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CYFD: Moral rot from top to bottom

By Sherry Robinson

All She Wrote

Tear it down and start over.

In 2023, after another column about dead children and the failures of the state Children Youth and Families Department, I got an email from Melissa Beery, a family peer support professional who had worked with CYFD. She wrote: “Maybe it’s time to embrace radical change.” She proposed dismantling the department and creating new entities.

Reading the latest report on CYFD brought this email to mind. Earlier this month, Attorney General Raul Torrez released a 216-page report summing up a year-long investigation by the state Department of Justice. If you’ve been wondering what goes on inside CYFD, why children keep dying, why investigative reporters never run out of horror stories, the DOJ has laid it all out in unflinching detail.

The investigation, said the report, “identified systemic failures that have repeatedly endangered the children CYFD is sworn to protect. These failures are not isolated—they are pervasive, deeply entrenched, and too often result in preventable harm.”

Even though state law requires CYFD to put a child’s safety first, the agency repeatedly sends children back to parents despite ample evidence of abuse, neglect and drug use. That practice alone caused the death of seven children during the investigation, and it wasn’t an outlier. New Mexico’s rates of maltreatment, repeated maltreatment, and deaths are above the national average.

I wanted to know about CYFD’s internal culture because I’ve learned that’s where long-standing problems reside in any organization. My theory was that CYFD was in the grip of entrenched, self-serving middle managers who resisted reforms by administrators, the courts or the Legislature.

Well, no. The report makes clear that CYFD suffers from moral rot from top to bottom. It has a culture of secrecy, intimidation and retaliation.

Let’s start with Secretary Teresa Casados, appointed in 2023 not because she knew anything about child welfare but because she was the governor’s buddy. By the time she left last year her ignorance had hurt the department and “left CYFD directionless at a critical juncture,” the report said. Casados disrespected staff, made decisions based on personal grievances, issued conflicting and confusing instructions, and hired friends and family in key positions. Her management style: my way or the highway.

The report didn’t probe Casados’s predecessors, but this governor’s other three secretaries also lacked the kind of expertise needed to run CYFD.

The DOJ investigation paints a department that operates in isolation, follows its own rules only when convenient, and avoids accountability. In any controversy it circles the wagons. CYFD routinely resists or ignores requests from law enforcement, courts, the Legislature and the public. There is no transparency.

The department has dealt with worker shortages by lowering the bar and hiring people without professional training and credentials in social work. They receive little training. From unqualified supervisors they get little oversight, no support and may even be bullied. (One frontline worker committed suicide because of workplace mistreatment.)

After the inevitable bad decisions and mistakes, they leave, usually within the first year. Turnover has topped 30% for the last three years despite pay increases. Those who stay face a heavier case load, mandatory overtime and burnout. The report describes this as “a self-reinforcing hiring crisis.”

It won’t surprise you that CYFD investigations are shallow and that investigators are under pressure to close cases quickly to reduce caseloads. And when a case is closed prematurely, it often bounces back and/or a child is harmed. Again.

Now apply this culture of disrespect, secrecy and retaliation to foster parents. We should all be thankful that these good people step forward to help. But instead of being valued, CYFD treats them like “glorified babysitters,” the report found. The department doesn’t support or listen to them, communicates badly and often misinforms foster parents about their wards. If a foster parent tries to advocate for a child or, heaven forbid, complain, the agency will yank the child for a different placement. It’s no wonder the state has around 1,000 foster homes for more than 2,000 children in state custody. Add this to the department’s half-baked recruiting and you see why foster parents quit at about the same rate they’re recruited.

“It is 1,000% because of CYFD that they don’t have more foster parents,” said a foster parent. “They quit because of CYFD.”

I don’t have space in this column to give you more than a slice of the report, so I urge you to read it yourself. I have no faith that any reforms will succeed in an agency that abandoned its public service ethic. Which is why I keep returning to Melissa Beery’s email of three years ago. Next week I’ll share her perspective.

