I assume that being a Democrat isn&#8217;t very fun right now, especially if you live in California.
Unless, of course, you&#8217;re a Democrat running to be the next governor of the once Golden State. In that case, you&#8217;re positively elated.
Already, one <a href="https://calmatters.org/politics/2026/04/california-governor-race-swalwell-allegations/">Democratic</a> candidate had to drop out after multiple sexual assault cases were lodged against him, and the current front-runner, Xavier Becerra, is going viral again for <a href="https://x.com/i/status/2054290605044576578">losing</a> track of 85,000 <a href="https://www.public.news/p/fact-check-yes-xavier-becerra-lost?utm_source=podcast-email&amp;publication_id=279400&amp;post_id=197441552&amp;utm_campaign=email-play-on-substack&amp;utm_content=watch_now_button&amp;r=294ts&amp;triedRedirect=true&amp;utm_medium=email">migrant children</a> during his time as President Joe Biden&#8217;s Health and Human Services Secretary. This is the guy California Democrats think will get them to the finish line.
What a time to be alive.
How did he lose all those kids? Starting in 2008, the United States allowed <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/25/us/unaccompanied-migrant-child-workers-exploitation.html">unaccompanied minors</a> to be released to sponsors while their immigration proceedings dragged on for years. The process really ramped up during President Obama&#8217;s second term in 2014, but it was under Joe Biden that the floodgates opened. In 2022 alone, more than 130,000 unaccompanied minors entered the U.S. — three times the number from five years earlier. From 2021 to 2023, the total exceeded 250,000. During this time, the Biden White House ramped up <a href="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2023/02/15/multimedia/00childlabor-detention-tbhl/00childlabor-detention-tbhl-superJumbo.jpg?quality=75&amp;auto=webp">demands</a> on staffers to move the children quickly out of shelters and haphazardly release them to adults, rushing through the vetting of sponsors in the process.
Xavier Becerra, being the dutiful “yes-man” he was to Joe Biden, was happy to oblige. His department threw out protections that had been in place for decades: background checks, assessments of children&#8217;s files, etc. According to former employees, he demanded that &#8220;twenty percent of kids have to be released every week or you get dinged,&#8221; and had the unnerving gall to ask why they could not discharge children with &#8220;machine-like efficiency.&#8221;
Oh, I don&#8217;t know, Xavier. Maybe because they&#8217;re children, not inventory?
According to a recording obtained by the New York Times, Becerra complained, &#8220;If Henry Ford had seen this in his plants, he would have never become famous and rich. This is not the way you do an assembly line.&#8221; He told the director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement that if she couldn&#8217;t increase the number of discharges, he would find someone who could. She resigned a month later. He made a similar threat to her successor.
Here is what that exploitation actually looked like, so we are all clear on what we’re talking about. Young women having their <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/25/us/unaccompanied-migrant-child-workers-exploitation.html">scalps ripped off</a> in a Michigan Cheerios factory. Twelve-year-olds on overnight shifts. Children sleeping in <a href="https://www.grassley.senate.gov/news/news-releases/records-hhs-sent-unaccompanied-minors-to-sponsors-with-ms-13-ties-potential-trafficking-rings">gang-controlled</a> sponsor homes. The Biden DHS&#8217;s own Inspector General <a href="https://www.oig.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/assets/2025-03/OIG-25-21-Mar25.pdf">found</a> at least 570 child placements tied directly to human trafficking, drug trafficking, and weapons trafficking, and noted that because the agency wasn&#8217;t even tracking trafficking victims, the real number was almost certainly higher. HHS, at the time, behaved as if the children who vanished into these dark labor arrangements were doing just fine. They weren&#8217;t. Democrats opened the border wide, crammed kids into the very facilities they once hysterically called &#8220;cages,&#8221; rushed them through with minimal oversight, and then looked the other way. When a fellow Democrat finally confronted Becerra about it at a May <a href="https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/se/date/2026-05-05/segment/02">debate</a>, he air-quoted the phrase &#8220;lost kids&#8221; and called the whole thing a Trump lie. The New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for <a href="https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/hannah-dreier-new-york-times">reporting</a> it. Twenty-six of Becerra’s own House Democrats wrote him a <a href="https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/116285/documents/HMTG-118-IF02-20230726-SD016.pdf">letter</a> about it. But sure, it’s a Trump lie.
The hypocrisy, as we point out often in this column, is again too rich to stomach. Becerra, the child losing overlord, had zero public health experience when he was handed HHS in the middle of a pandemic. At the time, Democrats cheered the pick. Now, these same voices clutch their pearls and scream “incompetent” at Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., an odd bird perhaps, but a man who has spent years fighting corporate capture of public health and is actually making a difference at HHS. Plus, he didn’t lose 85,000 children. Becerra did.
Yet here Becerra is, in recent debates, bragging about his record and insisting, “We protected kids,” while pointing fingers at employers. Spare us. The same man who treated child welfare like a Ford assembly line now wants Californians to trust him with the entire state.
This is exactly why Becerra is leading in the <a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5876037-becerra-california-governor-race-poll/">polls</a>. He will say yes to the Democrat machine in California and never make it answer for anything, but his lead also exposes just how bleak that bench has truly become. This is the party that gave California record homelessness despite billions spent, soft-on-crime policies that turned its cities into open-air drug markets, the highest gas prices and cost of living in the nation, failing public schools that trap poor kids in mediocrity, and an illegal immigration burden that strains every hospital, school, and housing market in the state. After all of that, their shining answer is the architect of the 85,000-lost-children scandal — not despite his record, but because of it. And he will keep the machine running and never once ask whether the machine should be stopped.
Progressives don&#8217;t actually care about protecting human beings. They care about advancing their radical Left, mass-migration agenda; consequences and scalp-ripping factories be damned. Human suffering is just the cost of doing business when your priority is importing a permanent underclass and growing the urban plantation. Accountability is for other people. Moral authority is for press releases.
The uncomfortable truth is that Democrats are not interested in fixing problems. They are interested in manufacturing them, moralizing about them for political gain, and then taking the people who made them and running them for higher office. They opened the border. They rushed vulnerable children through the system with minimal safeguards. They looked the other way when those children were exploited, and now they have the audacity to present one of the people most responsible as leadership material, because they hate Trump and Republicans just that much.
California has not elected a Republican governor since <a href="https://www.public.news/p/fact-check-yes-xavier-becerra-lost?utm_source=podcast-email&amp;publication_id=279400&amp;post_id=197441552&amp;utm_campaign=email-play-on-substack&amp;utm_content=watch_now_button&amp;r=294ts&amp;triedRedirect=true&amp;utm_medium=email">2006</a>. Democrats have had nearly two decades to prove they could lead with competence and humanity. Xavier Becerra is neither competent nor humane, and the people of California — the few Republicans and common-sense voters still there — deserve far better than recycled failures.
So don&#8217;t give the keys to Sacramento to a man who lost 85,000 children. Don&#8217;t give them to a woman who reportedly threw <a href="https://nypost.com/2023/04/13/rep-katie-porter-scalded-ex-hubbys-scalp-with-potatoes/">scalding potatoes</a> at her ex-husband and, for some reason, hasn&#8217;t discovered GLP-1s. And don&#8217;t give them to a billionaire as insufferable as Kamala Harris before the vino kicks in. Tom Homan&#8217;s people found <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BL6-g4mDp0">62,000</a> of those not-lost kids within months, which tells you everything about what competent, willing governance actually looks like. Maybe California tries a small-government conservative who doesn&#8217;t hate the people they serve. 
The children certainly deserved one.

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Failing Up: Xavier Becerra Wants To Be California’s Governor