What he says he witnessed left him deeply alarmed.
“The children always seemed to look like they were scared and uncomfortable and vulnerable, when they were supposed to be safe,” Kadourah said. “To me, those kids looked like, there’s no other way to say it, they were still being trafficked.”
Kadourah’s account was released by Republican California gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton, who is challenging Becerra and has made the former HHS secretary’s handling of migrant children a major campaign issue.
Kadourah alleges that concern extended beyond contractors overseeing the operation.
“They were worried. Because, I mean, they felt like they were accomplices in a human trafficking operation,” Kadourah said.
According to his account, agents transporting children began encountering alarming scenes when they reached drop-off locations.
“He was telling me every time he was dropping off some of those kids, they would immediately cry and refuse to get in a van or the vehicle of that sponsor,” Kadourah explained. “And I asked him, ‘Why? Did you ask the kids why?’ and they said they didn’t know who those people were.”
If accurate, the allegation raises an obvious question: How thoroughly were the adults receiving these children being checked?
Kadourah claims the paperwork supplied by HHS did not provide the assurance workers expected.
“Health and Human Services was giving us paperwork that was not fricking verified,” Kadourah said. “All they were doing was picking up phone calls and saying, ‘Oh, okay. You’re so-and-so’s uncle whatever?’ and then stamping it and moving it forward.”
His testimony has not independently established that every sponsor he questioned was fraudulent or that the children involved were ultimately trafficked. But Kadourah says the incidents became frequent enough that workers began seeing a pattern rather than isolated cases.
“When it’s not just one or two children crying, refusing to get in a vehicle with strangers, but it’s like 20, 30 of them crying, saying, ‘We don’t know who these people are,’ ‘That’s not my aunt and uncle’ – that raised a lot of red flags,” Kadourah said. “And I think that’s when they completely shut me out.”
That account carries additional political significance because Becerra had already faced criticism over comments he made while pushing HHS personnel to increase the pace at which children were discharged from federal custody.
During the Biden administration, Becerra invoked Henry Ford while criticizing the processing operation, saying the system needed to perform better. The remarks drew scrutiny because they compared part of the operation to an assembly line, even as Becerra acknowledged that children were not “widgets.”
Kadourah now argues that the emphasis on speed came with dangerous consequences.
His allegations also follow testimony from another former worker at the Pomona Fairplex Emergency Intake Site.
That whistleblower described her own disillusionment with the system this way:
“When you’re trying to help, and you realize that you’ve been fooled, and you’ve been used to traffic children.”
She alleged that weaknesses in sponsor verification allowed children to be released under circumstances that troubled employees responsible for their care.
The broader federal record provides substantial reason for concern about what happened to unaccompanied minors after they left government custody.
A March 2025 Department of Homeland Security inspector general audit concluded that Immigration and Customs Enforcement could not effectively monitor the location and status of all unaccompanied children after federal custody. The watchdog examined more than 448,000 minors transferred to HHS between fiscal years 2019 and 2023 and found that more than 31,000 release addresses were blank, undeliverable or missing apartment numbers.
Those findings do not prove Kadourah’s trafficking allegations. They do, however, document significant weaknesses in the government’s ability to keep track of vulnerable children after they entered the federal system.
The controversy is now following Becerra directly into California politics.
Hilton has been releasing a series of videos attacking his opponent’s HHS record, including Kadourah’s testimony, as the two compete for the governorship.
Becerra has defended his broader record on migrant children, arguing that his department faced extraordinary circumstances and worked to place minors safely while dealing with the enormous number arriving at the border.
But Kadourah’s allegations present Becerra with a much more specific set of questions.
Why, according to the whistleblower, were children allegedly telling workers that they did not recognize the adults waiting to receive them?
How thoroughly were those sponsors verified?
And why does Kadourah say workers became alarmed after seeing the same reaction from groups of children again and again?
Those are allegations that deserve answers independent of California’s campaign politics.
Because behind the bureaucracy, paperwork and arguments over immigration policy were children who had already made a dangerous journey into the United States.
Kadourah says some of them reached what was supposed to be the final safe step in that journey — and cried because they did not recognize the people waiting to take them away.