A few bright spots as we face fire season

By Sherry Robinson

All She Wrote

A Zia Pueblo farmer I know is debating how much corn to plant this year. “There’s no snow in the mountains,” he says. Irrigation will be tight, and he’s reluctant to draw from a pond he might need for emergencies.

As water and weather experts confirm what our eyes already tell us, New Mexico is holding its collective breath for this fire season.

So allow me to sprinkle a little good news. State and federal governments and electric utilities have taken steps to better prepare for what’s coming.

Lincoln County’s new Rio Safe Program will provide state and federal funding for the county to buy and demolish about 400 homes in the flood path of the Rio Ruidoso and relocate residents. The program will also restore watershed and create a park from a disaster area.

It’s the first home buyout program in New Mexico and the first buyout funded by the federal Natural Resources Conservation Service for communities recovering from post-fire flooding.

In a second development, electric utilities are working hard to keep drought-stricken trees from falling onto power lines and igniting wildfires. In a recent hearing before the state Public Regulation Commission, utility executives said they have new mapping software to identify high-risk areas and artificial intelligence-enabled cameras to quickly detect wildfire starts. They’ve been replacing wooden power poles with steel structures that have non-exploding fuses and design features that prevent trees or wildlife from contacting live wires. And they’re ready to shut off power pre-emptively during acute fire weather.

It’s not cheap, which is one reason why your utility bills are rising.

Investor-owned and cooperative utilities aim to be responsible, but they also fear lawsuits like the $25 million action against the Jemez Electrical Cooperative, which doubled its cost of insurance. A bipartisan bill to give responsible utilities a little protection died in this year’s legislative session.

This is all from reporting by Patrick Lohmann, of Source NM, who knows more about fire here than any other journalist.

In Washington DC, a new agency could shake up the federal fire-fighting bureaucracy. Predictions are mixed.

The Trump administration plans to consolidate Interior Department firefighting operations in the new Wildland Fire Service. Firefighters and fire policy experts like the idea because it could streamline communications and speed up response times in a new era of megafires, according to the Washington Post. However, congressional Democrats, including our own Sen. Martin Heinrich, and public lands advocates warn it siphon off even more employees from land management agencies already weakened by DOGE layoffs.

The 4,500-person Wildland Fire Service combines firefighting entities from the Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Office of Aviation Services and Office of Wildland Fire. The agency would have a new center for centralizing wildfire intelligence.

Supporters like the advocacy group Megafire Action say the old decentralized system doesn’t meet the demands of today’s bigger, faster-moving fires and longer fire seasons driven by climate change and drought.

Grassroots Wildland Firefighters has called for a unified agency since its founding in 2019, said president Riva Duncan. Her organization supports the administration’s eventual goal of moving the U.S. Forest Service’s firefighting operations out of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and into the new agency.

This super agency, envisioned in a 2025 presidential executive order, would have more than 11,300 employees, twice the size of current BLM, which has 5,000 employees, down from 10,000 in January 2025.

“They're going to break our public land management agencies,” former BLM Director Tracy Stone-Manning told the Post.

Where workers fought fires during fire season and performed other land management tasks in the off season, the new agency will focus on fires year-round and call on land management agencies for help with fires.

In a letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum in February, Heinrich and others said separating wildfire management from land management could have life-or-death consequences.

“We are concerned that the DOI is advancing a rapid and consequential restructuring of wildfire management without adequate analysis, transparency, or planning to prevent disruption during what is expected to be a significant fire season or to safeguard long-term wildfire preparedness,” they wrote.

Proponents admit that much depends on how the new agency is rolled out but trust the service’s new director, Brian Fennessy, a former California fire chief with long experience. This could still be a great idea, but it adds another reason to hold your breath.

Lawmaker wants his secession threat to open dialogue

By Sherry Robinson

All She Wrote

Texas has always wanted more of New Mexico.

