With overnight office stays now prohibited, advocates say foster youth spend all day in CYFD offices and leave each night to sleep on couches at youth homeless shelters

Ed Williams, Searchlight New Mexico

This article was originally published by Searchlight New Mexico.

Every day, the kids repeated the same routine. From early in the morning, they sat in the New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department’s Albuquerque office, scrolling on their phones, watching TV, or finding other ways to pass the time.

Around 10 p.m., they packed a small bag and got in their foster care caseworker’s car. The caseworker dropped them at a youth homeless shelter, where they spent the night on a couch.

At 7 a.m. the next day, their worker picked them up and took them back to the CYFD office, and then back to a shelter’s couch the next night.

Some children have spent weeks cycling daily between CYFD office buildings and couches at youth homeless shelters, according to three youth attorneys interviewed for this story, a practice confirmed by CYFD employees with direct knowledge. With every move from couch to office, the kids’ mental health deteriorates, the attorneys say — in one instance, culminating with a youth admitted to an inpatient psychiatric hospital.

CYFD denies that children have been staying in offices and sleeping on shelters’ couches.

In a statement to Searchlight, deputy director of communications Jessica Preston said CYFD has “successfully moved all children and youth from office settings into safe, appropriate placements,” including “reunification with family, kinship, family-based and treatment foster homes, residential treatment programs, and congregate facilities.”

“No child or youth was moved from an office setting to a ‘couch stay,’” she said.

That claim is at odds with a scenario described by others who work directly with children in foster care. In the three months that have passed since Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham issued an executive order prohibiting foster youth from spending the night in CYFD office buildings, foster care caseworkers have used these “couch stays” at youth shelters as last-ditch workarounds to comply with the order.

The reason is simple, according to CYFD workers interviewed by Searchlight.

Gov. Lujan Grisham’s executive order to remove kids from CYFD offices mandated that those kids be placed in “safe, appropriate and licensed settings designed for care and supervision.” But for the kids who were living in the office — among the state’s highest needs foster youth, children and teens with severe trauma-related mental and behavioral health conditions — few foster placements exist.

Caseworkers have scrambled to find a bed — any bed — for the hard-to-place kids who have continued to spend their days in offices, CYFD employees told Searchlight. And almost without fail, those efforts come up empty.

“Every single day, we’re hearing the same thing over and over and over for all of the kids, because they’re all in the same situation,” said a CYFD employee with direct knowledge. Searchlight is not identifying the employee because they are not authorized to speak with the media.

“I wish that they would quit lying to the public,” the employee said. “They say, oh, there’s no office stays. OK, they might not be sleeping in the office,” the worker said, but the situation is no less destructive.

Attorneys say that there have been multiple children at the Albuquerque office each time they have visited their clients at the building in recent months, but the number of kids in this situation is unclear.

Nowhere else to go

The governor’s executive order came after intense scrutiny by legislators, journalists and law enforcement over CYFD’s longstanding practice of housing foster youth in offices.

Attorneys and CYFD employees say that practice has continued despite a 2020 settlement agreement, known as the Kevin S settlement, in which the state promised to stop housing kids in offices, shelters, residential treatment centers and other so-called “congregate care” settings — living arrangements that have been shown to cause lasting harm to children. That agreement also included commitments to build a new array of mental and behavioral healthcare services for children.

In the years since, the state has made marginal progress but has failed to meet its commitments under the Kevin S agreement. As children have spent years without appropriate foster placements or adequate mental and behavioral health care, their needs have increased, making finding stable homes for them even more difficult.

With nowhere else to go, these kids would spend months sleeping in CYFD offices across the state. In 2024, more than 400 children were recorded as having stayed in agency office buildings, according to a report by independent monitors overseeing the Kevin S settlement.

Dangerous incidents — including sexual and physical assaults, exposure to fentanyl and other drugs — became commonplace. Those dangers led to an investigation by the New Mexico Department of Justice last year, resulting in a lawsuit against CYFD and a public report accusing the department of a “systematic moral failing.”

CYFD began working in earnest to remove kids from offices in December 2025, according to CYFD Communications Director Jake Thompson. By the end of that month, about 30 kids were staying in offices, the department said.

But the underlying cause of children living in offices — the state’s lack of appropriate foster placements and healthcare — remained in place when the executive order to ban all kids from overnight office stays in January, according to attorneys and child welfare experts.

“The state has not done what is needed to move these kids to places that can take care of them,” Dr. George Davis, the former director of psychiatry for CYFD and a plaintiff in the Kevin S. settlement, told Searchlight following the order. “We don’t have appropriate placements. Where are they going to go?”

