Xavier Becerra went to the television claiming that the Biden administration having lost track of children is mere “MAGA talking points.”
On air, he flippantly air quoted “lost kids,” as if it didn’t even happen. But the reality is, his agency was found to be looking the other way while kids were placed in unsafe conditions — likely with criminals — just to win political points.
Minimizing “lost children” to air quotes is awful. Especially considering that these were real kids. And there were a lot of them.
An Inspector General report indicated that from 2019-2023, 448,000 kids were processed through the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which Becerra oversaw during his tenure as the HHS secretary under President Joe Biden. Of those children, most were released to sponsors.
But from that point, major problems emerged. More than 233,000 of those children were never given a court date. More than 43,000 never showed up to court dates. More than 31,000 of the children’s release forms had no contact addresses on them.
The subtitle of the report says it all: “ICE Cannot Effectively Monitor the Location and Status of All Unaccompanied Children After Federal Custody.” Why? One commonly stated reason was the children’s location was not received “from HHS.” Becerra’s HHS, that is.
What was happening to these children? At least 570 of those children’s placements were tied to human, drug, and weapons trafficking. But that figure is likely much larger because, as the inspector general noted, ICE “did not track the number of [children] reported as victims of trafficking or forced labor” and that “this is a continuous concern.”
Other findings were also dismal. One frequent sponsor location contained “bars on the inside of the window,” was “very dangerous, was run by gangs, and high crime rates and daily shootings.” Another frequent location had no doors. Another was a dilapidated motel. These children were being placed into awful situations.
This appears to be the result of the agencies’ intended approach. One officer described the strategy for monitoring the well-being of children as “no news is good news.”
In other words, as immigrants poured into our country, the less heartbreaking stories the public knew about, the better. The narrative was that there was no problem to see here. DHS and HHS made little effort to disprove that narrative.
To add to his false statements last week, Becerra then argued that if the missing children had existed, Trump would have done something about it. Supposedly, Becerra’s defense against the accusation that he and DHS Secretary Mayorkas were losing track of tens of thousands of children is whataboutism. If Trump truly believed the children were missing, he would have done something himself.
But Becerra’s argument breaks down quickly. Under Trump, DHS did do something. By July 2025, HHS had set up a triage center to locate them. More than 59,000 of the 65,000 reports regarding missing children (4,000 of which were found to have been tied to fraud, trafficking, or other criminal activity) were resolved. Arrests had been made of those abusing or taking advantage of those children.
Trump’s DHS also created programs to locate the remaining children. In November 2025, DHS created a partnership with local law enforcement to “conduct welfare checks on these children to ensure they are safe and not being exploited.” The efforts worked. In December 2025, then DHS Secretary Kristi Noem announced that 127,000 of those children had been located.
Ironically, this serves as a de facto admission on Becerra’s part too. By his logic, Trump’s inaction proved the lack of a problem. But by extension, using Becerra’s logic, Trump’s action proves the problem.
If it were the case that Trump was merely making “talking points,” then why not counter those points? Why not produce some type of report showing that all the children that went through his agency were accounted for? Why resort to callous dismissiveness? Clearly, it is because this flimsy argument is all he has—short of admitting the problem he created.
It is understandable why Becerra would want to minimize what happened. It is indeed a stain on his record that he likely doesn’t want attention on while he runs for governor. But to minimize it — with air quotes — is truly infuriating.
It is one of countless examples of bad policy decisions at DHS and HHS that led to horrific results (like missing children). It appears all too normal for officials like Becerra to value politics over kids.
They take zero accountability or blame for the consequences of those decisions. Thankfully, his administration lost, and the children are being found.
Curtis Schube is the Director of Research and Policy at the Center to Advance Security in America and a former constitutional and administrative law attorney.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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