Hilton Confronts Becerra on Live TV Over Migrant Children Lost on His HHS Watch

Republican Steve Hilton used Wednesday night’s CNN California governor debate to put Democrat Xavier Becerra’s record on trial: the hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied migrant children who passed through his Department of Health and Human Services while he served as President Biden’s HHS secretary. Becerra answered by calling it “retread Trump talking points” and pointing at Trump.

The Sept. 30, 2026, debate, moderated by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash at the network’s studio in Burbank, was the marquee matchup in the race to succeed Gov. Gavin Newsom. Becerra had spent part of the immigration segment attacking the Trump administration’s treatment of immigrants and ICE enforcement. Hilton’s response turned the subject back to Becerra’s own tenure.

“Responsible for 479,000 unaccompanied migrant children”

“When you were HHS secretary, you were responsible for 479,000 unaccompanied migrant children,” Hilton said, according to The Daily Wire’s account of the exchange. He charged, as quoted by The Western Journal, that Becerra “dismantled the vetting that should have made sure that they were with a safe, protective family or sponsor,” and went further: “You sent thousands of young children directly into the clutches of child sex and labor traffickers.”

Then came the line Hilton plainly wanted voters to remember. “Hundreds of thousands of children that you were responsible for are still missing today,” he said. “100,000 of them are under ten years old.”

He also hit Becerra for never apologizing. “So I cannot believe that you haven’t apologized, that you have any kind of sense of shame or responsibility for what you did to those children,” Hilton said, as quoted by CNN. “And you stand here lecturing people about immigration when you treated these most vulnerable children, unaccompanied children, in this way.” Hilton pointed to The New York Times’ reporting on the issue, telling the audience the paper “won a Pulitzer Prize for it.”

Becerra’s answer: Trump

Becerra did not engage the numbers. He dismissed them as Trump talking points and pivoted to the first Trump administration’s border policy. “[Trump] used to put kids in cages. He used to separate those children from their parents. We changed all that,” Becerra said, according to CNN. “I am proud of the record in all my life of working on immigration and in protecting immigrant children.”

It was not the first time a rival had pressed him on this, and it was not the first time he gave this answer. At a KNBC debate in May, before the June primary, fellow Democrat Antonio Villaraigosa asked him, “Mr. Becerra, are you proud that you pushed out 85,000 migrant children?” Becerra replied, “Trump lied about that, this whole situation with the migrant kids.” Villaraigosa shot back: “The New York Times lied?”

What the record shows

The core of Hilton’s charge rests on documented findings. The New York Times’ 2023 investigation found that HHS, under pressure to move children out of shelters quickly, released them to sponsors while missing signs of exploitation. The Times reported that HHS could not reach more than 85,000 of the children after release.

A February 2024 report by HHS’s own Office of Inspector General found that sponsor safety checks were not documented in 16 percent of the cases it reviewed, and that more than one in five children missed a required check-in call a month after placement,.

The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general added a second layer in an Aug. 19, 2024, management alert. It found that ICE transferred more than 448,000 unaccompanied children to HHS from fiscal years 2019 to 2023, a span that includes the last two years of Trump’s first term but is dominated by the record surge on Biden’s watch, that more than 32,000 failed to appear for their immigration court hearings, and that as of May 2024 ICE had not served notices to appear on more than 291,000 children, who therefore had no court date at all. The watchdog’s conclusion was stark: “Without an ability to monitor the location and status of UCs, ICE has no assurance UCs are safe from trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor.”

Hilton’s sharpest numbers do go further than the record supports. A 2024 Associated Press review found that the “hundreds of thousands missing” figure largely reflects children the government lost track of on paper, many of them living with sponsors, and the documented abuses centered on labor exploitation more than sex trafficking. But on the core point, that Becerra’s agency weakened vetting and lost track of thousands of children, the record is on Hilton’s side. Becerra has argued that exploitation happened after children left his agency’s care.

The question that doesn’t go away

Strip away the arguments over the precise number, and the issue is simple. When the federal government takes custody of a child who crossed the border alone, someone is supposed to make sure the adult who picks that child up is safe, and someone is supposed to know where the child is afterward. Two inspectors general and a Pulitzer-winning investigation found that those safeguards failed on a massive scale, and the worst of it came during the surge years when Becerra ran HHS. “Lost on paper” is not the comfort Becerra seems to think it is: a child the government cannot account for is a child no one is checking on.

Becerra, who led HHS from 2021 until the end of the Biden administration, now wants to run the country’s most populous state. Asked about children placed under his department’s care, his answer on a national stage was a complaint about the previous administration.

A man who couldn’t keep track of the children in his care has no business lecturing anyone about how to treat immigrants.

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