![\"California](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/1777286888_946_.jpeg\")
<\/p>\nAfter winning his first race for Congress in 1992, 34-year-old Xavier Becerra credited a wave of community supporters in Los Angeles, many Latino, for backing his upstart campaign, saying he hoped his win was proof that grassroots politics was more valuable than \u201cheavy dollars.\u201d<\/p>\n
More than 30 years later, Becerra, 68, is again an upstart candidate \u2014 this time for California governor. Again he is facing monied competition \u2014 including from chief Democratic rival Tom Steyer, a self-funded billionaire \u2014 and relying on Latino and other grassroots support.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
California gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra speaks during a campaign event in Los Angeles on April 18.<\/p>\n
(Jae C. Hong \/ Associated Press)<\/p>\n
\u201cYou are the people power that it takes,\u201d he told a crowd of supporters at a recent \u201cFighting for the California Dream\u201d town hall in Los Angeles. \u201cCalifornia wasn\u2019t built by billionaires. It was built by your families. It was built by our families.\u201d<\/p>\n
That Becerra is still fighting in the race \u2014 and drawing new people to his events \u2014 reflects a remarkable and hard-to-explain turnaround for a campaign that appeared all but dead less than a month ago, then bounded back into contention after Rep. Eric Swalwell dropped from the race and resigned from Congress<\/a> amid sexual assault allegations.<\/p>\n Before Swalwell\u2019s collapse, Becerra\u2019s biggest splash in the race came in March, when USC excluded him and other low-performing candidates from a planned debate. The criteria left every candidate of color out, and after Becerra and others complained, the forum was canceled.<\/p>\n A California Democratic Party tracking poll, released in early April before the Swalwell scandal broke, showed Becerra near the bottom of the field with 4% support among likely voters. In a party poll taken after it broke, Becerra\u2019s support jumped to 13% \u2014 the biggest increase of any candidate.<\/a> <\/p>\n Certainly some of Swalwell\u2019s supporters shifted to Becerra, but political observers are still pondering why so many did \u2014 and not to Steyer, former Orange County Rep. Katie Porter or other Democrats with single-digit support, such as former L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa or San Jos\u00e9 Mayor Matt Mahan. <\/p>\n Whatever the answer, Becerra\u2019s surge has sparked fresh interest in his candidacy. It also has raised questions about his time as California attorney general, when he sued the first Trump administration more than 120 times,<\/a> and U.S. Health and Human Services secretary, when he backed the Biden administration\u2019s strict COVID-19 rules and oversaw the agency\u2019s response to a massive influx of unaccompanied minors at the southern border.<\/p>\n It has also put a growing target on Becerra\u2019s back \u2014 including at Wednesday night\u2019s gubernatorial debate<\/a>, when rivals criticized him as a \u201cD.C. insider\u201d with poorly detailed plans for the state \u2014 and sparked hope among many Latinos that California will elect one of them as governor for the first time in state history, sending a strong message of resistance to the intensely anti-immigrant Trump administration. <\/p>\n Of course, Becerra faces hurdles. Steyer, a hedge fund founder who has donated more than $130 million to his own campaign, has been ahead of him in polling, as have two Republicans: Silicon Valley entrepreneur and former Fox News host<\/a> Steve Hilton, who has President Trump\u2019s endorsement, and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco. Only the top two candidates in the June 2 primary advance to the November election.<\/p>\n Still, Becerra now has a path to victory, one that did not exist even a month ago, and new funding<\/a>. Many Democratic voters remain undecided, and many \u2014 shocked by the Swalwell scandal \u2014 are looking for another Democratic front-runner to back.<\/p>\n In an interview with The Times, Becerra said he\u2019s the man for the job, because \u201cCalifornia needs a work horse, not a show horse.\u201d<\/p>\n Xavier Becerra, left, gathers with other candidates for Los Angeles mayor in 2000.<\/p>\n (Gary Friedman \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n Rising wave of Latino political power<\/p>\n A Sacramento native and the son of a Mexican immigrant mother and a Mexican American father, Becerra graduated from Stanford Law School and served as a deputy to California Atty. Gen. John K. Van de Kamp before being elected in 1990 to the California Assembly.<\/p>\n In 1993, Becerra entered Congress on a rising wave of Latino political power<\/a> and the heels of a fractious presidential election in which former White House aide Pat Buchanan challenged President George H.W. Bush in the Republican primary on a stridently anti-immigrant, \u201cAmerica First\u201d message \u2014 one Trump repurposed in both 2016 and 2024<\/a>. <\/p>\n It was a defining political moment for Latinos across the country, and for Becerra personally, said Fernando Guerra, founding director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University.<\/p>\n \u201cHe certainly has been and is part of the incorporation of Latinos into California history and California politics, and it really begins in the early \u201990s,\u201d Guerra said. \u201cHis rise and political career is really a reflection of the rise and political incorporation of Latinos.