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The California governor’s race has forced a couple of mea culpas.
Former U.S. Rep. Katie Porter apologized for yelling at a staffer in a years-old incident revealed in a viral video that fueled blowback about her temperament. Investor Tom Steyer said he was wrong to have made his billions in part by investing in fossil fuels and private prisons.
But for frontrunner Xavier Becerra, facing criticism about elements of his long record in state and federal government, the answer is to dodge.
He bristled in recent debates when opponents criticized the way he handled a surge of unaccompanied migrant children when he was U.S. health secretary under President Biden. He dismissed the attack as a “MAGA talking point” even though the allegations are based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times investigation on child labor. In a television interview this week with KTLA, he sought to convince a reporter not to ask “only tough questions” and produce a “profile piece … not a ‘gotcha’ piece.” The reporter later asked about the migrant children.
Becerra, a former health secretary and former California attorney general, shot into the lead among Democrats after ex-Rep. Eric Swalwell dropped out in early April over sexual assault allegations. Since then, opponents have spent weeks criticizing his record and questioning his judgment as an executive.
The attacks are coming during a sensitive time for Becerra. Democratic strategist Dana Williamson is due in federal court Thursday on charges that she conspired with other strategists to steal $10,000 a month from Becerra’s dormant campaign account to pay his longtime former chief of staff Sean McCluskie on top of his federal government salary.
Becerra has not been implicated in the federal indictment and prosecutors have considered him a victim in the case, but opponents have criticized his judgment and said his connection to it makes him unfit for office. Asked by reporters about the case over the past several months, Becerra has said he approved the payments believing they were for account maintenance and legal compliance.
“It doesn’t pass the smell test,” former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said during a CNN debate last week. On the same network this week, Porter said the unsettled case makes Becerra a risk for Democratic voters.
McCluskie pleaded guilty to fraud in the case and is scheduled for sentencing in June — after the primary election. Williamson is in talks with prosecutors about a possible plea deal.
Becerra’s dismissals and dodging of tough questions reflect a confident position at the top of the polls as the long-winding primary election nears its end. An Emerson College poll released Wednesday finds Becerra tied for lead with Steyer and Republican former Fox News host Steve Hilton. Another poll found he and Hilton have far outstripped Steyer.
Becerra’s fundraising has also surged. He brought in just over $500,000 in campaign donations in the first three months of the year; since Swalwell dropped out on April 12, he’s received at least $2.3 million.
Democratic voters, anxious to rally behind a candidate to prevent two Republicans from winning the top-two primary election on June 2, are largely coalescing behind Becerra as a “safe choice,” said Menlo College political science professor Melissa Michelson. Because he’s in the lead, Becerra has been able to avoid discussing the criticism in detail — and unlike for other candidates who have faced attacks, it’s working, Michelson said.
“The attacks just aren’t hitting,” Michelson said. “He can go to the public and say, ‘They’re only doing this because I’m in the lead,’ and yes, that is true. … It makes it hard for the public to know, how seriously should I take these claims?”
Serious questions about migrant children
No criticism has dogged his campaign more than the 2023 New York Times series detailing the surge in children working dangerous, exploitative jobs in meatpacking plants, construction sites and factories around the country. The report attributed the rise to a record number of unaccompanied children arriving at the southern border from Latin America in late 2020 and 2021, the first year of Becerra’s term as Health and Human Services secretary.
According to the report, Becerra, whose agency had custody of the children, was under pressure from the Biden administration to get them out of crowded shelters near the border and undo a Trump-era practice of holding the minors in detention centers. He pushed for them to be placed quickly in the homes of adult sponsors, who were sometimes distant relatives or unrelated to the children and who sent them to work. The investigation found Becerra’s agency missed or ignored warning signs of labor trafficking and failed to stay in contact with the minors.
In one video in the Times report, Becerra is seen telling staff to speed up the placements.
“This is not how you do an assembly line,” he said.
Opponents have seized on the report repeatedly during debates. Former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has run ads about it since last fall.
“The experience we got from Secretary Becerra didn’t lead to better outcomes,” San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan said during a CNN debate last week. “It led to 85,000 migrant children who were lost.”
Becerra has repeatedly called that a “Trump lie.” On Monday, in a brief press conference after a town hall in Sacramento, he again dismissed the criticism and said he wasn’t responsible for the children’s treatment after they left his agency’s care.
“What employers did after they left our care, after they left our jurisdiction, where the exploitation of children may have occurred, was not on my watch,” he said. “When people tell these Trump lies about kids that are lost, when Democrats repeat those lies, I just say, this campaign is better than that.”
Some Republicans who were critical of Biden’s handling of immigration did claim there were hundreds of thousands of “missing children,” which immigration advocates called misleading at the time.
But a 2024 audit by an independent watchdog validated the Times investigation and concluded Becerra’s agency did miss critical safety checks before releasing children to adult sponsors.
The report by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of the Inspector General found that caseworkers had in 16% of cases failed to document background checks and other vetting of the adults. In other cases they failed to conduct required home visits.
In more than one-fifth of cases the inspector general reviewed, Becerra’s agency failed to contact children one month after they were placed with sponsors, as required by agency policies to ensure the children were safe. In those cases staff didn’t call until four months later, on average, and at times as long as a year after the children were released from federal custody.
Becerra’s campaign did not respond to a CalMatters inquiry about the watchdog report.
Pressed about the warning signs detailed in the investigation, Becerra told a reporter after the town hall this week that she had “conflated a lot of different things that are unrelated.”
He also refused to answer when CalMatters asked whether he was certain Williamson couldn’t implicate him in the campaign fraud case during her court appearance this week.
“I’m moving forward,” he said.
This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.
