A former caseworker at a California emergency intake site for migrant children has come forward with allegations of child trafficking, sibling separations, and sham sponsor vetting, all under the watch of Xavier Becerra, who now leads the Democratic race for governor.
The whistleblower, who worked for six months in 2021 at the Pomona Fairplex in Pomona, California, described a facility where children slept on cots in makeshift pods of roughly 20 to 35 minors, where sponsors submitted selfies as identification, and where staff could not verify the addresses of adults claiming custody of unaccompanied children. She brought her account to Steve Hilton, the Republican candidate challenging Becerra in California's gubernatorial race, and The California Post published the allegations on July 27.
Becerra served as Health and Human Services secretary under President Joe Biden from 2021 to 2025, the period during which just under 480,000 unaccompanied minors crossed the southern border. HHS was the federal agency legally mandated to care for and protect those children. The Pomona Fairplex was one of three emergency intake sites California opened alongside facilities in San Diego and Long Beach, with additional sites operating in Texas and Florida.
In July 2021, Becerra toured the Pomona Fairplex and told the public it was "a model" for similar sites across the country, a place where children could be "healthy and safe." The whistleblower's account paints a starkly different picture of what was happening inside.
Among the most disturbing allegations is the story of a child the whistleblower calls "Grace", a five-year-old who arrived at the Fairplex with her seven-year-old sister. The older girl left the facility first. Grace did not know where her sister had gone.
"I miss my sister and I don't know where she's at," the child told the caseworker.
The whistleblower said the separation left her shaken.
"I felt heartbroken because nobody could tell her where her sister was."
Whether Grace and her sister ultimately reached verified safe destinations remains unknown. The whistleblower's account does not resolve that question, and no government agency response is cited.
The caseworker also described the case of a 14-year-old girl who she alleges became pregnant after being raped and was forced into sex work by a woman described as her "so-called aunt", the same woman who served as the girl's official sponsor. The whistleblower called the sponsor-vetting process "ridiculous," alleging that staff accepted selfies in place of proper identification and that sponsors communicated through WhatsApp with no way for caseworkers to confirm who they actually were.
Employees who reported sexual harassment incidents at the facility were fired, the whistleblower alleges. No official records or legal filings confirming those terminations are cited.
One of the whistleblower's most pointed allegations involves the timing and logistics of how children left the facility. She described transfers happening at two and three in the morning.
"We have no idea who was going to be transporting the children."
She now suspects the timing was deliberate, so that "nobody would see the children leaving the facility." That is her characterization, not a confirmed finding. But the pattern she describes, unverified sponsors, untraceable addresses, predawn departures, raises obvious questions about what safeguards, if any, were in place once children left HHS custody.
The whistleblower, a first-generation American whose family emigrated from El Salvador, said she was raised in Southern California and is a mother of two. She framed her decision to come forward in terms of personal responsibility.
"We failed, and I think we should all take responsibility, he should take responsibility."
Hilton, the Republican nominee, has seized on the whistleblower's account as central to his case against Becerra. He claims 280,000 children went missing under Becerra's watch at HHS, a figure for which no sourcing document is cited in the reporting. Becerra, for his part, said in May that reports of 85,000 migrant children going missing were "not accurate," though that characterization comes from Hilton's account of Becerra's statement rather than a direct, independently sourced quote.
Hilton did not hedge his language:
"These children were trafficked as a direct result of Becerra's personal instructions to eliminate proper vetting of the adults these migrant children were being sent to."
He added: "Becerra's actions are despicable and disqualifying." Those are allegations from a political opponent in the middle of a campaign, and they should be weighed accordingly. But the underlying facts the whistleblower describes, if accurate, point to systemic failures that go well beyond campaign rhetoric.
The California Post reached out to Becerra for comment and did not immediately hear back. The latest poll from the Public Policy Institute of California shows Becerra leading Hilton 61 percent to 36 percent ahead of the November 3 general election.
The Pomona Fairplex caseworker is not the first person to allege that HHS placed migrant children with dangerous sponsors. In 2023, HHS whistleblower Tara Lee Rodas testified before the House Judiciary Subcommittee that the government's Unaccompanied Alien Children program had effectively made the federal government a middleman in child trafficking.
"Whether intentional or not, it could be argued that the U.S. government has become the middleman in a large scale, multibillion-dollar child trafficking operation that is run by bad actors seeking to profit off of the lives of children."
Rodas described sponsors who were criminals, traffickers, and members of transnational criminal organizations who viewed children as commodities. She testified that children placed through the program had been found working overnight shifts at slaughterhouses, factories, and restaurants to pay off smuggling debts. Some, she said, were sold for sex.
Rodas told Congress the revelation changed how she understood her own work:
"Realizing that we were not offering children the American dream, but instead putting them into modern-day slavery with wicked overlords, was a terrible revelation."
The numbers behind that testimony are stark. Encounters with unaccompanied alien children at the border swelled from 33,239 in fiscal year 2020 to more than 152,000 in fiscal year 2022. HHS lost contact with approximately 85,000 unaccompanied migrant children after placing them with sponsors, the same figure Becerra later disputed.
As the Washington Examiner noted, Rodas witnessed apartment buildings housing 20 to 40 unaccompanied children and numerous cases of children in debt bondage, required to stay with their sponsors until debts were paid. The pattern she described, recruitment in home countries, smuggling to the border, government-facilitated placement with exploitative adults, mirrors the allegations now emerging from the Pomona Fairplex.
Several questions remain unanswered. No arrests, charges, or formal investigations tied to the Pomona whistleblower's allegations are cited. It is unclear whether the allegations about the 14-year-old girl were ever reported to law enforcement or what, if anything, resulted. The whistleblower's account has not been independently corroborated by a second party, and she has not been publicly identified.
What is clear from the record is the gap between Becerra's public assurances and the conditions alleged by a caseworker who was inside the building. He called the Pomona Fairplex "a model." She described children separated from siblings with no explanation, sponsors vetted through selfies and WhatsApp messages, a teenage girl allegedly raped and trafficked by her own sponsor, and predawn transfers into the hands of unknown drivers.
Becerra is asking California voters to make him governor. Before they do, they deserve a direct answer about what happened to the children his agency was supposed to protect, and why the man who called that facility "a model" never saw what a caseworker on the ground floor could not miss.