\u201d<\/p>\n In 1994, Becerra helped oppose Proposition 187<\/a>, a state initiative to deny undocumented immigrants access to public education and healthcare. In 1996, he sharply criticized the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which cut federal benefits for many legal immigrants. By 1997, Becerra \u2014 just 39 \u2014 was chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and the first Latino member to serve on the powerful House Ways and Means Committee.<\/p>\n By 2016, Becerra, 58, was the highest-ranking Latino in Congress when then-Gov. Jerry Brown tapped him<\/a> to replace a Senate-bound Kamala Harris as California attorney general. There, Becerra played a key role in defending the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare, against Republican attacks.<\/p>\n In early 2021, Becerra was confirmed to serve as President Biden\u2019s health secretary<\/a>, another first for a Latino and a critical post given the COVID-19 crisis, and remained in that role until Trump\u2019s second inauguration.<\/p>\n Then-U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra arrives for a hearing to discuss reopening schools during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021.<\/p>\n (Greg Nash \/ Associated Press)<\/p>\n Criticism and praise<\/p>\n In a rush of endorsements in recent days, Becerra\u2019s supporters have lauded his executive experience, calling him a \u201cproven leader\u201d who, amid constant threats from the Trump administration, is \u201cready to fight back on day one.\u201d<\/p>\n Becerra\u2019s critics also have pointed to his leadership record, but to highlight what they contend are glaring failures.<\/p>\n Steyer spokesman Kevin Liao alleged Becerra was \u201cabsent, ineffective, or too late\u201d in responding to COVID-19 and other public health crises as health secretary, and that California \u201ccannot afford incompetence, or someone who disappears when things get hard.\u201d<\/p>\n The remarks echoed others made during the pandemic, including by Eric Topol, who is executive vice president of Scripps Research in La Jolla, a professor of translational medicine and a cardiologist. During the pandemic, Topol accused Becerra of being \u201cinvisible\u201d in the fight to control it. In a recent interview, he said he still believes that.<\/p>\n Topol said the Biden administration\u2019s COVID response was defined by poor data collection and \u201cinfighting\u201d among agencies such as the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration, including on vital issues such as when Americans should receive booster shots and how long they should isolate after infection.<\/p>\n Becerra \u201cbasically took a very absent, low profile \u2014 didn\u2019t show up, didn\u2019t harmonize the remarkable infighting,\u201d Topol said. \u201cThe buck stops with him.\u201d<\/p>\n Dr. David A. Kessler, the Biden administration\u2019s top science official on COVID-19 and now a professor of pediatrics and epidemiology at UC San Francisco, fiercely defended Becerra, crediting him with rolling out some 676 million vaccines and steering the nation out of a wildly unfamiliar health crisis with substantial success \u2014 what Kessler called a \u201chistorical achievement\u201d that proved government \u201ccan do big things.\u201d<\/p>\n Kessler said Becerra rightly assessed that the country needed to hear from medical experts, not politicians, and so deferred at times to the doctors, epidemiologists and vaccinologists he smartly surrounded himself with and trusted \u2014 but he was never absent. \u201cHe enabled us. He was there. Anything I needed, he helped deliver,\u201d Kessler said.<\/p>\n Becerra said there were a lot of people involved with the COVID-19 fight, including a White House team launched before his confirmation as health secretary. Still, it was his agency that ultimately led the response, and helped bring the pandemic to an end, he said.<\/p>\n \u201cAt the end of four years, when we had put some 700 million COVID shots into the arms of Americans and pulled the country and our economy out of the COVID crisis, it was HHS \u2014 and I was the secretary of HHS,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Becerra\u2019s rivals in the governor\u2019s race also have attacked him for how he responded to an influx of unaccompanied immigrant minors<\/a> during the pandemic. They allege Becerra rushed their release to relatives and other sponsors while ignoring concerns from career health staff that some of those placements weren\u2019t safe \u2014 resulting in thousands of kids being lost to the system, forced into child labor or trafficked.<\/p>\n The criticism stems in part from a sweeping New York Times investigation<\/a> that found the health department couldn\u2019t find some 85,000 children it had released, that Becerra had relaxed screening processes for sponsors and that placement concerns from career health staff went ignored or were silenced.<\/p>\n The investigation by reporter Hannah Dreier<\/a> found that thousands of the 250,000 or so migrant children who arrived in the U.S. between early 2021 and early 2023 had \u201cended up in punishing jobs across the country \u2014 working overnight in slaughterhouses, replacing roofs, operating machinery in factories \u2014 all in violation of child labor laws.\u201d<\/p>\n Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra holds a news conference in Border Field State Park in San Diego in 2017.<\/p>\n (Francine Orr\/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n It found there were many signs of \u201cthe explosive growth of this labor force,\u201d and that staff had repeatedly flagged concerns about it in reports that reached Becerra\u2019s desk. It also reported that<\/a>, during a staff meeting in the summer of 2022, Becerra had pressed staff to move children even more quickly through the process, comparing them to factory parts.