Xavier Becerra wants to be governor of California. Before he gets there, he needs to answer for what happened to the children on his watch — and the whistleblower who just came forward has made that considerably harder to avoid.
In July 2021, Becerra toured the Pomona Fairplex emergency intake site for unaccompanied migrant children and called it “a model” for the country — a place where kids could be “healthy and safe.” A caseworker who spent six months inside that same facility in 2021 has now told a very different story.
According to the whistleblower — a first-generation American, a mother of two, raised in Southern California by a family that emigrated from El Salvador — children at the Fairplex faced abuse, chaotic releases, and separation from siblings. Sponsors presented fake documents. Children were moved in the middle of the night. Some were released to unverified addresses. Some were never seen again.
One haunting case: a five-year-old girl referred to as “Grace” arrived at the facility with her seven-year-old sister. Grace became distraught because she couldn’t find her sibling and hadn’t seen her for days. The caseworker raised concerns. Those concerns were ignored — overridden by institutional pressure to reunify children with sponsors as quickly as possible, regardless of whether those sponsors had any verified connection to the children.
Another case: a 14-year-old girl became pregnant after being raped. She had been trafficked into sex work by a woman described as her “so-called aunt” and sponsor.
Becerra called it a model. These things were happening inside it.
None of this should surprise anyone who has been paying attention. Biden’s own Department of Homeland Security Inspector General documented that more than 300,000 unaccompanied migrant children went missing under the administration Becerra served. Nearly 480,000 unaccompanied minors crossed the border during his tenure as HHS Secretary — the agency legally mandated to care for and protect them. When asked about the missing children in a local television interview earlier this year, Becerra became testy and defiant. He insisted there were no lost kids on his watch.
He’s lying out of his criminal backside. The whistleblower says otherwise. The DHS Inspector General says otherwise. The documentation says otherwise.
Here is the part that makes this politically explosive: Becerra is currently the frontrunner for the California Democratic gubernatorial nomination. He is running on his record. His record includes presiding over a system where, by his own department’s accounting, hundreds of thousands of vulnerable children disappeared — and by a firsthand caseworker’s testimony, where children were trafficked, separated from siblings, and released to unverified adults in the dead of night.
The left spent years calling Republicans child abusers for building facilities to house children who crossed illegally. Becerra toured a facility where a 14-year-old was being trafficked and called it a model for America.
California voters are going to have to decide what to do with that information. Republicans should make sure they have it. And in a perfect world, Xavier Becerra would be sitting a courtroom right about now learning how many decades he will spend behind bars.
