SANTA FE — The American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico and two Democratic state legislators filed an emergency petition Monday asking the New Mexico Supreme Court to halt a Children, Youth and Families Department directive that mandates the removal of drug-exposed newborns from their families without individualized investigation, arguing the policy is unlawful and causes the very harms it purports to prevent.
At the center of the dispute is New Mexico’s Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act program. The federal CARA law, enacted in 2016, required states to develop plans of safe care for substance-exposed newborns.
New Mexico passed its version in 2019, taking a deliberately non-punitive public health approach: hospitals were required to create voluntary care plans connecting families to treatment and services, and state law was amended to specify that a finding of newborn substance exposure alone could not trigger a child abuse or neglect report to CYFD.
The intent was to reduce stigma and keep families intact while addressing addiction as a medical disorder. New Mexico is among the highest-ranked states in the nation for children born with neonatal abstinence syndrome.
The voluntary framework quickly showed its limits. A 2023 Legislative Finance Committee evaluation found roughly 85 percent of CARA families were forgoing support services, 42 percent of families with a plan of care did not even know they had one, and only 15 percent of those referred to substance abuse treatment accepted the referral, with about 500 drug-exposed infants per year receiving no plan of care at all.
Republican lawmakers had been pushing for enforcement teeth since at least that year: Sen. Gay Kernan, R-Hobbs, introduced a bill in 2023 requiring CYFD to conduct family assessments when families failed to follow their care plans, which passed the Senate unanimously but died in the House after CYFD opposed it. After Kernan retired that August, Sen. Crystal Brantley, R-Elephant Butte, pledged to reintroduce the measure and did so in 2024, with House Republicans filing a nearly identical companion bill — but those efforts stalled as the governor signaled she had her own plans for CYFD.
It was not until the 2025 legislative session that lawmakers of both parties converged on a solution: Senate Bill 42, which passed the Senate 38-0 and the House 59-2 and was signed into law in April 2025, shifted primary CARA oversight from CYFD to the state Health Care Authority and established enforceable consequences, including a 24-hour deadline for care coordinators to notify CYFD if a family disengages from their plan of safe care.
Before SB 42’s frameworks could fully take effect, the deaths of at least two infants under state supervision in June 2025 — both born drug-exposed and both sent home under CARA plans that CYFD failed to adequately monitor — prompted Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham to act unilaterally. On July 7, 2025, CYFD’s acting chief general counsel issued a directive ordering the agency to seek immediate custody of every newborn exposed to methamphetamine, fentanyl, polysubstance, or diagnosed with fetal alcohol syndrome prior to hospital discharge, with no individualized review and no exceptions.
Lujan Grisham described the move as an early and more robust implementation of SB 42. As of March 2026, 167 infants had been removed under the directive.
The ACLU’s emergency petition, joined by Rep. Micaela Lara Cadena and Sen. Linda Lopez, argues the directive violates due process under the New Mexico Constitution by bypassing individualized family assessments. The petition further contends the policy conflicts with the Indian Child Welfare Act and New Mexico’s Indian Family Protection Act by failing to make active efforts to prevent the breakup of Native American families and that it directly contradicts SB 42’s own framework, which is designed to provide voluntary, non-punitive services before removal is considered.
The ACLU also flagged that parents using legally prescribed medications such as Methadone or Suboxone to treat opioid addiction are subject to removal under the directive.
Sen. Nicole Tobiassen, R-Albuquerque, fired back Monday, urging the court to deny the petition. “The ACLU, together with their leftist partners in the legislature, are taking an extreme position,” Tobiassen said. “Even blue states such as Maryland and Minnesota define drug exposure in newborns as abuse or neglect and require interventions to remove children from unsafe living conditions. New Mexico can and should continue to prioritize the best interest of the child in such cases.”
The New Mexico Supreme Court had not publicly responded to the petition as of Monday evening.
