Xavier Becerra participates in a California gubernatorial debate hosted by CNN at East Los Angeles College in Monterey Park on May 5, 2026.
Ethan Swope/Associated Press
SACRAMENTO — Rep. Eric Swalwell’s abrupt exit from the governor’s race has been a boon to Democrat Xavier Becerra’s campaign, catapulting him to frontrunner status in the crowded field. His sudden rise has prompted his rivals to train their fire on Becerra, and they have zeroed in on a handful of incidents from his tenures as U.S. secretary of Health and Human Services and California attorney general.
Some of his attacks from rivals are straightforward, like criticism he has received for accepting a donation from Chevron. But other attacks, referenced briefly during debates, interviews or attack ads, draw on complex stories, such as the indictment of his former aide or his role in placing unaccompanied migrant children with sponsor families. In some cases, the claims his rivals have made about him are accurate, but in other cases they are exaggerated or taken out of context.
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Here’s a look at three major controversies Becerra is taking heat for, and what we know about the claims his rivals have made against him.
Fraud conspiracy by chief of staff
Last year, Becerra’s former chief of staff, Sean McCluskie, pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit bank and wire fraud for his role in a scheme to steal campaign funds from his boss.
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Federal prosecutors say McCluskie and two other longtime California political operatives, Greg Campbell and Dana Williamson, conspired to steal $225,000 from Becerra’s dormant political account while he served as then-President Joe Biden’s Health and Human Services secretary. McCluskie, Campbell and Williamson arranged the scheme as a way to pad McCluskie’s income after he took a pay cut and cost-of-living increase to go from working for Becerra as attorney general in California to cabinet secretary in Washington, prosecutors say.
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The scheme played out between 2022 and 2024, prosecutors say.
The scandal has caused a political headache for both Becerra and Gov. Gavin Newsom, who had employed Williamson as his chief of staff. Becerra is described in the criminal indictments as the victim of the crimes. Neither politician is implicated in any of the criminal wrongdoing, according to the indictments, which were issued in fall 2025. McCluskie and Campbell have pleaded guilty to criminal charges. Williamson has pleaded not guilty. Sacramento-based KCRA has reported she may be negotiating a plea deal with prosecutors.
The investigation into the scheme began during the Biden administration. Charges were brought during the second Trump administration.
During a debate on CNN, Republican Steve Hilton explicitly accused Becerra of being involved with the scheme. Democrat Antonio Villaraigosa piled on, suggesting Becerra’s proximity to the fraud at the very least raises questions about his involvement.
In an interview on CNN on Monday, Democrat Katie Porter, one of Becerra’s rivals, referenced the alleged plea deal negotiations and said there was no way to know if Becerra would be implicated in the future as a result. She referenced California’s top-two primary system, in which the two candidates who win the most votes in the primary, regardless of party, advance to the general election and noted there is no option for voters to write in additional candidates.
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“I don’t want to see what happened with Eric Swalwell happen with Xavier Becerra,” she told anchor Dana Bash. “At this point, this close to the end of the race with our top two, with no possibility for a write-in, I think it’s too big of a risk to take.”
If Becerra is the only Democrat who advances to the general election and later is charged with a crime, Porter said that would essentially guarantee a Republican governor in California.
Becerra has repeatedly denied wrongdoing and the indictments describe him as a victim, not a perpetrator.
“If I had been involved, the U.S. attorney would have had me in that indictment,” Becerra retorted during the CNN debate. “I was not involved.”
Handling of unaccompanied migrant children
As Biden’s Health and Human Services secretary, Becerra was tasked with handling a record influx of unaccompanied migrant children, who had arrived in the United States without parents or guardians.
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Though the Department of Homeland Security has jurisdiction at the border, the United States has laws against housing kids in detention centers where adult migrants are often sent. Tens of thousands of migrant children were therefore transferred over to Becerra’s agency, which was under pressure to get them out of congregate settings.
