“There was no confidentiality between the minor and the case manager. If these children were being harmed…they couldn’t say anything,” said the whistleblower.
Last month, gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra was celebrating after emerging as the top vote-getter in June’s crowded primary field. Less than a month later, however, his path to victory has become considerably more complicated.
Earlier this week, a former caseworker at the Pomona Fairplex emergency shelter for migrant children publicly alleged the widespread abuse and exploitation of minors at California migrant detention facilities during Xavier Becerra’s tenure as Secretary of Health and Human Services.
In a series of recorded conversations, the whistleblower also claims Becerra dismantled the vetting process to prioritize quickly releasing migrant children instead of thoroughly screening the adults taking custody of them. As a result, the complaint alleges, some children ended up with traffickers, in exploitative labor situations, or in the custody of people falsely claiming to be family members.
Some of these children were indeed later trafficked for sex and/or labor, the whistleblower attested.
Becerra’s Republican challenger, Steve Hilton, calls these recordings the “Becerra Tapes,” and suggest they reveal that “rape victims [were] silenced in Xavier Becerra’s migrant child abuse camps.”
“There was no confidentiality between the minor and the case manager. If these children were being harmed…they couldn’t say anything,” said the whistleblower.
“If something has happened, if they’ve been raped, there should be privacy and there was no privacy,” they continued.
Across the four years Becerra spent leading the HHS from 2021 to 2025, nearly half a million unaccompanied minors crossed over the U.S.-Mexico border and entered into the custody of the HHS (or, more accurately, the Office of Refugee Resettlement, a division of the HHS). Estimates vary, but it’s believed that the HHS lost track of around two-thirds of these children.
Of that total, 130,000 to 140,000 are still missing.
For this reason, Becerra had previously been subpoenaed by the House Homeland Security Committee for information concerning the disappearance of tens of thousands of migrant children and its vetting process for sponsors. Initially, Becerra’s HHS appears to have stalled, “[denying] access to this vital information, refusing to provide even an indication of the scope of the issue,” said Committee Chairman Mark Green (R-TN).
Then, the following year, the Senate Judiciary Committee made public HHS data showing that “the Biden-Harris administration placed over 11,000 migrant children with unvetted sponsors who were not the child’s parent or legal guardian, (guardian, and who were not fingerprinted or did not receive a background check) and did not conduct home studies for over 79,000 migrant children under the age of 12.”
During that time, a senior adviser at HHS, Chris Clem, came forward and said his belief that Becerra was directly responsible for it. Becerra likened the placement process to a factory, urging staff to expedite sponsorships.
“You need to move this like an assembly line,” Becerra said.
“It was about getting kids out of government custody as fast as possible, and that’s where the horrors occurred because there was very little vetting of sponsors,” Clem said. “That’s when they become missing.”
Despite all of this, Becerra has made it out relatively unscathed and remains the Democrat nominee for Governor. Perhaps that has less to do with enthusiasm for Becerra himself and more to do with a trilogy of errors among the other Democrat frontrunners—from the rape allegations against Eric Swalwell to a myriad of hot mic moments that tanked Katie Porter’s political viability. The big winner in each aforementioned case was, of course, Becerra himself.
As of yet, Becerra has yet to provide any comment on the allegations and has remained active on social media since the “Becerra Tapes” were released.
The public, however, has had a much different reaction.
“It’s beyond sad that buying a beer requires more verification than having a child released into your custody or voting. Yet somehow this was/is acceptable,” said one social media user.
“Unforgivable,” said another.
“The federal HHS agency under the Joe Biden administration should be fully investigated, and anyone who took part, including Xavier Becerra, needs to be investigated and held criminally accountable for this horrific act against innocent children!” wrote the Common Sense Coalition account.
