Xavier Becerra’s handling of the child migrant crisis is casting a long shadow over his time as US health secretary — and now it could haunt his California governor bid as alarming new allegations emerge about children lost in the system.
John Fabbricatore, a senior adviser with the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement, told The California Post that roughly 330,000 cases involving migrant children released during Becerra’s tenure remain unresolved.
He also claimed that more than 40 children processed by the agency have since died.
“We found over 40 kids deceased,” Fabbricatore said. “We found kids in sex trafficking. We found kids who were murdered, kids who were in slave labor.”
The allegations threaten to reignite scrutiny of the agency’s oversight of migrant children during Becerra’s tenure and could become a major political headache as he seeks higher office.
The startling figures were confirmed by other HHS officials.
Investigators have located 148,541 migrant children or former minors but are still trying to account for another 330,345 cases, including children who have since turned 18.
Becerra quickly ducked out of a press conference Wednesday at the State Capitol in Sacramento, refusing to meet with reporters or answer questions.
Last September, Fox News reported that federal investigators had identified 27 deceased migrant children — either by murder, suicide or drug overdose — while locating more than 22,600 unaccompanied minors released on the Biden administration’s watch.
With just three months until Election Day, Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton’s campaign has started releasing videos documenting the stories of migrant children who were abused and released into the hands of predators.
A new video features Guatemalan siblings Juana Rebecca Pérez Santay and Antonio David Pérez Santay, who said they were 17 and 15, respectively, when they crossed the southern border and were released by the feds into the hands of child traffickers.
Juana alleged she was forced to work roughly 20 hours a day, never received any pay and slept on a tile floor beside four young males. She said she was denied food and even permission to drink water.
“The worst moment,” Juana said, occurred when “a drunk man came into the house … and tried to rape me.”
She added: “They treated me like a slave.”
When Juana begged her sponsor for help, she said she was told: “Leave him alone because he’s drunk and he doesn’t know what he’s doing.”
Antonio recalled being told he would be allowed to stay in the home for just 15 days before being forced to pay his sponsor for food and rent. The sponsor allegedly hid the phone numbers children are given to report trafficking.
On Wednesday, Hilton offered blistering criticism of Becerra’s failure to properly protect and account for migrant children based on the new HHS numbers.
“This new information confirms the testimony of the whistleblowers who have been coming forward to our campaign,” Hilton told The Post.
“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 the Becerra campaign, did not respond to The Post’s questions about HHS’s new numbers and instead took aim 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,” Underland said.
Fabbricatore, a retired ICE executive who returned to the federal government in 2025, said that many of HHS’s unresolved cases trace back to “cartels” that broke families up before they arrived at the border and then took advantage of a broken system to extort families or traffic children.
He said investigators are now trying to reconstruct years-old records that were compromised by inadequate sponsor vetting and unreliable identifying information.
“There were thousands of fraudulent addresses given, thousands of fraudulent dates of birth, names,” he said.
“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.”
A bombshell report by the New York Times in 2023 found that HHS officials started churning children out to unvetted sponsors and efforts to check in on children often were confined to a single phone call that didn’t even need to be answered or returned.
Becerra was infamously recorded pressuring staff to speed up the process like an “assembly line” akin to Ford motors.
Jeff Nesbitt, Becerra’s former HHS public affairs chief, defended the former secretary, arguing the Biden administration inherited a sponsorship system after Trump’s first term that had been “largely dismantled and destroyed.”
“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,” Nesbitt told The Post.
Asked whether Becerra acknowledged anything could have been done better or accepted any responsibility for documented cases of child trafficking and abuse, Nesbitt reiterated that the department inherited “a system that was in shambles.”
The Times’ thoroughly documented children released from federal custody who later died or suffered catastrophic injuries while working illegal and dangerous jobs.
The outlet also reported that Becerra was alerted to concerns about sponsors, but the Biden administration waited until after reports were published to improve its processes.
Fabbricatore argued that procedures under Becerra fell far short of what vulnerable children deserved.
“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,” he said.
Hilton said Becerra’s handling of migrant children will ultimately define the race for governor.
“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,” he said.
