A senior federal adviser now says roughly 330,000 cases of migrant children released during Xavier Becerra's tenure as Health Secretary remain unresolved, a disclosure landing three months before Becerra faces California voters for governor.
John Fabbricatore, a retired ICE executive who returned to the Department of Health and Human Services in 2025 as a senior adviser to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, told The California Post that investigators have so far located 148,541 migrant children or former minors released during the Biden administration. But 330,345 cases remain open. And more than 40 of the children the agency processed have since died.
Other HHS officials confirmed the figures, though no names or titles for those officials were provided. Fabbricatore described an investigative effort hampered by years of degraded records, files full of fraudulent addresses, fake dates of birth, and sponsor identities that lead nowhere.
Fabbricatore did not hold back about what investigators have found so far. In his account, the children who fell through the cracks did not simply go missing. Some ended up in the worst circumstances the federal government is supposed to prevent.
"We found over 40 kids deceased. We found kids in sex trafficking. We found kids who were murdered, kids who were in slave labor."
The scale of the record-keeping failure, Fabbricatore said, has made the work of tracking down these children extraordinarily difficult. Sponsors who received children from federal custody provided thousands of fraudulent names and addresses. When investigators try to follow those leads, they find nothing.
"When you hand kids over to people that aren't being clear on their own identity, then those kids are next to impossible to find because you're dealing with smoke, you're dealing with ghosts."
The numbers Fabbricatore cited represent a significant increase from earlier public reporting. A Fox News report last September said federal investigators had at that point identified 27 deceased migrant children, killed, dead by suicide, or lost to drug overdoses, while locating more than 22,600 unaccompanied minors released on the Biden administration's watch. The gap between 27 confirmed deaths then and more than 40 now suggests the toll has continued to climb as investigators work through the backlog.
Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton's campaign has been releasing videos featuring migrant children who say they were abused after the federal government placed them with sponsors. Two of those children, Juana Rebecca Pérez Santay and her brother Antonio David Pérez Santay, both Guatemalan nationals, described conditions that amount to trafficking.
Juana, who was 17 when she crossed the southern border, said she was forced to work roughly 20 hours a day, never received pay, slept on a tile floor beside four young males, and was denied food and permission to drink water. She described the worst moment in plain terms:
"A drunk man came into the house... and tried to rape me."
When she begged her sponsor for help, Juana said, the sponsor dismissed the assault. The sponsor's response, as Juana recounted it: "Leave him alone because he's drunk and he doesn't know what he's doing."
Juana's summary of her treatment was blunt: "They treated me like a slave."
Her brother Antonio, 15 at the time of his crossing, recalled being told he could stay in the sponsor's home for 15 days before he would be forced to pay for food and rent. Antonio also said the sponsor hid the phone numbers that children are given to report trafficking, cutting off the one lifeline the federal system was supposed to guarantee.
On Wednesday, Becerra appeared at the State Capitol in Sacramento for a press conference but left without speaking to reporters or answering questions. The California Post did not specify the event's original purpose. The timing was notable: the new HHS figures had just surfaced, and Hilton was publicly pressing Becerra to account for the agency's record under his leadership.
Hilton seized on the moment. On August 5, he posted on X:
"🚨 MORE BECERRA CHILD TRAFFICKING VICTIMS SPEAK OUT: 15 yr old boy forced into 'debt bondage' after Becerra released him to child traffickers. He tells Becerra: 'How could you do this?' No wonder Becerra is dodging questions from the press and a debate with me. Shameful."
In a statement, Hilton framed the new HHS data as confirmation of a pattern his campaign had already been documenting through whistleblower testimony:
"This new information confirms the testimony of the whistleblowers who have been coming forward to our campaign."
He went further, directly accusing Becerra of dismantling the safeguards that were supposed to protect children from exploitation:
"Xavier Becerra deliberately dismantled vetting procedures that should have made sure children were placed in a safe home with a responsible adult. Instead they were sent directly into the clutches of child sex traffickers and those who wanted to exploit them for slave labor."
Jonathan Underland, a spokesperson for Becerra's gubernatorial campaign, did not respond to The California Post's questions about the specific HHS figures, the 330,345 unresolved cases, the 148,541 children located, or the more than 40 deaths. Instead, Underland issued a statement aimed at Hilton:
"No matter how many times Steve Hilton chases news cameras, packages his false claims in different press releases, or finds Trump appointees to carry his water, the same facts remain clear: they are doing whatever they can to divert attention from Trump's hateful policies and [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] militia's targeting of innocent families."
The statement characterized Fabbricatore, a career ICE official who returned to government service, as a "Trump appointee" carrying Hilton's message. It did not contest the underlying data or offer an alternative accounting of the unresolved cases.
Jeff Nesbitt, who served as Becerra's HHS public affairs chief, offered a different defense. He argued that the Biden administration inherited a sponsorship and vetting system that had been dismantled during Trump's first term and spent years rebuilding it:
"HHS and the Biden administration, under his leadership, rebuilt that network successfully, rebuilt the budget, increased the vetting, increased the sponsors, increased the facilities, step by step, brick by brick throughout the entire administration."
When asked whether Becerra accepted responsibility, Nesbitt returned to the inherited-system argument. He did not directly address the question.
The problems Fabbricatore described are not new allegations surfacing for the first time. The New York Times reported in February 2023 that HHS officials had begun releasing children to unvetted sponsors at speed, and that efforts to check on children after placement often amounted to a single phone call, one that did not even need to be answered or returned. That same reporting found Becerra had been alerted to concerns about sponsors, but the Biden administration waited until after the reports were published to improve its processes.
A second New York Times investigation in December 2023 documented children released from federal custody who later died or suffered severe injuries while working illegal and dangerous jobs. Becerra was also described as having been recorded pressuring staff to speed up the child-release process, comparing it to an "assembly line" similar to Ford's manufacturing operations. The source and date of that recording were not specified.
Fabbricatore was direct about where accountability should land. He rejected the idea that a cabinet secretary could claim ignorance of what happened inside his own agency:
"When you're a leader, you are responsible for the organization, and to say that you had no oversight on something where you didn't know is a cop-out."
Hilton, who is running against Becerra in the California governor's race, made clear he views the HHS record as disqualifying. His campaign has been methodically releasing victim testimonials, and the new federal figures give those personal accounts a statistical backbone.
"There is no way that someone who put his own political career over the safety and well-being of so many thousands of children can possibly be elected governor of California."
Several questions remain unanswered. The relationship between the 40-plus deaths Fabbricatore cited and the 27 deaths reported earlier by Fox News is unclear, whether the newer figure includes the earlier count or reflects additional discoveries. No information has emerged about whether law enforcement has opened investigations tied to the specific cases of Juana and Antonio Pérez Santay. And Becerra's campaign has yet to address the actual numbers head-on.
A system that released more than 300,000 children to sponsors it could not verify, then lost track of them, does not get to call the people asking questions the problem. The children who ended up in forced labor, in trafficking, and in graves deserve more than a press conference exit and a campaign statement that changes the subject.
