By SHERRY ROBINSON
All She Wrote
© 2025 New Mexico News Services

Another cabinet secretary has departed the horror show we call the Children Youth and Families Department. Teresa Casados left the same day the Governor’s Office announced her retirement, which looks like a firing.

In 2023, when she joined CYFD, Casados was the governor’s chief operating officer. She had been a competent bureaucrat – that reliable person a governor can count on to get things done. Casados had led the state’s COVID-19 response, along with wildfire relief. But the agency reporters usually describe as “embattled” was a different challenge.

At the time of Casados’ appointment, I remember the objections: She’s not a social worker. She has no experience with abused and neglected children. The governor brushed them aside, confident that her fixer would bring order to chaos.

Two years later, demands of a massive court settlement remain unmet, the Attorney General is investigating, and legislators have tried repeatedly to bring oversight and accountability to the department.

CYFD is worse than ever, says watchdog Maralyn Beck, who describes Casados’ job performance as “terrible.” On her watch we saw the first child suicide in state custody, followed a month later by a second.

But Casados’ departure isn’t cause to celebrate, Beck says. “This isn’t about Teresa,” she posts on social media. “Governor, this is on you.”

Beck is the self-appointed CYFD watcher and truth teller who has dogged the agency since her own eye-opening experience as a foster parent in 2017. She founded a nonprofit, New Mexico Child First Network, and has become an expert on CYFD and the child welfare system in New Mexico.

I urge everyone who cares about kids to watch Beck’s August 28 podcast with reporter Daniel Chacon, of the Santa Fe New Mexican, but I warn you: It will hurt your heart to know what goes on under the state’s banner.

Beck was in her early thirties in 2017 when she volunteered to be a foster parent after a baby died in foster care. The infant had been strapped in a car seat for 12 hours with no food. Becoming a foster parent took eight months, not because CYFD was being careful but because nobody saw any urgency in recruiting foster care givers. As a foster mom, Beck experienced an agency in chaos with no internal controls or accountability. Employees didn’t talk to each other or to foster parents and often treated foster parents poorly. CYFD’s culture was broken, and management was abysmal.

Monique Jacobson was then Gov. Susana Martinez’s all-purpose bureaucrat in charge of CYFD. Like Casados, Jacobson was well regarded. Like Casados, she had zero relevant experience. During a public meeting Beck was surprised at Jacobson’s ignorance of CYFD’s internal workings.

Beck expected Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham to do better. Her first hire, Brian Blaylock, had experience with troubled youth but was in over his head as a cabinet secretary. The second, retired state Supreme Court Justice Barbara J. Vigil, was a poor fit and spent two months of her short tenure in London, Beck said. Casados was the office’s third occupant.

Through them all, children died.

“You don’t have child fatalities in a system that’s working,” Beck said. Just weeks ago, the court-appointed arbiter for the Kevin S. lawsuit’s settlement declared that CYFD and the state Health Care Authority have shown little urgency in complying with the settlement agreement. Filed in 2020, the class-action lawsuit accused the two agencies of failing to keep children in their care safe.

Said Beck: “Kids are not in appropriate placement. It is exponentially worse than when the Kevin S. lawsuit was filed.”

She’s also troubled that CYFD doesn’t pay its foster care givers regularly or reimburse them for expenses, even though it routinely places little ones wearing diapers and nothing else. Beck describes herself as an ordinary person who simply wanted to help. Her plan in life was not to become an expert on CYFD, but knowing what she knows, she feels compelled to do this work. She testifies regularly in state hearings, where her mantra is, “Our kids are not OK.”

“I have all but put my life on hold to fix this department,” she told Chacon. “I’m not backing down. Better expect me at every hearing.” She has a few choice words for elected officials, especially the governor: “We need leaders to stop being political. We need leaders with humanity. We need leaders willing to do not just the hard work but the heart work.”