When the legislative session begins Wednesday, its Children’s Committee plans to propose legislation focused on reforms to the Connecticut Department of Children and Families prompted by the alleged fatal abuse of an 11-year old New Britain girl that was revealed last October.
Jacqueline “Mimi” Torres-Garcia’s death, which Chief Medical Examiner Dr. James Gill ruled a homicide, coupled with a state audit released this past summer that found an increase in children missing from DCF care, has prompted lawmakers to propose legislation focused on transparency, permanent guardrails and supervisory review of the agency, according to lawmakers familiar with the proposed legislation.
“It’s not just about the agency itself,” said Rep. Corey Paris, D-Stamford, co-chair of the Children’s Committee. “It’s about whether Connecticut runs a child welfare system that is predictable, transparent and effective.”
Jacqueline’s case is not the first one to draw attention.
DCF also investigated over a nine-year period the case of a child allegedly held captive and tortured in Waterbury for a period of 20 years.
(Courtesy of the Waterbury Police Department)
Report: DCF made years of visits to home of CT man allegedly found captive, starved
Paris said he would like to implement a federal dashboard in the state comparable to one in Wisconsin that shows how the child welfare system is performing against federal safety and permanency standards with elements including response times, placements and performance youth outcomes.
“Anyone can see where that system is doing well and where it is falling short,” he said. “That kind of system creates urgency and accountability and trust. Connecticut has the data and what we lack is consistent public transparency.”
House Speaker Matt Ritter said “a legislative package focused on child welfare, including DCF reforms will be one of the priority bills for the 2026 legislative session.”
State and federal reports highlight challenges within the DCF system with the state audit finding that DCF did not “perform formal assessments of common risk factors or plans to address children who go missing from care.”
The federal government conducts periodic audits of every state’s child welfare system to measure children’s safety, permanency and well being.
In its most recent report released last year, The Child and Family Services Review said that “Connecticut was found in substantial conformity with none of the seven” benchmarks.
Child advocates argue that the child welfare system is taxed and does not have enough placements for all the children in its care, with many ending up for long periods of time in ERs and shelters where they do not receive appropriate care. They said that DCF is not meeting state obligations to protect children from abuse and neglect and that legislation and accountability is sorely needed in the system.
The Department of Children and Families said it is grappling with a number of challenges including staff retention problems and the complex, behavioral, medical and psychological needs of youth straining the behavioral health system. The child welfare agency said it has addressed the issue of children missing from care by updating policies, improving reporting and expanding services for high-risk youth.
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Sen. Cecil Maher, D-Wilton, co-chair of the Children’s Committee, said there are measures needed to keep children safer and “that does include making sure that there are placements and that children are not kept holding in emergency departments.”
State Rep. Anne Dauphinais, a Danielson Republican, said she wants to support DCF in the best way possible and that fixing the issues won’t happen overnight.
“I think DCF works very hard to address things and there is always that balance of overreach,” she said. “I have spent a lot of time talking to them and talking through things. If we had more (foster) homes we wouldn’t have such a placement problem.”
Children waiting for placement
Child advocates with The Center for Children’s Advocacy said many children are being left in ERs and shelters for long periods because they said DCF has no immediate placement for them.
“Every day we are representing kids who are stuck in hospitals,” said Sarah Eagan, executive director of The Center for Children’s Advocacy.
Martha Stone, director of the Center for Children’s Advocacy, said children wait and wait with some eventually getting an inpatient psychiatric bed at hospitals.
“We have little kids stuck in the ER and you sort of look at the conditions of the emergency room,” said Stone. “They are held in the room by themselves with nothing else but a cot and a guard outside the door.”
After they are ready for discharge Stone said there “aren’t enough reputed foster homes that will take them in and once they get to a therapeutic foster home, there are not enough intensive community-based services for them to be able to stabilize.”
“So at each point in the system you’ve got some constellation of gridlock,” Stone said.
The federal audit of Connecticut’s system last year found that only 41% of children’s mental health needs were met.
Eagan said there are over 1,500 children waiting for long periods in hospital emergency departments a year because there is no place for them to go.
Paris said “children sleeping in emergency rooms or bouncing between emergency shelters is one of the clearest signs that the system is failing them.”
He said this is a system capacity issue and requires immediate and long-term fixes.
“We should be looking at expanding crisis stabilization beds statewide so ERs are not used as holding places,” he said.
Josh Michtom, director of the Child Welfare Project and a senior staff attorney, said he has a client whose mother keeps kicking him out, unable to care for his “extraordinary mental health needs” and that DCF has told him that they don’t have a shelter for him.
