A whistleblower, once a caseworker at an emergency center for migrant children at the Pomona Fairplex, has come forward to the campaign of Republican Steve Hilton, alleging abuse and exploitation of migrant children at detention centers in California under then-HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra.
The whistleblower alleges abuse and exploitation of migrant children at detention centers in California under then-HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, with allegations that Becerra dismantled the vetting of sponsors to speed up the release of migrant children, leading kids to be sent to traffickers, abusive workplaces, and fake relatives.
The caseworker, a first-generation American whose family came from El Salvador and who raised two children in Southern California, worked six months at the Pomona Fairplex site in 2021.
Hilton is releasing a series that he is calling the “Becerra Tapes” to illustrate the fact that the Democrat politician is not only corrupt, but guilty of potentially illegal and horrifyingly abusive activities.
A case manager for Becerra’s Unaccompanied Alien Children Program, whose name and face did not appear in the video to protect her identity, said with a crack in her voice, “When you’re trying to help, and you realize that you’ve been fooled, and you’ve been used to traffic children….”
A caseworker at the Pomona Fairplex alleges children faced abuse and chaotic releases, were separated from young siblings, and sent to unverified addresses or secretly moved in the dead of the night — some never to be seen again — while the complex also accepted fake documents from sponsors.
The whistleblower said that they would call the sponsor at the number presented, and some of the sponsors did not even know the minor’s name; they just knew they were supposed to get them.
“A lot of these people did not have proof,” she said.
The whistleblower added, “We still have no proof that the child went to that address, because we couldn’t do any follow-up or continue with the case or see, welfare checks, we couldn’t do any of that.”
Additionally,
fake documents were accepted, including newly assembled identification cards with selfie photos and fraudulent birth certificates.
The whistleblower said, “We were constantly getting information that is false, and we had to go with it.”
Another worker ran a background check on an address that had already received more than 200 migrant children, with Google Maps showing shipping containers, no homes.
The worker called an anti-trafficking hotline and was terminated the next day.
“They knew exactly what was going on. Their concern was speed,” the whistleblower said.
Becerra toured the Fairplex complex in July 2021, and called it a “model” for other sites across America and a place where kids could be “healthy and safe.”
In her six months working at the center in 2021, the whistleblower claims her concerns about what was happening to vulnerable children were routinely ignored because of pressure to reunify minors with sponsors, with one haunting example involving a 5-year-old girl, “Grace,” who arrived at the Fairplex with her 7-year-old sister, and Grace was distraught because she couldn’t find her sibling.
Meanwhile,
Hilton’s campaign has repeatedly pointed to leaked audio from an internal HHS meeting in which Becerra criticized staff for moving too slowly in releasing unaccompanied migrant children to sponsors, with Becerra saying “This is not the way you do an assembly line” and “We need to get discharges up … Every time we have to go to the Hill and explain why we’re spending so much money… we’re spending more than $1,000 a day for kids who may not even have the legal right to be here.”
“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,” Becerra stated, according to the recording, showing a sitting cabinet secretary talking about migrant children — many of them under twelve, some of them infants — and complaining that the rate of disposal was insufficiently industrial.
“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 said.
Hilton and Lieutenant Governor candidate Gloria Romero released explosive whistleblower testimony at a press conference alleging that, under Xavier Becerra’s watch, migrant children at the Pomona Fairplex were rushed out the door, handed to adults using fraudulent identification, separated from their siblings, and abandoned by a system that failed to determine where they ended up or whether they were safe, with investigative journalist Anthony Rubin, journalist Jorge Ventura, and Chris Clem, former Chief Patrol Agent of the U.S. Border Patrol’s Yuma Section, joining the conference.
Hilton said the accurate number is 479,000 unaccompanied migrant children – “And of that 479,000 unaccompanied migrant children, Becerra lost 319,000 unaccompanied migrant children. There are 140,000 still missing, most under age 13… still missing after years of Becerra’s migrant abuse camps.”
In the viral moment that triggered this new wave of scrutiny,
Becerra served as secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services under former President Joe Biden from 2021 to 2025, overseeing the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the agency responsible for caring for unaccompanied migrant children before placing them with sponsors in the United States, and during that time, Hilton says more than 319,000 unaccompanied migrant children went missing after being released from HHS custody.
Hilton’s claim is based on a Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General audit that found Immigration and Customs Enforcement could not effectively monitor many children after their release to sponsors, with the audit finding more than 291,000 children had not been placed into immigration proceedings, and more than 32,000 failed to appear for scheduled immigration court hearings—a combined total of more than 319,000 children whose whereabouts ICE could not effectively track.
However,
Becerra has dismissed reports of “lost” children as inaccurate or as “MAGA talking points,” insisting the minors were placed with vetted sponsors who simply did not answer follow-up calls.
When asked about a New York Times report stating that 85,000 migrant children were unaccounted for, Becerra responded, “What you just read is not accurate—I don’t know if you got those talking points from Donald Trump.”
Meanwhile,
Jonathan Underland, a spokesperson for Becerra, claimed that “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.”
Becerra’s campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment from the New York Post or other outlets.
The California gubernatorial general election is scheduled for November.