Before New Mexico could join the United States as a territory, Congress had to settle a boundary dispute. Texas claimed all of New Mexico east of the Rio Grande, even though it had never fought for or held any of it. In the historic Compromise of 1850, Congress placed the New Mexico-Texas boundary along the 103rd meridian and agreed to pay Texas $10 million for its “loss.”

Then in 1859 a surveying mistake gave Texas a 310-mile strip, 601,152, acres, that belonged to New Mexico. When the mistake came to light, New Mexico accepted it under duress. “It was the first of many times that Texas blackjacked us,” said Sen. John Morrow, a Capulin rancher, in 1991.

There was ample historic precedent when Texas House Speaker Dustin Burrows recently added taking a chunk of New Mexico to his list of priorities for 2027. Burrows ordered a study of the constitutional, statutory, fiscal and economic implications of adding such contiguous counties as Roosevelt and Lea to Texas.

I doubt this is a serious proposal, but just in case, here’s something to think about: Do you want to be one of 33 counties in New Mexico or one of 254-plus counties in Texas?

Burrows took his cue from New Mexico’s House Joint Resolution 10, introduced in the recent legislative session by Republican Reps. Randall Pettigrew of Lovington and Jimmy Mason of Artesia. It would have amended the state Constitution to allow three or more contiguous counties to secede if two-thirds of voters and their county commissions agree and if Congress and the president approve.

Pettigrew, who was born and raised in New Mexico, said he wanted to stimulate a conversation about the cultural and financial divides between southeastern New Mexico and the rest of the state.

“We have no seat at the table when it comes to policy,” he told the Albuquerque Journal. Leaders need to see that “the frustration from southeast New Mexico is real, and our voice needs to be heard.”

Pettigrew was miffed that his bill wasn’t heard, but he should know by now that a great many bills go unheard during the state’s 30-day session.

Still, he’s not wrong about the need for conversation. The oil patch underwrites a significant piece of the state budget – this year it made the governor’s universal child care bill possible – and yet Santa Fe takes the industry for granted. It wouldn’t kill Roundhouse Democrats to publicly acknowledge the oil-producing counties; they waste plenty of time on less important pomp and ceremony.

But if we’re going to converse, let’s expand the topic. I invite Pettigrew and Mason to leave their comfort zone and spend time in the rest of the state. Go to southwestern New Mexico, with its mix of mining, ranching and tourism. Go to the reservations. Go to the tourist towns. Go to the peanut- and onion-producing East Side and the pecan- and chile-producing southern counties. Go to the northern mountains. Go to the cities.

They would find that New Mexico is home to a great many cultures and economies and that each place is quite different from its neighbor. Think of Española and Santa Fe, for example, or Clovis and Portales, or Angel Fire and Eagle Nest. Many of them feel that Santa Fe doesn’t understand them. I’ve heard it myself in covering every corner of the state for 50 years.

I think a lot of this comes from having a small population spread over a very large state. Legislative budgeters are challenged to stretch limited money across many disparate needs. And yet, the process is slow, designed to give everyone a fair hearing and accommodate differences.

In the current political climate, Republicans don’t feel heard in the Legislature, and they probably aren’t. It’s an experience they share with Democrats in Congress. Both bodies once had norms and courtesies that gave the minority party a voice. Pettigrew’s conversation could include the role of the party out of power.

Let’s remember John Morrow’s words of 1991 and not be naïve about Texans’ intentions. Burrows is an opportunist. He talks a good line about “culture, opportunity, and the right to choose a path that reflects the shared values of the Permian and Delaware basins,” but he knows nothing about New Mexico or New Mexicans. As I keep saying, we’re different here.

If Texas wants more of New Mexico, let them be good capitalists and invest in our companies.

Hispanic leaders deliver quick, decisive response to Cesar Chavez revelations

By Sherry Robinson

All She Wrote

As astonishing as the recent Cesar Chavez revelations were the speed and decisiveness of the response. Within a day of the New York Times story revealing the legendary civil rights activist as a sexual predator, organizations cancelled commemorative marches and communities moved to rename streets and buildings.