<\/p>\n \u201cIf 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,\u201d Becerra said, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by the newspaper.<\/p>\n Danni Wang, another Steyer spokesperson, said children \u201cwere handed to gang members, traffickers, and abusers because [Becerra] stripped the background checks that had protected them for years.\u201d<\/p>\n Becerra said the controversy is one he has addressed publicly for years, including in multiple congressional hearings. He said his team worked diligently to properly vet sponsors and do right by the thousands of children in their care, despite Congress failing to provide the budget needed to restore a system of licensed care facilities that the first Trump administration had dismantled.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was a wreck. They had closed facilities, they had fired the licensed caregivers. And remember, this was during COVID, [when] you didn\u2019t want anyone to be near each other,\u201d he said. \u201cHow do you take care of thousands of kids in a center that could house maybe 50 kids?\u201d<\/p>\n He said he led an aggressive push to stand up temporary facilities \u2014 including in places like the San Diego Convention Center \u2014 while rebuilding the licensed care facilities Trump had dismantled and working to place kids into the community as quickly and safely as possible.<\/p>\n Ron Klain, who served as Biden\u2019s chief of staff for the first two years of the administration, said Becerra helped lead the administration out of the crisis by being \u201can outspoken advocate\u201d for the children in its care.<\/p>\n \u201cXavier was very, very insistent in meetings and very outspoken on the risk that some of these people [the kids] were being placed with were not the proper people to place them with, and pushed hard for more rigor in the process,\u201d Klain said.<\/p>\n Becerra also has faced criticism and questions related to the federal indictment<\/a> of his former chief of staff Sean McCluskie, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit fraud after authorities accused him of stealing some $225,000 from Becerra\u2019s dormant state political campaign account.<\/p>\n Becerra was not implicated in the scandal \u2014 which he\u2019s previously described as a \u201cgut punch\u201d \u2014 and said he did everything he could to ensure McCluskie and others were held accountable once it came to light, including by providing \u201ctestimony and documents\u201d to the FBI and federal prosecutors.<\/p>\n Hilton has said<\/a> the scandal, which also implicated a former aide to Gov. Gavin Newsom, showed that \u201ccorruption has become totally ingrained and systemic\u201d under Democratic rule in California.<\/p>\n Looking ahead<\/p>\n Experts said Becerra\u2019s long resume will help him stand out in a race with less experienced competitors and no household names \u2014 and that Californians electing a Latino for the first time, as the Trump administration conducts one of the largest ever deportation campaigns, dismantles immigrant rights<\/a> and targets people on the street based largely on their looking and sounding Latino<\/a>, would be a major political moment. <\/p>\n Becerra said his extensive experience should matter to voters, because such experience will be necessary in the pivotal and no doubt chaotic Trump years ahead, when \u201cpizzazz and dazzle\u201d will matter less than steady competence from \u201csomeone who\u2019s actually been in the midst of that hurricane\u201d before.<\/p>\n \u201cIt helps to have gone through these things. I\u2019ve been there, I\u2019ve done that, and I\u2019ve done it successfully,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019ve proven that, whether it was taking on Donald Trump toe to toe as the [attorney general], whether it was getting us out of COVID working closely with the White House to deploy the resources and get that done, we made it happen.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After winning his first race for Congress in 1992, 34-year-old Xavier Becerra credited a wave of community supporters…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":287939,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[29238,7,9,8,123276,3413,1752,7363,123277,123274,35193,63,123275,3020,38105,315,123273],"class_list":["post-287938","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-becerra","tag-california","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news","tag-community-supporter","tag-concern","tag-congress","tag-country","tag-eric-topol","tag-first-race","tag-health-secretary","tag-los-angeles-times","tag-many-latinos","tag-president-trump","tag-swalwell","tag-time","tag-upstart-candidate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287938","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=287938"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287938\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/287939"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=287938"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=287938"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=287938"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Los](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/1777286888_566_.jpeg\")
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<\/p>\n![\"Atty.](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/1777286889_21_.jpeg\")
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