From offices to shelters

In the wake of the executive order, many CYFD caseworkers have turned to youth homeless shelters to house youth who were living in offices.

Searchlight has reported that individual shelters have been receiving four to five referrals per day from CYFD since the executive order was issued. Shelter managers told Searchlight that most of those referrals are for youth with severe mental and behavioral health needs that shelters are not equipped to handle — a problem that has led to repeated emergencies, sometimes in the form of violent outbursts or sexually aggressive behavior that puts the safety of the entire shelter at risk.

“We have had to call the police so many more times since that order, probably more than we’ve had to call in the last six or seven months combined,” Heather Hoffman, executive director of Youth Shelters and Family Services in Santa Fe, said in an interview.

A CYFD spokesperson said in an email that “a very small number” of kids have been sent to “short-term” shelter stays, which “typically last a few days.” Shelter managers interviewed by Searchlight said that foster youth have spent months at shelters, and the cases that last only a few days are usually because the child experiences a serious mental health crisis and can’t be safely kept there.

Even in those cases, shelter managers said, CYFD often takes days to remove the child, and threatens shelters with licensing investigations if they don’t keep them.

When kids do leave shelters because of mental health emergencies or dangerous outbursts, shelter managers, attorneys and CYFD workers say, they sometimes return to the office until another shelter agrees to let them sleep on their couch for the night.

'Nobody wants me'

After returning to the CYFD office from a shelter couch, a child’s caseworker repeats the process from the day before: holding a new staffing meeting and calling every possible shelter, foster home or relative they can to find a place their kid can go. They rarely succeed.

“I feel like there’s a big disconnect between upper management and us,” a CYFD employee told Searchlight. “They’re making decisions that affect us, but they’re not seeing it at our level.”

“I hated office stays,” the employee said. “But in reality, they had a room. To tell a kid, OK, you’re gonna go sleep here, and then you’re gonna come back, and then you’re gonna sleep here, and then you’re gonna come back? That just shows this lack of stability.”

Youth attorneys say that lack of stability has caused their clients’ mental health to spiral.

“Every day that a kid doesn’t find a safe place to live is a day that adds to their trauma,” said Alison Endicott Quiñones, an Albuquerque-based youth attorney. Endicott Quiñones says she has two clients who each spent weeks moving from offices to couches after the executive order.

“The kids know that their worker is making call after call to find a placement,” she said. “So what do the kids think? They think ‘Nobody wants me.’ And we try to explain that it’s about level of care, the ability to meet your needs, or it’s about space. But that doesn’t work for these kids. All they know is that they’ve been rejected.”

These children frequently lose their belongings in the constant shuffle between offices and shelter couches. Several have missed school because CYFD doesn’t know which school to enroll them in as they live for months without a stable placement, Endicott Quiñones said.

One of Endicott Quiñones’ client’s mental health deteriorated so severely during six weeks of overnight couch stays that they eventually had to be admitted to a mental hospital, where they remain today, she said.

“We don’t have safe and appropriate placements for these kids. We have kid storage facilities. It is ridiculous, and it is inappropriate.”

Another attorney, Elizabeth Hess, described a similar situation for her client, a fifth-grader who needs a high level of care. Hess said her client spent several weeks sleeping on shelters’ couches before her caseworker managed to find her a full-time placement in a shelter.

“She needs stability,” Hess said. “There’s no stability now. She’s not sure where she’s sleeping at night. She’s going and she’s sleeping on a sofa with, you know, who knows who’s around her?” 

The girl’s caseworker has tried to make the situation as tolerable as she can for the child, Hess said, even taking her to get her nails done on her own dime. Other caseworkers have used their paychecks to take their kids shopping or eat at their favorite restaurant, just to make the lack of a stable home that much less traumatic.

CYFD says that it is continuing to work through “coordinated and determined collaboration” with partners to find safe places for kids in its custody to live.“Providing safe, stable placements for children and youth in state custody is CYFD’s primary focus, but we need the public’s help to achieve the greatest results,” said CYFD’s Jessica Preston. “We encourage compassionate, responsible New Mexico adults to consider becoming a foster parent and help make a profound difference in the life of a vulnerable child or youth.”

Ed Williams has been an investigative journalist for Searchlight New Mexico since 2018, where he has reported on systemic issues impacting New Mexico’s children and families, human trafficking, abuses of power, and more. As investigations editor, Ed oversees Searchlight’s deep-dive reporting and collaborations with local and national media partners.