Child welfare’s golden rule seems to be keep families together at all costs – even if that means ignoring problems and reunifying families – sending kids straight back into danger, dysfunction, and abuse. And when kids and concerned citizens do cry out for help, they’re often met with a shrug, thanks to chronic indifference, staffing shortages, and a system that can’t (or won’t) do its job. This results in a system that often serves itself and bad parents – but not the kids.
Take the gut-wrenching case in New Mexico where a 7-year-old boy begged the cops not to let his 5-year-old sister die when law enforcement found them amid neglect in March of 2024. Unfortunately, his sister was already dead when the police found her – from carbon monoxide poisoning. First responders tried to revive the girl but failed. She was found underneath her unconscious parents.
The media [1] is pointing to workers at a New Mexico Child, Youth and Families Department (CYFD) office in Silver City, New Mexico, who failed to intervene despite multiple investigations from claims of neglect of both children. A reported lawsuit described their home as a “shack” and stated that both children had meth in their systems, with the boy suffering from pneumonia on the day his sister was found dead.
CYFD first got wind about the family back in 2022 after a sheriff’s deputy found the boy alone in the back of a truck in a Walmart parking lot. The agency found that the children were being neglected but did nothing.
More incompetence by CYFD followed even after receiving complaints from concerned relatives of the children and school staff. The boy even showed up at school with a black eye according to Daily Mail [2].
And when CYFD staff FINALLY showed up at the home in person, they found many problems – but still failed to substantiate neglect even after the kids described domestic violence in their home.
Leaving children with abusive or neglectful parents – or rushing to reunify them after separation – is often par for the course in the child welfare system. But when the system ignores bruises, drug exposure, and the desperate cries of a child, it’s no longer child protection – it’s state-sanctioned abandonment.
Until protecting children becomes more important than preserving broken families, tragedies like this will keep happening. Biology doesn’t make you a good parent – and bureaucracy doesn’t make you a hero.