Joe Biden's border policies let over one hundred thousand migrant children vanish into the shadows.
Two of those children just resurfaced with a message aimed straight at Xavier Becerra.
One trafficked teenager looked into a camera and asked him the question he can't answer.
Sponsor Program Let Traffickers Reach Migrant Kids
Juana Rebecca Pérez Santay crossed the border with her 15-year-old brother, Antonio David.
She says her government-assigned sponsor put her to work like a slave.
She says that same sponsor tried to sexually assault her.
Her brother says he was handed off to a stranger and forced into debt bondage to pay off the smugglers who brought him north.
He stared into the camera and said the words every parent watching should be thinking: "How could you do this?"
He wasn't asking Joe Biden.
He was asking Xavier Becerra, the man who ran the Department of Health and Human Services while it happened.
Becerra's HHS was the agency responsible for placing unaccompanied migrant children with sponsors after they crossed the border.
The Center for Immigration Studies found that HHS lost track of 112,872 of those children between 2021 and 2023 – nearly half of every child the agency was supposed to be protecting.
Some of those children ended up exactly where Juana and Antonio did: locked into forced labor for people who were never properly vetted in the first place.
Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley has spent years documenting the fallout, and his office says the pattern is not an accident.
It's a system built for speed, not safety.
Becerra Has Gone Silent Since June
Becerra is not just a former Cabinet secretary answering for old decisions.
He's running for governor of California right now, and he's been ducking every reporter who wants to ask him about it.
The RedState report on this story notes Becerra hasn't taken questions from California press since June 9.
He's also refused to debate his Republican opponent, Steve Hilton, who has made the missing-children scandal a centerpiece of his campaign.
Hilton has been blunt about why: "Man up and show up."
Becerra won't.
He issued no statement responding to Juana and Antonio's video.
He offered no counter-evidence, no defense, no acknowledgment that two trafficked teenagers exist.
Silence is a strategy when the truth is this bad.
The Missing Kids Weren't Just A California Problem
This scandal didn't stay contained to one state.
Investigators tracking the 112,872 missing children found the largest concentrations in Texas, Illinois, Tennessee, New York, Maryland, New Jersey, Florida, and Georgia.
That's eight states where a federal agency handed children to strangers and then simply stopped checking on them.
Sponsors "could be a close or distant family member" of the child, or they could have "no family relation at all," according to the government's own description of the program.
No relation, no background check that actually meant anything, no follow-up worth calling a follow-up.
Juana and Antonio are not an isolated tragedy.
They are two names attached to a number that was always going to produce victims like them.
Congress even put an HHS whistleblower, a retired Border Patrol agent, and a trafficking expert on the record about what went wrong inside the agency Becerra ran.
The warnings were piling up the whole time he was in charge.
Becerra Wants A Promotion He Hasn't Earned
Becerra wants to run the largest state in the country after presiding over one of the worst failures of child protection in modern American history.
This isn't a paperwork error or a partisan talking point – it's over a hundred thousand kids the government simply lost.
Some of them were trafficked, some were forced into labor, and at least one had a stranger try to assault her.
Becerra had the power to fix the sponsor vetting system and he didn't.
Now he wants a promotion.
California voters deserve to know exactly what happened on his watch before they hand him more power, and the fact that he won't say a word tells you everything about what he's hiding.
Steve Hilton is right to keep the pressure on, because the only thing worse than this scandal happening once would be letting the man who oversaw it walk into the governor's mansion without ever answering for it.
Sources:
- Jennifer O., "How Could You Do This? Another Trafficking Victim Cries, While Xavier Becerra Dodges CA Press," RedState, August 6, 2026.
- Center for Immigration Studies, "Biden's HHS Lost Nearly Half the Unaccompanied Migrant Children Released to 'Sponsors'," CIS.org.
- U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, "Bombshell Report Confirms Grassley Oversight of Biden-Harris Admin's Failure to Protect Migrant Children," Senate Judiciary Committee, 2024.
- Washington Examiner, "Steve Hilton tries to pin Xavier Becerra down to debate in California governor's race," Washington Examiner, 2026.
- KTLA, "'Man up and show up': Steve Hilton challenges Xavier Becerra to California governor debate," KTLA, 2026.
- HotAir, "Enough Is Enough: Steve Hilton Debuts Wild New Campaign Ads," HotAir, July 24, 2026.
