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

This is the Bridge of the Americas border crossing - where the New Mexico 
family police agency reportedly told a 15-year-old to cross the border alone
to reunite with his mother. 

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? Or were the godparents willing, but blocked by a hospital and the child welfare agency? 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. 

UPDATE, AUGUST 1, 2026: The New Mexico Attorney General is suing the state family police agency, the Children, Youth and Families Department, demanding that the agency return the child from Mexico. The Complaint the agency has filed may shed new light on what happened. This Associated Press story does a good job of summarizing the Complaint. But, like CYFD itself, the Attorney General’s office is an unreliable source, resorting to Trump-style tactics to demonize families. That’s why we call our analysis of the Attorney General’s April report about CYFD Two Epic Fails.

So, for example, the Complaint alleges that, at one point, CYFD workers yelled at the child for returning from Mexico. At another point, CYFD workers allegedly told the Border Patrol that the child was now “Texas’ problem.” Indeed, if the Complaint is to be believed, the Border Patrol treated this child more humanely than CYFD. But is this Complaint to be believed?

Further complicating the matter: At key points the Complaint is redacted. Is that legally required? Is it done to protect the child’s privacy? Or would an unredacted version call into question some of the claims? Given how much the Attorney General postures about others’ failure to be transparent, at a minimum there should be an explanation.

So with those caveats, the post below (and the headline above) have been amended to add the new information where it appears to be reliable. In these places, new information is in red, the original version is crossed out.

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. But he went into Mexico, and when he couldn't find his mother, Instead, he crossed several lanes of traffic, went back to the United States. When CYFD refused to take him back, the Border Patrol took him to fled to Texas, was held in a shelter in Texas. The Texas child welfare agency ultimately reunited him  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 apparently 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? 

There are two versions of what happened here, each of which reflects a failure by CYFD. Version 1, as originally published here: 

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. 

But the Attorney General’s Complaint offers a different version. In this version, the godparents themselves sent the boy to live with relatives in Mexico, but he ran away, back to New Mexico.

That’s when he was hospitalized. When he was ready for discharge the godparents did want him – but, according to the Attorney General’s Complaint, the hospital refused to discharge him because the godparents weren’t his formal legal custodians. Even after the godmother got a signed letter from the mother authorizing her to take the child, the hospital allegedly refused.

Then, the Attorney General says, the hospital filed a child abuse report – claiming there was no one legally allowed to take him!

So what did CYFD do? They, too, apparently wouldn’t give him back to his godparents, and placed him with strangers in foster care instead.

So not only is there no indication CYFD helped the godparents, if this version is correct (and again, we have only the Attorney General’s word for it) they actively thwarted the godparents.

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.