Republican candidate Steve Hilton is escalating his attacks on rival Xavier Becerra, unveiling more bombshell allegations that the Democratic gubernatorial candidate dangerously mishandled thousands of migrant children who were held in the state.
Video shared with The California Post shows the Hilton campaign talking to an anonymous whistleblower who claims she worked at the Pomona Fairplex.
It was one of three California locations among multiple emergency intake sites set up across the country to process a surge of unaccompanied migrant children under the Biden administration, when Becerra was serving as Health and Human Services secretary.
In the new video, the whistleblower alleged that workers who tried to protect migrant children were retaliated against.
For example, the unnamed whistleblower claims she found out the sponsor of a 13-year-old child from El Salvador was actually wanted by international police. A federal worker who was trying to dig into the case ended up being escorted out, said the whistleblower, whom The Post hasn’t independently spoken to.
“Mind you, she’s working for the government. She’s trying to protect these children,” she said in the video, “and she got escorted out. She got fired.”
“That was the, I guess you could call it the culture at the Pomona Fairplex,” she added.
In another case, another worker was doing a background check on an address that over 200 migrant children had been sent to, the whistleblower alleged. The worker saw on Google Maps that location had no homes, just a bunch of containers, and called an anti-trafficking number.
That worker was terminated the next day, the whistleblower claimed.
Becerra knew about all this, she alleged, but he would visit the Fairplex only to do photo ops.
“They knew exactly what was going on. Their concern was speed,” she said. “They wanted the children out right away rather than the concern for safety of the child. So it’s speed over safety.”
She said after a visit by Becerra, the center put even more pressure on workers to release migrant children so cases can be resolved. Workers would wait on a crucial piece of verification but instead were berated.
The Hilton campaign had already surfaced more shocking allegations this past Monday by a whistleblower claiming some children were later trafficked for sex or labor.
Becerra has been dogged by his performance under Biden as far back as the primary, and fellow Democrats had particularly pounced on his handling of the migrant child crisis.
A February 2023 investigation by The New York Times found that thousands of unaccompanied minors were funneled into exploitative labor situations after being released from federal custody.
Becerra was infamously caught on video making remarks that “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.”
Hilton is now seizing on that attack line for the general election, where he faces an uphill battle in a predominantly blue state.
“These children were trafficked as a direct result of Becerra’s personal instructions to eliminate proper vetting of the adults these migrant children were being sent to,” Hilton had said Monday.
Becerra had told Congress that his agency’s legal authority over unaccompanied migrant children ends once they are placed with an approved sponsor unless Congress granted him that authority.
A spokesperson for the Becerra campaign told The Post that Hilton should instead be scrutinizing one of his biggest supporters — President Donald Trump.
“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.”
