OPINION:
Last week, the Trump administration announced it had found at least 146,000 migrant children who were lost during the Biden administration.
A staggering 450,000 migrant children disappeared under President Biden’s tenure, and “nearly 300,000” are still unaccounted for, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said Thursday.
“We’re investigating reports to where some of these kids claim that they were raped 6[00] to 700 times,” he added. “I don’t care who you are. I don’t care if you have kids. You don’t have kids. I don’t care if you’re a liberal, you’re independent, you’re a Democrat. You’re Republican.
“If you can’t stand for law enforcement to go find these kids, who are you? Who are you?” Mr. Mullin fumed. “And do you know where we’re finding the most of them? Sanctuary cities.”
Xavier Becerra, who is running for governor in the sanctuary state of California, served as Mr. Biden’s health and human services secretary. His department oversaw the migrant sponsor program that let hundreds of thousands of children disappear.
Last year, President Trump’s Health and Human Services Department opened an investigation into the prior administration’s process for vetting such sponsors and found Mr. Becerra’s team ignored obvious safety risks to expedite the process as a record number of migrant children flowed through Mr. Biden’s open border.
Many of those children may have ended up in the custody of sexual predators and human traffickers who took advantage of the government’s lax vetting process. The Trump administration’s report details cases where migrant sponsors provided documentation to the government that was obviously fake or doctored to gain access to the children — fraud that was never questioned by the previous administration.
The New York Times reported in 2023 that Mr. Biden’s White House and HHS were repeatedly alerted to signs that children were being placed with exploitative sponsors. This information was either ignored or missed.
“Thousands of children have ended up in punishing jobs across the country — working overnight in slaughterhouses, replacing roofs, operating machinery in factories — all in violation of child labor laws,” The Times reported.
It detailed at least five HHS staff members who filed complaints at the time and were pushed out of their jobs after raising concerns about child safety.
During Mr. Becerra’s tenure at HHS, The Times reported at least 85,000 unaccompanied minors whom HHS could not reach during follow-up calls. On the campaign trail, Mr. Becerra has repeatedly denied such claims. He calls the allegations “Trump lies” and “a MAGA hoax.”
In one viral exchange with a reporter, Mr. Becerra aggressively pushed back against the missing children statistic, stating that The Times’ report was “not accurate. What you read is not accurate … it was never the case that we could not find kids.”
Yet the allegations are sadly true. Mr. Becerra’s incompetence in running HHS during the migrant crisis should disqualify him from managing the nation’s most populous state.
Even sadder: Many of those still-missing children are probably being trafficked in the sanctuary state of California.
Last week, Mr. Mullin chastised New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the Democratic governors of Virginia, New York and California for “refusing to allow their law enforcement to join in the 287(g) program where we simply go after the worst of the worst.”
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