New Mexico’s troubled Children, Youth and Families Department is facing new outrage after a 15-year-old American citizen from Doña Ana County was reportedly removed from foster care, driven across state lines, and dropped off at an El Paso border crossing to reunite with his estranged mother in Mexico despite past abuse concerns.
The Albuquerque Journal reported that CYFD staff transported the teen on July 6 to the Paso del Norte crossing in El Paso, where he was allegedly told around 8:30 p.m. to walk across the bridge into Ciudad Juárez with his belongings and meet his mother.
The child refused to cross into Mexico and reportedly spent 10 days in a homeless shelter while Texas Child Protective Services assisted him. When Texas CPS contacted New Mexico CYFD, the agency reportedly refused to retrieve the child, saying his case had been closed and he was no longer under its jurisdiction.
The boy was later escorted to Juárez and reunited with his mother on Friday. He reportedly ran away almost immediately but has since been found.
The situation has sparked fierce criticism from child welfare advocates and the America First Policy Institute’s New Mexico chapter, which said the case reflects a broader failure inside New Mexico’s child welfare system.
“The first priority of the child welfare system is the safety and well-being of children,” AFPI New Mexico Executive Director Vincent Torres said in a statement. “New Mexico abandoned that responsibility when CYFD drove a 15-year-old American citizen to the border and sent him into Mexico to live with a parent the state itself had found responsible for abuse.”
Torres added, “He told them he didn’t want to go. They sent him anyway. Then they closed the case.”
According to the Journal, the teen was born in New Mexico in 2010 to parents who were Mexican nationals. For years, he lived with family friends described in court records as godparents, along with two siblings. Publicly available court petitions reportedly show the father had been out of contact for several years and that the mother had previously been named in a substantiated abuse claim involving the child. Sources familiar with the case also told the Journal the mother was recently arrested on a criminal charge and deported to Mexico earlier this year.
At a July 6 custody hearing, which was not public, sources told the Journal that CYFD moved to dismiss the abuse case, said it had no concerns about the mother, and planned to reunite the child with her despite the teen’s objections.
CYFD defended its actions in a statement, saying, “Nothing is more important to CYFD than ensuring vulnerable children are safe, protected from harm and have a chance to thrive, and the department kept that mission front and center as it sought to unite the 15-year-old boy with his birth mother in Mexico.”
The agency said it assessed the mother, including two home visits, and “determined her to be safe and appropriate for placement of the child.” CYFD did not specify when or where those visits occurred.
The agency also said it had “several conversations with this child about unification with his mother prior to the hearing” and determined he had not suffered abuse or neglect.
“Throughout this case, the department took strenuous steps to keep the child safe and to keep a family together,” CYFD said. “The department had no legal grounds to take custody and place him in foster care.”
But Dawn Walters, head of New Mexico’s Office of the Child Advocate, raised concerns about what happened after the teen was left at the border.
“Being sent to a parent in an unfamiliar country would be a really difficult transition, a really traumatic transition for a child who already has a lot of trauma,” Walters told the Journal.
Walters said she was concerned about the child’s health conditions and prescription medication needs and had not been in contact with him since he entered Mexico.
“Per CYFD, this case is closed to them,” Walters said. “He wasn’t living with his mother, so it’s not a return. It is a concern to me that he was sent to a parent who hadn’t been providing care for him, and it’s not clear to me what steps were taken to ensure that the mother was aware of his medical needs, of his prescriptions and how to obtain those things once he was in a different country with a different medical system.”
Maralyn Beck, executive director of New Mexico Child First Network, also told the Journal the teen’s wishes appeared to have been ignored. She compared the case to deporting a child.
Under New Mexico law, Beck noted, youth 14 and older are recognized as having agency in such cases.
“This youth has made his wishes clear,” Beck said. “Unless you have spoken to the youth himself, we are ignoring his explicit concerns, his explicit wishes, and I do not believe he is safe.”
The controversy comes just months after the New Mexico Department of Justice released a blistering 220-page report accusing CYFD of systemic failures. That report stated, “Instead of safeguarding vulnerable children, the Department has prioritized family reunification at virtually any cost — returning children to dangerous caregivers with histories of substantiated abuse or chronic neglect, and who refuse treatment or services to address those underlying issues.”
DOJ Chief of Staff Lauren Rodriguez said the latest incident reinforces those findings.
“Our independent investigation into CYFD found that the agency’s failures were not isolated incidents, but the result of deep, systemic problems that have put New Mexico’s most vulnerable children at risk for years,” Rodriguez said.
“The circumstances surrounding this latest incident only reinforce what our report concluded: the systemic issues identified in our investigation continue to exist,” she added. “New Mexico’s children deserve a child welfare system that acts with urgency, competence, and accountability.”
AFPI said the reported border dropoff is not an isolated failure, but part of a larger crisis under state leadership.
“This did not happen in a vacuum,” Torres said. “For years, this state’s administration has presided over a child welfare agency in crisis, one the Attorney General’s own investigation found has repeatedly placed children in harm’s way.”
“This case is not an isolated incident,” he added. “It is the predictable result of a system that has gone unaccountable for far too long.”
For a department already under fire over child deaths, abuse investigations, staffing problems, and years of scandal, the latest report raises another disturbing question: how did a 15-year-old American citizen end up stranded at a Texas border crossing after New Mexico’s child welfare agency closed his case?
As Torres put it, “New Mexicans deserve answers, and this child deserves justice.”