In a 2023 investigation that revealed many migrant children were forced to illegally work in factory and construction jobs, the New York Times reported that Becerra had overseen a rushed effort to get children out of shelters and detention centers, where images of children sleeping on floors were generating public outrage, and into private homes with sponsors. The Times published a video of Becerra pressuring HHS staff to speed up the process, comparing it to an assembly line.
“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,” Becerra said in the recording.
In some cases, former HHS employees and others who worked with the children told the Times the agency sometimes overlooked red flags that it was releasing children into unsafe or exploitative conditions as a result of the rush.
In an interview with the Chronicle last month, Becerra said he inherited a broken system for handling migrant children from the Trump administration as the COVID-19 pandemic raged, making his job especially challenging. Becerra defended his work, saying that his agency appropriately vetted sponsor families before releasing migrant children to them.
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“The stories that the Times documents of exploitation, it wasn’t by HHS. It was by the employers who took advantage of these kids. I didn’t have legal jurisdictional reach into those employer situations,” he told the Chronicle.
He also disputed a characterization in the investigation, which won a Pulitzer Prize, that his agency had lost contact with 85,000 children, saying that the children and their families didn’t have any obligation to return HHS’s calls.
Republicans, including Trump and former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, seized on the investigation to attack Becerra and the Biden administration, something Becerra referenced in his interview with the Chronicle.
“When people say we lost 85,000 kids or that we could not find, or we lost contact with them, you can characterize it that way, but there was no obligation for the receiving party, the child or the sponsor, to ever respond to us,” he told the Chronicle. “It’s just MAGA talking points, and we have candidates that are using them. The truth is that we took care of these kids.”
Despite the unflattering findings in the investigation, Becerra continued to serve as Biden’s health secretary through his entire four-year term, suggesting the president continued to have confidence in him.
Police misconduct records case
In his interview with the Chronicle, Becerra also defended his handling of a situation related to police misconduct records while he was California attorney general, in which his office threatened a journalist with a misdemeanor charge.
Becerra made the threat in 2019 after the Police Officer Standards and Training Commission provided journalists with a list compiled by Becerra’s office of 12,000 police officers and people who had applied to be police officers who had been convicted of crimes. Journalists at the Investigative Reporting Project at UC Berkeley obtained the list through a Public Records Act request, but Becerra’s office wrote in a letter that POST should not have disclosed the information and warned the journalists’ “receipt or possession” of the list “is a misdemeanor.”
“If you do not intend to comply with our request, the Department can take legal action,” a deputy attorney general wrote in the letter on Becerra’s behalf.
In the meantime, KQED and the First Amendment Coalition sued Becerra for access to police misconduct records held by his office as part of the same reporting project, which was undertaken by a group of journalism publications, after his office resisted releasing them.’
Becerra has faced some criticism for his handling of the situation, including from rival Democrat Tom Steyer.
“His record of threatening journalists, and his refusal to acknowledge his past mistakes, is just another indication that Becerra just isn’t up to the task,” Steyer spokesperson Danni Wang wrote in a campaign email.
Asked about the misdemeanor threat and his efforts to withhold documents, Becerra argued that was a mischaracterization and that he had simply sought clarity from a judge about whether he was indeed required to disclose the records under a new state law.
“I didn’t fight to keep records private,” he told the Chronicle. “I fought to get a clear understanding of this new law that calls for disclosure of what were previously private law enforcement records.”
But Becerra’s request came as a result of being sued for the records — a case he lost. He did not proactively seek clarity from the court on the meaning of the law.
A judge ultimately did order Becerra’s office to release the records, and noted that Becerra had initially “refused to disclose the records.”
Journalists ultimately published a series of stories that revealed more than 80 California police officers had continued to work as cops after they were convicted of crimes.
The controversy happened more than a year before the widespread public outrage over the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis that prompted new laws to increase transparency around police misconduct.
In his interview with the Chronicle, Becerra promised to hold law enforcement agents responsible when they act illegally. He pointed to federal agents’ killing of two Americans in Minneapolis amid protests over Trump’s mass deportation push as something he said would not have happened on his watch if he were governor.