No denials, no equivocation, no excuses.

In the context of other disturbing news right now, this one was hard to hear. For decades, the United Farm Workers leader was a voice for the voiceless. But he created a new class of the voiceless who finally spoke out as older adults, after much personal tragedy. One of them was Dolores Huerta, who said, “My heart aches for everyone who suffered alone and in silence for years.”

In the 1970s Chavez sexually abused two girls who were the daughters of his longtime organizers, according to the investigative story. A powerful, charismatic man then in his 40s, he was renowned as a champion of farmworkers. As is often the case in these situations, more women have come forward.

Huerta, born in the Colfax County mining town of Dawson, co-founded the group that became the United Farm Workers with Chavez. “I am nearly 96 years old, and for the last 60 years have kept a secret because I believed that exposing the truth would hurt the farmworker movement I have spent my entire life fighting for,” she said in a statement.

We grieve for Huerta, who is loved and admired here. She said she never saw herself as a victim but convinced herself that “these were incidents that I had to endure alone and in secret.” She was heartsick to learn others had too, although some were discouraged from telling their stories.

Immediately, the UFW said it had “learned of deeply troubling allegations that one of the union’s co-founders, Cesar Chavez, behaved in ways that are incompatible with our organization’s values… Allegations that very young women or girls may have been victimized are crushing.” While the UFW had no firsthand knowledge or direct reports, it said, “We need some time to get this right, including to ensure robust, trauma-informed services are available to those who may need it.”

The usual marches and celebrations of the man were quickly canceled, and cities across the southwest announced the removal of his name from street signs and public buildings. Schools in Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Deming and Las Cruces bear Chavez’s name, reported Source NM, and monuments and murals can be found around the state.

One day after the allegations became public, Albuquerque’s mayor announced that his city would begin removing the name. However, it’s one thing to pry sign the sign from the Cesar Chavez Community Center and another to change a street name. Avenida Cesar Chavez stretches through the heart of the city and everyone with that address must be notified. Albuquerque and other communities must work with artists to change public murals.

Albuquerque has some experience obliterating reminders of disgraced public figures. There was former Sen. Manny Aragon’s name on a building at the National Hispanic Cultural Center and former Rep. Sheryl Williams Stapleton’s name on a building at the State Fairgrounds. More recently, UNM’s Health Sciences Center quietly removed former Gov. Bill Richardson’s name from a building.

Richardson is an early Epstein casualty. The Albuquerque Journal reported that Richardson arranged to meet with Epstein on a number of occasions before and after Epstein’s 2008 conviction in Florida on sex charges. To be fair, the high-rolling Epstein was known to cultivate and collect power brokers, and Richardson’s need to raise money to run for president led to some unsavory alliances. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt, for now.

We’ll soon learn more as the new legislative subcommittee, dubbed the “truth commission,” has begun investigating the late financier’s Zorro Ranch south of Santa Fe. The four-member, bipartisan group intends to gather information through subpoenas, a website and a phone line. U.S. Rep. Melanie Stansbury, D-N.M., who’s had access to unredacted Epstein files, says they include names of prominent New Mexicans and allegations that women and men were brought to Zorro Ranch for sexual exploitation.

Rep. Andrea Romero, D-Santa Fe, who chairs the subcommittee, said of Cesar Chavez, “The painful pattern of powerful men using their positions to silence survivors, while the institutions around them look away, is precisely what the Epstein truth commission was created to confront.”

As the U.S. Justice Department drags its feet, the public is ever more impatient to see answers and accountability. The United Farm Workers and Hispanic leaders are showing the way.

Chronicling tariffs’ path of economic destruction

By Sherry Robinson

All She Wrote

Jerry Pacheco probably doesn’t own a crystal ball, but at the end of the year he wrote: “Countries that strongly trade with each other do not go to war with each other. The animus and uncertainty caused by starting a tariff war put the U.S. on the road to fractured relationships and isolationism.”

