Five days before California finishes choosing its next governor, Steve Hilton put the most serious charge of the campaign into a single post aimed at the man he is trying to beat. "DHS INVESTIGATION: Migrant children raped 600-700 times," Hilton wrote on Thursday. "Becerra enabled this. He dismantled checks supposed to make sure the 450,000 migrant kids in his 'care' were sent to loving homes. Instead they were sent to child sex and labor traffickers. DISQUALIFYING." Xavier Becerra, his Democratic opponent, ran the Department of Health and Human Services under President Biden — the department whose refugee office took in unaccompanied migrant children and released them to sponsors across the United States. Hilton's case is that the children were handed over with the safety checks stripped away, and that what happened to some of them afterward disqualifies Becerra from ever holding office again.
Attached to the post is a two-minute video, and it is worth being exact about what it shows: the Secretary of Homeland Security, Markwayne Mullin, speaking at a Justice Department press conference, saying his department is finding children who were neglected after the government placed them. The words behind Hilton's number come from that podium. "We're investigating reports to where some of these kids claim that they were raped 600 to 700 times," Mullin said, announcing that investigators had located at least 146,000 of the children the last administration could not account for, and that prosecutors were indicting traffickers who had taken children in. That is the honest shape of the figure: it is what the Homeland Security Secretary says some rescued children have reported, and what his investigators say they are still working to prove. It is not a count any investigation has published, and Hilton's post states it harder than the man in his own video did.
The investigation Hilton points to is real work with an unproven edge. Federal agents have spent this year locating children and prosecuting sponsors accused of fraud and trafficking. In October, Hilton wrote to Mullin demanding records, including a laptop held by a former government contractor who transported children to sponsors and has since spoken to congressional investigators; Hilton says the laptop may show what Becerra and the Biden White House knew. In the same letter, Hilton wrote that his campaign "had been informed" that Homeland Security Investigations is examining the matter, "including specifically the role of Xavier Becerra." No one at the department has confirmed that. The letter is public; the investigation of Becerra himself, so far, is Hilton's word.
What is documented needs no one's word. The Homeland Security Department's own inspector general reported in August 2024 that immigration authorities transferred more than 448,000 unaccompanied children to the health department between 2019 and 2023 and could not account for where all of them ended up: more than 32,000 never showed up for their court hearings, and more than 291,000 had never even been given a court date. Inside Becerra's department, guidance issued in March 2021 — days after he took over — sped up releases and removed background checks and identity verification for other adults living in a sponsor's home; his own department's inspector general later found the changes stripped out a layer of safety review, and in one sample of 2021 files, 16 percent lacked documentation of at least one required check. Reporting in 2023 found the department lost contact with more than 85,000 children after release because sponsors simply stopped answering its calls, and it recorded Becerra pressing his staff to move children out faster, telling them, in effect, that this was not how you run an assembly line. The stricter fingerprint checks were only restored in February 2025, after he had left.
Where the search stands now, according to the officials running it: more than 150,000 of the children have been located. A senior adviser at the refugee office says about 330,000 cases are still unresolved and adds the sentence that explains why this story will not go away: "We found over 40 kids deceased. We found kids in sex trafficking. We found kids who were murdered, kids who were in slave labor." Those numbers, it should be said plainly, count cases the government cannot close — including young people who have since turned eighteen — and officials on all sides use the totals differently. What none of the numbers can do is tell any individual family where their child is.
Becerra has answered the charge, and his answer has not changed. There were no lost kids, he says: children were placed with sponsors, and his department was never built to track them afterward. In his debates with Hilton he dismissed the attack as recycled Trump talking points and said of his record, "I am proud of the record." His campaign called Hilton's October letter a distraction from a weak platform. He has not responded to Thursday's post itself. That leaves California voters, ballots already in hand, with two things that are true at once: the federal government really did lose track of children it had promised to protect, under rules Becerra's department loosened and a secretary who demanded speed — and the gravest specific accusations against Becerra personally, of knowing and of being investigated, remain exactly that: accusations, made by the man who benefits most if voters believe them on Tuesday.
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