“They are not prepared to serve the population that the law says that they have to,” Michtom said.
Gary Steck, chief executive office of Wellmore Behavioral Health, which houses the only 24-7 urgent crisis center in the state in Waterbury, said “virtually every day a kid ends up being held for more than 24 hours because there is not a place available.
“It is a very common experience that we can’t find a bed for a kid that needs an inpatient bed and there are never enough foster care providers,” he said.
Ken Mysogland, chief administrator of external affairs for DCF said, “we recognize the acuity of youth today is straining our behavioral health system and options for placement.
“It takes time and planning to determine the best match between a child and a kinship or foster family or therapeutic program to meet their unique and complex needs,” he said. “This is intensive work within an evolving system, and significant enhancements have been made over the past couple years. We know we have more work to do across all systems.”
Budget woes and foster reimbursement rates
Eagan said that DCF’s budget has suffered, losing roughly $150 million since 2010 but still opening 30,000 cases a year. She said the foster care reimbursement system is also not adequate, equating to an increase in $1.75 a day over the last 20 years.
“A foster parent in Springfield, Massachusetts providing care for an 11-year-old foster child would be paid thousands more a year than a foster parent caring for that child in Hartford,” she said. “We have a foster care crisis in Connecticut that contributed to why these children are bouncing around.”
Dauphinais said there has been some appetite to give foster families more money and resources.
“If we start supplementing them a little better there might be more families that will stay in or become foster parents,” she said.
Mysogland said in an email that “we can confirm that our (foster care reimbursement) rates are lower than a number of neighboring states on the East Coast.”
Challenges
Reports on DCF in the state have cited problems over the years.
The state audit examined trends regarding “children who were missing from DCF care from fiscal year 2021 through 2023.
“DCF reported 3,736 missing episodes representing 606 missing children under 18 years old from fiscal years 2021 through 2023,” the state audit said. “The number of episodes increased by 42% while the number of children missing from care remained consistent for the period.”
The audit found that 70% of children were missing from care for one day or less, with an average episode of eight days and median one day.
“DCF did not sufficiently document police notifications to show evidence of compliance with state and federal laws,” the report found. “In some instances, DCF did not promptly report critical incidents.”
DCF said fewer than 5% of children in DCF care ran away or went AWOL during the audit period, which is consistent with peer states.
The agency said further that since the “audit period, the department finalized new “Missing from Care” practices in May 2025 to ensure full federal compliance and stronger coordination with law enforcement and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
DCF said it has reduced the overall number of children in care by approximately 30% since 2019. The agency said it also expanded crisis services including urgent crisis center mobile crisis intervention, sub acute crisis stabilization and the new Intensive Treatment and Transition Center.
Referring to the federal government’s periodic audit of the state’s child welfare system, DCF Interim Commissioner Susan I. Hamilton said in an email that the The Child and Family Services Review indicated that the department demonstrated strong practice in several areas “such as kinship care, siblings placements through behavioral assessments and strong community engagement…”
“The Department has a proven track record of successfully completing prior Program Improvement Plans, and one will be submitted in the near future in collaboration with other system partners to address the highlighted areas consistent with all states across the country,” Hamilton said.
The death of Jacqueline has also sparked sharp criticism around DCF.
Jacqueline “Mimi” Torres was most recently listed as being homeschooled, according to officials. (Courtesy of Farmington Police Department)
Jacqueline’s remains were found in an advanced state of decomposition in a storage tote left outside a boarded up, abandoned home on Clark Street in New Britain in October. According to the arrest warrant affidavits in the case, police believe Jonatan Nanita and Jacqueline’s mother, 29-year-old Karla Garcia, kept the girl’s remains in the basement of their Farmington condo after she died in September 2024.
Nanita and Garcia, who were dating at the time and share three children together, have been accused of bringing the remains with them when they relocated to New Britain in March 2025, police wrote in the warrants. They each face murder and other charges in Jacqueline’s death.
Solutions
Eagan said following Jacqueline’s death people are seeking more transparency on how the child welfare system functions.
While highlighting that DCF does have a Statewide Advisory Committee, which is tasked with providing oversight, she said the committee “needs to function in a more public fashion” and that it should be independently staffed and supported.
She added it is important to improve the quality of legal representation for children, strengthen and invest in the state-contracted system of care services for children, and address chronically low foster care reimbursement rates.
Maher said it is important to look at DCF as a whole.
“We need to do a very comprehensive overview of where DCF is right now, what the needs are and how do we fix them so children are taken care of and are staying safe,” Maher said. “We can’t take care of kids if our case workers are overloaded.”
Reporter Justin Muszynski contributed to this article.