January 1, Border State’s Secret Pipeline Exploiting Vulnerable Children

Wyatt’s Take

• New Mexico’s dead-last education system is failing its most vulnerable children while fast-tracking irreversible medical procedures
• Texas families are crossing state lines to circumvent protective laws designed to safeguard minors from experimental gender treatments
• A state that can’t teach fourth-graders to read has no business experimenting on teenagers with life-altering hormones

New Mexico’s children are hurting. Their state is beautiful—freckled with red rocks, cacti, and the occasional roadside diner. But beneath that rugged exterior lies an American tragedy.

The Land of Enchantment is unknown to most Americans. Routinely ranking dead last in education, yet spending more than top-performing neighbor Colorado, New Mexico has become a genuine mystery — an American blind spot that radical activists are exploiting.

When the New Mexico legislature passed HB 7 in 2023, proponents of gender medicine celebrated. Under this law, public regulation of so-called “gender-affirming care” became virtually illegal.

Any attempts at basic safeguards must be measured against a disputed “medical standard of care.” It’s no coincidence that this bill lumps these experimental procedures together with abortion: Planned Parenthood, one of the state’s top providers, champions both.

In the first half of 2026, visits to New Mexico Planned Parenthood clinics jumped by 50%. Half came from out of state.

Texas families have relocated there to circumvent protective laws for minors. Some have said so publicly, and Planned Parenthood’s leaders share they’re proud to enable it.

New Mexico is surrounded by states with common-sense protections. A second law, SB 13, sealed its status: it grants legal immunity to those involved in “transitioning” children and shields the practice from out-of-state investigations into the harm it causes.

The pipeline is easy to reach: cheap, legal, and largely invisible to national scrutiny. The families arrive, the appointments are kept, the numbers climb — and the country goes on not looking.

This month, our nation’s children return to school. It’s worth asking what New Mexico has prepared for them.

The answer isn’t a secret, though you wouldn’t know it from the state’s marketing. New Mexico ranks fiftieth in the nation for child well-being, and fiftieth in education — dead last on both counts, year after year.

Its own families had to sue to force accountability. In Yazzie/Martinez v. State of New Mexico, a court found in 2018 that the state was failing its most vulnerable students: Native American, poor, disabled, and English learners.

Seven years later, New Mexico remains under that court order and out of compliance. Its latest fix was rejected by the very families it was meant to serve.

Set that pattern of failure against the speed and enthusiasm with which the state distributes gender medicine. All kids are vulnerable, yet the population struggling with identity confusion — often creative, autistic, different — mirrors the very populations going unserved in New Mexico schools.

New Mexico can move a Texas 14-year-old onto hormones over a long weekend. But it cannot teach a New Mexico fourth-grader to read.

It’s quick with what is immediate and irreversible, and slow with what is ordinary and lasting: the education that actually prepares a child for life.

Detransitioner Soren Aldaco knows this reality firsthand. As a teenager, she was caught in the gender-affirmation pipeline.

When she told her own story publicly, it made a difference. People stopped her at coffee shops and wrote to say how learning about her healing gave them hope, or influenced them to make different decisions in their own lives.

In 2023, she sued the providers responsible for her care. After one tried to use Texas’s statute of limitations to escape accountability, the Texas Supreme Court ruled this year that her case could proceed on its merits, underscoring the unique nature of “gender-affirming” harm.

We need more stories from New Mexico — more families willing to say what’s happening, more reporters willing to follow the road where Planned Parenthood leads.

Right now, the state shovels tax dollars into a failing school system, proclaims its devotion to all New Mexicans, and enables their harm — while inviting the rest of the country to participate.

A state that can’t teach its own children to read is in no position to dictate medical best practices. And a child never taught to read may never learn enough to question what’s being done to them.

New Mexico owes its kids a quality education, not experimental medicine and an artificially complicated life.

Why It Matters

When states abandon their duty to educate children but rush to provide irreversible medical treatments, something has gone terribly wrong. Working families who prioritize common sense over ideology understand that children need reading, writing, and arithmetic — not activists in white coats making permanent decisions about their futures. The same politicians who can’t fix a broken education system shouldn’t be trusted with our children’s bodies.