Xavier Becerra wants to run California. But a growing number of critics, including fellow Democrats, want to know what happened to tens of thousands of migrant children who vanished from federal tracking while he led the Department of Health and Human Services.
The former Biden administration cabinet secretary, now a candidate for governor of California, faces renewed scrutiny over a controversy that first surfaced in a 2023 New York Times investigation: over a two-year period, more than 85,000 unaccompanied minors placed with sponsors became untraceable by federal officials. Nearly a dozen HHS staffers responsible for those children told the Times that child labor trafficking was increasing on their watch. Fox News Digital reported that the issue is now dogging Becerra's gubernatorial campaign, with even a longtime Democratic strategist telling the outlet that "voters deserve better."
The missing-children scandal is not the only problem following Becerra onto the debate stage. During a recent California governor's debate, he was pressed on a separate matter, his prior admission that "many of us heard the rumors" about former Rep. Eric Swalwell's alleged sexual misconduct. Becerra's response was to draw a line between rumors and facts.
The timeline begins in early 2021, when images of migrant children packed into overcrowded border facilities put pressure on the Biden administration. At the Donna, Texas, Department of Homeland Security holding facility, the main detention center for unaccompanied children in the Rio Grande Valley, minors were forced to stay in what the reporting described as jail-like conditions run by federal immigration officials.
The administration's answer was speed. HHS began pressing staffers to move children out of shelters and into the custody of sponsors, adults in the United States who were supposed to care for them. The sponsor system was meant to protect kids from human trafficking and other exploitation. But the rush to clear shelters came at a cost.
Becerra himself, as HHS secretary, reportedly compared the agency's operations unfavorably to an assembly line. He told staff, according to the Times' reporting: "If Henry Ford had seen this in his plants, he would have never become famous and rich. This is not the way you do an assembly line." The remark captured the administration's fixation on throughput, getting children out the door, rather than on what happened to them after.
What happened after was the problem. HHS's legal authority over a child ends once that child is placed with a sponsor. And by the time the Times published its investigation in February 2023, the federal government had lost track of more than 85,000 of those children over two years.
The Swalwell misconduct scandal may have grabbed the debate headlines, but the missing-children issue strikes at the core of Becerra's record as a federal official entrusted with vulnerable minors.
The warnings did not come only from journalists. HHS's own Office of Inspector General found problems well before the Times report landed. In 2022, the OIG determined that guidance issued to speed up the release of children from shelters had removed safeguards, including certain background checks and reviews of children's files, and may have increased the risk of placing minors with unsafe sponsors.
Then in February 2024, the OIG issued another report. This time, investigators documented gaps in sponsor screening and follow-up that raised direct safety concerns for unaccompanied children. The findings were specific: 16 percent of sampled case files were missing documentation for required safety checks. Follow-up calls, the basic mechanism for confirming a child's welfare after placement, were untimely or undocumented in many cases.
Two inspector general reports. Two rounds of documented failures. And the man who ran the agency during the worst of it now wants a promotion.
A few months after the Times' reporting, Republicans in the House subpoenaed Becerra and HHS for records and documents related to the "vetting, screening and monitoring" of sponsors for migrant children. The subpoena sought the paper trail behind the decisions that led to tens of thousands of children slipping through the cracks.
House Republicans ordered HHS to produce records by October 3, 2024. But congressional committees kept complaining that the production was incomplete and that the documents provided were not responsive to their requests. Becerra was hauled to Capitol Hill for a hearing. He was eventually called back to testify again.
The pattern, slow-walking document production, providing material that doesn't answer the questions asked, and forcing repeated appearances, is familiar to anyone who has watched federal agencies stonewall congressional oversight. It does not inspire confidence that the full story has been told.
Meanwhile, California's Democratic gubernatorial field has fractured under the weight of scandal and infighting, leaving voters to sort through a crowded race shadowed by questions of accountability.
Becerra has contested the characterization that unaccompanied minors were "lost." A campaign staffer told Fox News Digital that Becerra worked to fix a "broken immigration system" he inherited. The framing is familiar: blame the predecessor, claim the mess was already there, and insist that the current leadership did its best under difficult circumstances.
But the OIG reports tell a different story. The safeguards that were removed, the background checks skipped, the file reviews dropped, the follow-up calls that never happened or were never documented, those were policy choices made under Becerra's leadership. The 85,000 children who became untraceable were placed with sponsors during his tenure. The assembly-line metaphor was his own.
When pressed during the gubernatorial debate about what he knew regarding Swalwell's alleged misconduct, Becerra offered a similar dodge: "Yeah, you hear rumors all the time about all sorts of things. Rumors are not facts." It is a convenient standard, one that allows a leader to claim ignorance while problems fester under his authority.
Swalwell himself dropped out of the California governor's race and resigned from Congress amid the scandal. Becerra's handling of the Swalwell questions during the debate drew sharp criticism for its evasiveness, a pattern that now extends across multiple controversies.
What makes the political situation particularly uncomfortable for Becerra is that the criticism is not coming only from Republicans. A longtime Democratic Party campaign strategist, speaking to Fox News Digital, said plainly that "voters deserve better." When members of your own party are raising red flags about your fitness for office, the usual partisan deflections lose their force.
The broader picture of Democratic arrogance driving scandal fallout in the California governor's race only compounds the problem. Becerra is not an outsider running against a broken system. He was the system. He ran the agency. He set the pace. And when the inspector general came knocking, twice, the findings pointed directly at decisions made on his watch.
Strip away the politics, the subpoenas, and the campaign trail posturing, and what remains is a simple, grim fact: more than 85,000 children entered a federal system that was supposed to protect them from trafficking and exploitation, and the government lost track of them. Nearly a dozen officials inside the very division responsible for those children raised alarms about rising child labor trafficking. The OIG documented that basic safety checks were skipped in a significant share of cases.
These were not statistics on a spreadsheet. They were children, minors who crossed the border alone, were placed in the custody of the United States government, and then handed off to sponsors whose backgrounds, in too many cases, were not adequately checked. The follow-up calls that were supposed to confirm their safety either didn't happen or weren't recorded.
Becerra treated the process like an assembly line and got assembly-line results: volume over quality, speed over safety, numbers cleared over children protected.
Now he wants California voters to trust him with an even bigger job. The question voters should ask is straightforward: if 85,000 children could vanish on his watch at HHS, and two inspector general reports couldn't produce a full accounting, what accountability looks like under a Governor Becerra?
When the people in charge can't, or won't, answer for the children who disappeared, the voters are the last line of oversight left.