Pacheco is executive director of the nonprofit International Business Accelerator in Santa Teresa. He’s spent his career advising on international trade and recruiting companies to the border region. In the last year Pacheco has opined in many a newspaper column on economic disruption and inflation caused by tariffs.

As I write today, Iran has choked off the Strait of Hormuz and the president, who has spent the past year insulting our allies and punishing them with tariffs, now wants their support to get oil shipments moving again.

Pacheco and every other expert I’ve read call tariffs a self-inflicted wound and a war that nobody wins. “In the post-World War 2 era, the U.S. and the Western world have been committed to free trade as a method by which trade ties can be increased, alliances can be formed, wealth created and wars averted,” he wrote.

As you probably know from your grocery bill, tariffs have been a burden on New Mexico consumers and businesses for months.

Take your cup of coffee, for example. Prices were already rising because of climate change and labor shortages in the small number of locations that can grow coffee. Then the president socked Brazil, which supplies about a third of our coffee, with a 50% tariff, reported Source New Mexico in August.

In May all nine of the state’s coffee roasters petitioned U.S. Sen. Ben Ray Lujan to support the Trade Review Act of 2025 to allow Congress to approve tariff changes. Lujan was sympathetic. “I’ve not spoken to one business in New Mexico yet that has told me that they are applauding these tariffs, whether it’s a toy store, restaurants, a manufacturing wholesaler,” he said. The bill hasn’t moved.

Tariffs are supposed to protect domestic industry, but the U.S. has no coffee industry except for Hawaii, which produces a small share of the world’s coffee.

Legislators heard similar complaints last fall from manufacturers who testified before an interim committee.

Monti Inc., of Santa Teresa, makes copper busbar, a critical component in electrical equipment. Its plant manager said he supports the administration’s desire to reshore manufacturing, but his company imports all of its copper, reported Source New Mexico, because domestic supplies are insufficient. In August and September alone, the company had $3 million in additional costs but passed on just $1 million to customers; the balance ordinarily would have been used to grow the business.

“We’ve encountered headwinds unlike any we’ve ever seen before,” he said.

At the same hearing, the owner of retailer Eurozone Food Distributors, of Albuquerque, said that food was reaching a point where “there’s no profit to be made,” reported KOAT-TV.

Even more discouraging to businesses than the increased cost is the chaotic implementation, which makes planning impossible. As tariffs volley up and down, Eurozone is trying to order products from suppliers and deal with importers and shippers. Coffee roasters sign contracts months before beans reach the U.S. In Santa Teresa textile manufacturer Acme Mills might have shipping containers on the water.

In each case, the tariff might have doubled between the purchase of goods and their arrival. And as they pass along costs or eat costs, they’re working hard to contain those numbers. Even Trump supporters are begging for some predictability.

From news accounts, tariffs have also hurt the state’s construction industry, furniture makers and agriculture. Early this year I was chagrined at the price spike for printer ink, a staple for my home office. Why? Toner and ink cartridges come from China, Mexico and Canada.

It’s no wonder that companies and states, including New Mexico, have sued to halt the tariffs.

Pacheco could see this coming in 2024, and he’s chronicled the path of economic destruction.

In July he talked to reporters about the business-killing uncertainty: “People are not placing orders, or they’re postponing buying decisions. And the other side is … the business we’re not getting because they’re not going to make a multi-million-dollar investment decision in this environment. I’ve seen three deals, two in the automotive industry and one in the electronics industry, totally go away.”

Right now, the United States needs some friends. Tariffs are no way to treat a friend.

notes

Sherry Robinson was named to the top five columnists in Albuquerque the Magazine's Best of the City 2025 based on reader votes.

Robinson won New Mexico Press Women's top award in 2025 for entries in the communications contest .

In 2024 NMPW recognized Robinson for courageous journalism.

See previous work

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Columns by sherry robinson

notes

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