Becerra is avoiding tough questions as the front-runner in the governor’s race

from Jeanne KuangCalMatters

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The race for governor of California has forced several wines for me.

Former U.S. Rep. Katie Porter has apologized for yelling at a staffer in an incident years ago revealed in a viral video that fueled criticism of her temper. Investor Tom Steyer said he was wrong to make his billions in part by investing in fossil fuels and private prisons.

But for front-runner Xavier Becerra, facing criticism over elements of his long record in state and federal government, the answer is to avoid.

He bristled in recent debates when opponents criticized his handling of the wave of unaccompanied migrant children when he was US health secretary under President Biden. He dismissed the attack as a “MAGA talking point,” even though the allegations were based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning A New York Times investigation into child labor. In a TV interview this week with KTLA, he tried to convince a reporter not to ask “only hard questions” and to create “profile material … not ‘get it’ material.” The reporter later asked about the migrant children.

Becerra, a former health secretary and former California attorney general, shot to the top among Democrats after former Rep. Eric Swawell is out in early April because of allegations of sexual assault. Opponents have since spent weeks criticizing his record and questioning his executive judgment.

The attacks come at 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 passive campaign account to pay his longtime former chief of staff Sean McCluskey on top of his federal government salary.

Becerra is not involved in the federal indictment and prosecutors consider him a victim in the case, but his opponents have criticized his decision and say his connection to him makes him unfit for office. Asked by reporters about the case over the past few months, Becerra 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 pending case makes Becerra a risk to Democratic voters.

McCluskey pleaded guilty to fraud in the case and is scheduled to be sentenced in June – after the primary election. Williamson is negotiating with prosecutors about a possible plea deal.

Becerra’s dismissals and avoidance of tough questions reflect his confident position atop the polls as the long primary draws to a close. An Emerson College poll released Wednesday found Becerra tied for the lead with Steyer and former Republican Fox News host Steve Hilton. Another poll found him and Hilton far ahead of Steyer.

Becerra’s fundraising has also increased. He brought in just over $500,000 in campaign donations in the first three months of the year; since Swalwell went down on April 12, he has received at least $2.3 million.

Democratic voters looking to rally behind a candidate to prevent two Republicans from winning the June 2 primary have largely rallied behind Becerra as a “safe choice,” said Menlo College political science professor Melissa Michelson. Because he’s in charge, Becerra has been able to avoid discussing the criticism in detail — and unlike other candidates who have faced attacks, it’s working, Michelson said.

“Attacks just aren’t hitting,” Mickelson said. “He can go to the public and say, ‘They’re only doing this because I’m in charge,’ and yes, that’s true.” … Is it difficult for the public to understand how seriously I should take these claims?”

Serious issues for migrant children

No criticism dogged his campaign more than a 2023 New York Times series detailing the rise in the number of children working in dangerous, exploitative jobs in meatpacking plants, construction sites and factories across the country. The report attributed the surge 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 tenure as Secretary of Health and Human Services.

According to the report, Becerra, whose agency had taken custody of the children, was under pressure from the Biden administration to get them out of overcrowded shelters near the border and to reverse the Trump-era practice of holding minors in detention centers. He insists that they be quickly placed in the homes of elderly sponsors, who are sometimes distant relatives or unrelated to the children, and sent to work. The investigation found Becerra’s agency missed or ignored warning signs of labor trafficking and failed to maintain contact with minors.

In a video in the Times report, Becerra is seen telling the staff to speed up placements.

“That’s not how you make an assembly line,” he said.

Opponents repeatedly seized on the report during the debates. Former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has been running ads for it since last fall.

“The experience we got from Secretary Becerra didn’t lead to better results,” San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan said during a CNN debate last week. “This resulted in 85,000 lost migrant children.”

Becerra has repeatedly called this a “Trump lie.” On Monday, at a brief news conference after a town hall in Sacramento, he again dismissed the criticism and said he was not responsible for the treatment of the children after they left his agency’s care.

“What the employers did after they left our care, after they left our jurisdiction where there may have been child exploitation, was not under my supervision,” he said. “When people say these Trump lies about lost children, when Democrats repeat these lies, I just say this campaign is better than that.”

Some Republicans who have been critical of Biden’s stance on immigration have indeed claimed that there are hundreds of thousands of “missing children,” which immigration advocates called misleading at that time.

But 2024 audit by an independent supervisory authority confirmed the Times’ investigation and concluded that Becerra’s agency did miss critical safety checks before releasing children to adult sponsors.

The report by the Office of Inspector General at the Department of Health and Human Services found that in 16 percent of cases, officials failed to document background checks and other background checks on adults. In other cases, they failed to make the required home visits.

In more than a fifth of the cases reviewed by the inspector general, Becerra’s agency failed to contact the children a month after they were placed with sponsors, as required by agency policies to ensure the children were safe. In those cases, officials did not call until an average of four months later, and sometimes even a year, after the children were released from federal custody.

Becerra’s campaign did not respond to a CalMatters inquiry about the monitor’s report.

Pressed by the warning signs detailed in the investigation, Becerra told a reporter after a town hall this week that she had “mixed up a lot of different things that aren’t related.”

He also declined to answer when CalMatters asked if he was sure Williamson could not implicate him in the campaign fraud case during her court appearance this week.

“I’m moving on,” he said.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.