Democrats blame President Donald Trump for all of their problems, and nowhere is that more true than in California, where former President Joe Biden’s Health and Human Services Secretary, Xavier Becerra, repeatedly invoked Trump during a debate Tuesday night to avoid accountability for his own disastrous record on child labor while in office.
Becerra came under attack not from the debate moderators, or even from the Republicans on stage, but from former Rep. Katie Porter, who, while deflecting attention from her own past leadership problems, accused Becerra of “not being able to account for undocumented children who wound up in child labor.” Becerra responded by denying that this ever happened.
“Distorting the facts in your quest to be governor is never good,” Becerra said. “But using Trump lies to try to damage your opponents is worse, and that’s what we see happening.”
“Everyone knows that Trump campaigned in 2024 talking about lost kids when there were no such thing as lost kids,” he continued. “I think it’s shameful for people to use Trump lies to try to gain favor with voters when you know it’s not true. Use the facts. We should have a governor who relies on the facts. I will speak the facts when I’m governor because that’s what the California voters deserve.”
Here are the facts.
When unaccompanied minors from countries other than Canada or Mexico are detained by Border Patrol after illegally crossing the border, a 2008 federal law mandates that they be transferred to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is housed within the Department of Health and Human Services.
When Biden created the U.S.-Mexico border crisis by ending Trump’s Remain in Mexico policy, the number of unaccompanied minors detained after illegally crossing the southern border exploded. In fiscal 2020, just 15,000 minors were referred from Border Patrol to the Office of Refugee Resettlement. In fiscal 2021, that number jumped to more than 120,000, where it stayed until Trump returned to office.
The Department of Health and Human Services did not have the capacity to house the children, identify possible homes, vet those homes, and place minor children in them. Instead of increasing HHS capacity to hold migrant children, or, God forbid, instituting policy changes to decrease the number illegally crossing the border, Becerra pushed his staff to release children into the United States as fast as possible, even if it meant failing to vet the sponsors who wanted to host them.
“If Henry Ford had seen this in his plants,” Becerra told staff members early during the Biden border crisis, “he would never have become famous and rich. This is not the way to do an assembly line.”
The director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement quit after Becerra threatened to fire her for not releasing unaccompanied migrant children into the country fast enough. As a direct result of Becerra’s push to ignore internal policy, tens of thousands of migrant children ended up on real assembly lines.
A 2024 HHS Office of Inspector General report on the Office of Refugee Resettlement found that, during Becerra’s tenure, 16% of required sponsor safety checks were not conducted, 19% of children were released to sponsors without completed state child abuse checks, and 22% of children never received a required safety and well-being follow-up after placement.
As a direct result of these policy failures, reports of illegal child labor to the Labor Department soared 69%, and deaths from child labor also increased. Unscrupulous sponsors would take custody of the children and rent them out to staffing agencies, which found them jobs at meatpacking plants in Michigan, car factories in Alabama, and seafood processing facilities in Massachusetts.
“It’s getting to be a business for some of these sponsors,” one former HHS caseworker told reporters at the time.
TRUMP’S FOOD STAMP REFORMS ARE WORKING
Trump did not make any of these facts up. They are all documented by government agencies, the New York Times, and PBS, institutions not known for spreading Trump-approved talking points.
Becerra and other Democrats can try to blame Trump for all of their policy failures, but voters are increasingly fleeing deep-blue states such as California, Illinois, and New York for Republican states such as Florida, South Carolina, and Texas for a reason. Porter is right: Becerra should be held accountable for his failures in the Biden administration. Unfortunately, we are not going to hold our breath waiting for California voters to do it.