Xavier Becerra’s inability to track tens of thousands of migrant children while U.S. health secretary — leaving many to be abused and forced into dangerous work conditions — is exploding as a defining issue in the California governor’s race.
After his Republican rival Steve Hilton unveiled new whistleblower allegations over child labor and sex trafficking of children as young as six on Monday, a former senior adviser to the Department of Health and Human Services slammed Becerra’s lack of oversight and claimed at least 130,000 were still missing.
In 2023, a New York Times investigation found that over two years, the agency could not reach more than 85,000 children and the agency lost contact with a third of migrant children.
But Chris Clem, a senior adviser at HHS in 2025 after serving 27 years in the U.S. Border Patrol and retiring as chief of the Yuma Sector in Arizona, told The Post the number was far higher and pinned responsibility for the crisis directly Becerra, who was Joe Biden’s HHS secretary at the time.
“The single largest border crisis of our lifetime and the largest amount of kids — this does rise to the secretary’s level, and he should have had a finger on the pulse daily,” Clem said.
Clem questioned whether Becerra learned from his experience as HHS and said Californians should be concerned.
“When he was in charge of kids before, he didn’t do a very good job of it,” he said.
During Becerra’s tenure as HHS secretary from 2021 through early 2025, nearly 480,000 unaccompanied migrant children crossed the U.S.-Mexico border and entered the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the HHS division responsible for caring for migrant children.
“Numbers are always funny because part of the problem was the lack of accountability at HHS at the time,” Clem told The Post.
Clem’s comments follow troubling allegations in The Post from a caseworker at the Pomona Fairplex emergency intake center that young children in Southern California were released into the care of inadequately vetted sponsors, siblings were separated, and vulnerable minors vanished after leaving federal custody.
The whistleblower alleged some children were later trafficked for sex or labor. Children were also allegedly woken at 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. and handed small bags of belongings before being taken away.
“We have no idea who was going to be transporting the children,” the whistleblower said, adding she now suspects the timing was so “nobody would see the children leaving the facility.”
In June, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said that the Trump administration had found at least 146,000 migrant children were unaccounted for during the Biden administration.
According to Clem, Becerra’s emphasis on rapidly releasing children from custody without thorough vetting — Becerra infamously compared the process to a Ford “assembly line” — was an abdication of his duties.
“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.”
Clem added, “[Becerra] did visit his facilities, so he can’t act like he didn’t know.”
Jonathan Underland, a spokesperson for Becerra’s campaign, defended the candidate’s record as health secretary and put the blame for the missing children on President Trump’s first term in office.
“Where Sec. Becerra rebuilt the child protection systems Trump gutted, Steve Hilton has proudly allied himself with the president who put those children in harm’s way — who illegally sent a father to a foreign prison, whose separation policies continue to take children away from their parents, and whose ICE agents shot two fathers dead this month,” Underland said.
“Hilton is bought in. He doesn’t get to cash out now.”
Jeff Nesbitt, who served as Becerra’s public affairs chief at HHS, defended the California governor candidate in a statement to The Post.
“Secretary Becerra inherited a disorganized, chaotic mess from President Trump’s first term,” Nesbitt said. “He and his HHS team re-built the sponsorship and vetting network from the ground up during the Biden administration.”
He added that no children were “lost.”
“HHS’ role is to find sponsors for them while their cases are under review in the immigration law system. Becerra’s HHS team worked hard to find unaccompanied migrant children properly vetted sponsors. Once they were placed with sponsors, according to congressional authorization, that was the end of HHS’ responsibility for them.”
Hilton, who has made Becerra’s record at HHS a central issue of his campaign, said the controversy strikes at the core of the Democrat’s case for governor, with more allegations of wrongdoing expected to emerge in the coming days and weeks.
“This is going to be a defining issue for Becerra because it defines him,” Hilton told The Post.
“He keeps telling us that the reason California should elect him governor is because of his experience — let’s look at how he ran HHS.
“He failed the most basic task of humanity and decency, which is protecting the vulnerable children that were in his care.”
Hilton rejected the idea that the problems stemmed merely from an overwhelmed federal bureaucracy.
“This wasn’t incompetence. This wasn’t an agency that was overwhelmed and just couldn’t cope,” he said. “These shocking abuses of children happened as a direct result of deliberate action taken by Becerra.”
