because of physical and sexual abuse combined. Torrez ignores all of this. In a 220-page report about child welfare in the state with the highest child poverty rate in America, the word poverty does not appear even once.
- At one point, Torrez’s rhetoric borders on the rhetoric of conspiracy theory, when he points out that a shortage of foster parents gives CYFD “a built-in excuse” to leave children in dangerous homes.
- Torrez’s approach makes all children less safe. It is likely to set off another foster-care panic, a sharp, sudden spike in the number of children torn from everyone they know and love and consigned to the chaos of foster care. Such a panic sent entries into care skyrocketing more than 40 percent between 2022 and 2023 – leading to an exponential increase in children forced into dangerous makeshift placements, such as CYFD offices.
That did enormous harm to the children needlessly taken, exposing them to emotional trauma that can be life-shattering. It also put them at risk of abuse in foster care. Multiple studies find abuse in one-quarter to one-third of family foster homes, with an even higher rate in group homes and institutions. At the same time, when a take-the-child-and-run mentality sets off a foster-care panic, it further overloads the system, making it even harder to find the relatively few children in real danger. Torrez’s false conclusion about the reasons CYFD is failing actually makes more likely the very horrors he rightly decries.
- Study after study finds that, in typical cases, not the horror stories, children left in their own homes fare better in later life than even comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care. One study even finds that, in such direct comparisons, the foster youth are four times more likely to die by age 20. The most common cause of death: suicide.
- When Torrez was asked about such studies at a news conference, he defended his own ignorance, declaring, “I’m not afforded the luxury of an academic view of public safety. I have to have a real view of public safety.” But the academic view he derides is based on a close, objective examination of the fates of tens of thousands of children. Not only does Torrez embrace the Trump approach to fearmongering, he also embraces the RFK Jr. approach to science – even when that may put children’s lives at risk. That makes his conclusions – unreal.
- Torrez’s Trump-style approach diverts attention from the real reasons CYFD is failing – reasons cited over and over in the report itself: An underprepared, underqualified, undertrained, undersupervised workforce that’s horrendously overwhelmed – all problems that a foster-care panic can only worsen.
- Torrez either misunderstood key data or chose to use it selectively. Contrary to his claims, there is no evidence that there is more child abuse in New Mexico than in other states (nor is there any evidence that there is less). And the staggering increase in children forced into makeshift placements occurred during the foster-care panic, not, as Torrez claims, when entries into foster care were decreasing. If there were a hotline to which one could report statistics abuse, Attorney General Torrez would have his rights to the calculator app on his phone terminated.
- The Attorney General and his staff appear to have sought out the views only of those who would confirm their biases going in. Either that or they spoke to some who would contradict the report’s thesis, but chose to ignore them. The voices of birth parents whose children were needlessly taken, and even the voices of foster youth who say they should have been allowed to remain in their own homes, appear nowhere in the report.
- Torrez did get some things right – including his condemnation of CYFD’s obsessive secrecy. And he’s right to bring a lawsuit about it. But he ignores real solutions that really could vastly improve CYFD and make all children safer.
“Attorney General Torrez has issued a report that indulges in horror stories in the manner of Donald Trump, ignores evidence and is likely to leave the system even worse,” Wexler said. “What might one call such a report? How about: a systemic moral failure.”
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