Xavier Becerra wants to be governor of California. But his tenure as Health and Human Services secretary keeps catching up with him, and the issue at its center is one no amount of campaign polish can easily explain away: more than 85,000 unaccompanied migrant children who became impossible for federal officials to track.
The former Biden cabinet member, now running in the California Democratic primary for governor, faced pointed questions during a Wednesday night debate. But the scrutiny over his HHS record goes far deeper than any single debate exchange. As Fox News Digital reported, a longtime Democratic Party campaign strategist said flatly that "voters deserve better", a remarkable rebuke from inside Becerra's own party.
The timeline tells the story. And it is damning.
When images of children packed into border facilities flooded the news in 2021, the Biden administration faced enormous political pressure. The Donna Department of Homeland Security holding facility in Donna, Texas, the main detention center for unaccompanied children in the Rio Grande Valley, became a symbol of the crisis. Officials responded not by strengthening safeguards but by loosening them, pushing HHS staff to move kids out of shelters and into sponsor placements as fast as possible.
Becerra, as HHS secretary, presided over the operation. He compared the process to an assembly line, and not favorably.
"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."
That quote, directed at HHS staff, captures the pressure inside the agency. Children were being processed at speed. But the vetting, screening, and monitoring of the sponsors receiving those children was riddled with holes.
By 2022, HHS's own Office of Inspector General had already found that guidance issued to speed up releases had removed safeguards and may have increased the risk of placing children with unsafe sponsors. That was not a political accusation from Republicans. It came from the department's internal watchdog.
Then, in February 2023, the New York Times published an investigation that brought the scale of the problem into full public view. The Times obtained data showing that over a two-year period, more than 85,000 unaccompanied migrant children became untraceable by federal officials. Nearly a dozen officials within the HHS division responsible for those children expressed concern that child labor trafficking was increasing.
The scope of that number bears repeating. Eighty-five thousand children. Not misplaced paperwork. Not a bureaucratic rounding error. Children the federal government placed with sponsors and then could not find.
The inspector general's office did not stop at its 2022 findings. In February 2024, a follow-up OIG report indicated it had found continued gaps in sponsor screening and follow-up procedures. Among the specifics: missing documentation for required safety checks in 16 percent of sampled case files, along with untimely or undocumented follow-up calls in many cases.
Sixteen percent may sound modest in the abstract. Applied to tens of thousands of children, it represents a systemic failure, one that left vulnerable minors in placements the government could not verify were safe.
House Republicans moved to get answers. A few months after the Times investigation, they subpoenaed Becerra and HHS for records and documents related to the "vetting, screening and monitoring" of sponsors for migrant children. The committees set an October 3, 2024 deadline for HHS to produce the records. The pattern that followed was familiar to anyone who has watched Washington stonewalling: HHS produced hundreds of pages of documents, but Republicans argued none were responsive to their actual concerns. The committees kept complaining the production was incomplete.
Republicans eventually hauled Becerra to Capitol Hill for a hearing. He was later called back to testify again. During those appearances, Becerra contested the characterization that children had been "lost," arguing that sponsors simply did not pick up the phone during follow-up attempts. That defense hinges on a technicality, HHS's legal authority over a child ends once the child is placed with a sponsor. In other words, once a child was handed off, the agency had no legal mechanism to ensure the child's safety, and apparently limited ability even to confirm the child's whereabouts.
That structural gap existed before Becerra took office. But the decision to accelerate placements while weakening sponsor vetting happened on his watch. The inspector general said so. Twice.
Becerra is now trying to turn the page. He is running for governor in a state where Democratic primary voters may not be eager to relitigate Biden-era immigration controversies. But the missing children scandal is not a partisan talking point. It is a documented failure with real victims, children who were placed into situations the federal government could not or would not verify were safe.
The broader pattern of Biden administration allies distancing themselves from the former president's record makes Becerra's position even more precarious. He cannot easily separate himself from decisions he oversaw as a cabinet secretary. And the fact that a Democratic strategist publicly said voters deserve better suggests the discomfort is not limited to the right.
The accountability questions extend beyond Becerra personally. The Biden administration's approach to unaccompanied minors reflected a broader pattern: respond to political pressure with speed, defer the consequences, and resist oversight when those consequences surface. The failure to revoke visas of individuals who later posed threats to children fits the same mold, urgency without follow-through, process without protection.
On March 14, 2024, Becerra testified before the Senate Finance Committee in the Dirksen building on the president's fiscal year 2025 HHS budget. By that point, the OIG had already issued two reports flagging the same core problems. Congressional committees had subpoenaed records. The Times investigation had been public for over a year. And still, the full accounting remained elusive.
The resistance to transparency is itself telling. When agencies produce hundreds of pages of documents that somehow fail to address the questions actually asked, the message is clear: the records either do not exist, or someone does not want them seen. Either answer should concern voters. Programs like the new whistleblower bounty initiative targeting health care fraud exist precisely because institutions left to police themselves so often fail to do so.
Becerra's gubernatorial campaign will no doubt emphasize his long career in California politics and his time as state attorney general. His supporters will frame the missing children issue as a problem he inherited or one that was beyond any single official's control.
But the record says otherwise. The OIG found in 2022 that specific guidance changes, made to speed up releases, removed safeguards. That was a policy choice, not an act of nature. The 2024 OIG report found the gaps persisted. And the 85,000 figure, drawn from data obtained by the New York Times, represents children who entered a system Becerra ran and then vanished from the government's view.
The question for California Democrats is straightforward: does this record merit a promotion? Becerra oversaw a department that, by its own inspector general's assessment, weakened protections for some of the most vulnerable people in the country, unaccompanied minors, many of them fleeing dangerous conditions, placed with sponsors the government failed to properly vet and then failed to track.
When officials at every level, from state legislatures accused of shielding fraud from exposure to federal agencies that resist congressional subpoenas, treat accountability as optional, the people who pay the price are always the most powerless. In this case, they were children.
Eighty-five thousand of them. And the man who ran the agency responsible now wants to run the largest state in the union. Voters can decide whether that record qualifies him, or disqualifies him.
