Xavier Becerra owes an explanation to the parents of over 130,000 migrant children.

He also owes it to the people of California to explain what happened to the many vulnerable children in his agency’s care.

It won’t do for Becerra to claim, as he did during the primary debates, that claims about lost migrant children are just “Trump lies.” Even left-leaning media outlets like The New York Times have documented the problem.

It is a real problem, and the best that can be said about Becerra’s role is that the problem started before he took office as Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS). 

But the fact remains: Becerra made it worse.

Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton said Monday that previous estimates of 85,000 children were too low. Whistleblower Chris Clem, who is a former senior HHS adviser, said that the real number of children the department lost track of was 130,000, and could be higher.

The problem dates back to 2012. President Barack Obama declared his new Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which allowed hundreds of thousands of children of illegal immigrants to stay in the country. 

Obama had previously said he had no constitutional authority to do such a thing, but he was facing a tough reelection, and needed to outflank Marco Rubio’s immigration reform bill in the Senate.

Once DACA was in place, word spread quickly abroad: If you could get your kids across the border, they could stay.

So in 2014, thousands of minors started showing up at the southern US border — alone.

Some were sent ahead by their families. Some were sent to join relatives already in the US. And some were trafficked by cartels. 

After Border Patrol stations were overrun with illegal immigrant children, the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), which is run by HHS, contracted with nonprofit organizations to provide shelter to the children.

There were reports of abuse inside the shelters, and so the government added safeguards, like telephone hotlines for minors to report problems.

In addition, children were only supposed to be released from the shelters if a verified relative or guardian arrived to pick them up. 

The shelters came back into the spotlight in 2018, after more talk of amnesty for illegal immigrant children — this time, thanks to President Donald Trump’s good-faith effort to negotiate with Democrats, which went nowhere.

The border was again flooded with migrants, and protests forced Trump to stop the policy of separating adults from children — a practice that had been established to prevent trafficking.

Finally, Joe Biden arrived on the scene, having vowed to “surge” migrants to the border, after Trump had kept them out of the country.

A new, much bigger wave of migrants arrived. The ORR was completely overwhelmed. 

Children were moved through the shelter system as quickly as possible to make way for more. That meant relaxing the safeguards protecting them.

The result: Tens of thousands of children moved through the system and then were lost.

Some were simply with families that didn’t answer the phone when the government called.

But others were trafficked, or forced into child labor.

Becerra can’t hide from the issue. The children were his responsibility.

Where did they go?

And if you don’t know, and won’t say, how can you govern California?