“2,000 cases are outside of the 45 days to complete an investigation. Two months from today, that will not be the case. We will not be behind on any case anywhere,” Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham told KOB 4 in February.

The governor said the 2,000 case backlog at CYFD would be cleared by early April.

Earlier this week, a CYFD spokesperson said the department still has more than 1,300 cases to clear.

State Sen. Jerry Ortiz y Pino spent half of his professional career in CYFD. He’s hesitant about that two-month timeframe.

“Every time they close one of those cases, that’s potentially at KOB 4 news story at 10 the next night if something goes wrong with that kid,” Ortiz y Pino said. “So they have to be very careful, they can’t just do it willy-nilly, so for her to make that promise — I think it’s telling that she doesn’t really know what’s involved.”

Ortiz y Pino said for CYFD to catch up on cases, they’re going to need to hire more social workers and investigators. The governor says they are taking investigators from other departments to help out, but Ortiz y Pino is skeptical.

“It’s just profoundly difficult for me to understand how we’re ever going to get a handle on this until we professionalize that department,” he said. “It doesn’t mean just shifting more bodies in there, it means getting people who know what they’re doing.”

CYFD Secretary Teresa Casados also weighed in Thursday about their progress on the cases, but she did not make any promises about when they would be cleared.

“It’s important for us to clear the backlog, but it’s really important for us to make sure that we’re looking at every case independently and doing that assessment,” Casados said. “I want to be really careful because if they hear we’re supposed to be closing cases, that’s not really a term we’re using right now. It’s really to investigate them and figure out where they need to be.”

Lujan Grisham says the people they are pulling from other departments to help with the overdue cases are being retrained to specifically focus on paperwork and phone calls.

Casados says they’re also now requiring caseworkers to get written permission from supervisors if an investigation is going to take longer than 45 days.