The Brief

The California governor’s race has forced a couple of mea culpas.

Former U.S. Rep. Katie Porter apologized for yelling at a staffer in a years-old incident revealed in a viral video that fueled blowback about her temperament. Investor Tom Steyer said he was wrong to have made his billions in part by investing in fossil fuels and private prisons.

But for frontrunner Xavier Becerra, facing criticism about elements of his long record in state and federal government, the answer is to dodge.

He bristled in recent debates when opponents criticized the way he handled a surge of unaccompanied migrant children when he was U.S. health secretary under President Biden. He dismissed the attack as a “MAGA talking point” even though the allegations are based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times investigation on child labor. In a television interview this week with KTLA, he sought to convince a reporter not to ask “only tough questions” and produce a “profile piece … not a ‘gotcha’ piece.” The reporter later asked about the migrant children.

Becerra, a former health secretary and former California attorney general, shot into the lead among Democrats after ex-Rep. Eric Swalwell dropped out in early April over sexual assault allegations. Since then, opponents have spent weeks criticizing his record and questioning his judgment as an executive.

The attacks are coming during a sensitive time for Becerra. Democratic strategist Dana Williamson is due in federal court Thursday on charges that she conspired with other strategists to steal $10,000 a month from Becerra’s dormant campaign account to pay his longtime former chief of staff Sean McCluskie on top of his federal government salary.

Becerra has not been implicated in the federal indictment and prosecutors have considered him a victim in the case, but opponents have criticized his judgment and said his connection to it makes him unfit for office. Asked by reporters about the case over the past several months, Becerra has said he approved the payments believing they were for account maintenance and legal compliance.

“It doesn’t pass the smell test,” former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said during a CNN debate last week. On the same network this week, Porter said the unsettled case makes Becerra a risk for Democratic voters.

McCluskie pleaded guilty to fraud in the case and is scheduled for sentencing in June — after the primary election. Williamson is in talks with prosecutors about a possible plea deal.

Becerra’s dismissals and dodging of tough questions reflect a confident position at the top of the polls as the long-winding primary election nears its end. An Emerson College poll released Wednesday finds Becerra tied for lead with Steyer and Republican former Fox News host Steve Hilton. Another poll found he and Hilton have far outstripped Steyer.

Becerra’s fundraising has also surged. He brought in just over $500,000 in campaign donations in the first three months of the year; since Swalwell dropped out on April 12, he’s received at least $2.3 million.

Democratic voters, anxious to rally behind a candidate to prevent two Republicans from winning the top-two primary election on June 2, are largely coalescing behind Becerra as a “safe choice,” said Menlo College political science professor Melissa Michelson. Because he’s in the lead, Becerra has been able to avoid discussing the criticism in detail — and unlike for other candidates who have faced attacks, it’s working, Michelson said.

“The attacks just aren’t hitting,” Michelson said. “He can go to the public and say, ‘They’re only doing this because I’m in the lead,’ and yes, that is true. … It makes it hard for the public to know, how seriously should I take these claims?”

Serious questions about migrant children

No criticism has dogged his campaign more than the 2023 New York Times series detailing the surge in children working dangerous, exploitative jobs in meatpacking plants, construction sites and factories around the country. The report attributed the rise to a record number of unaccompanied children arriving at the southern border from Latin America in late 2020 and 2021, the first year of Becerra’s term as Health and Human Services secretary.

According to the report, Becerra, whose agency had custody of the children, was under pressure from the Biden administration to get them out of crowded shelters near the border and undo a Trump-era practice of holding the minors in detention centers. He pushed for them to be placed quickly in the homes of adult sponsors, who were sometimes distant relatives or unrelated to the children and who sent them to work. The investigation found Becerra’s agency missed or ignored warning signs of labor trafficking and failed to stay in contact with the minors.

In one video in the Times report, Becerra is seen telling staff to speed up the placements.

“This is not how you do an assembly line,” he said.

Opponents have seized on the report repeatedly during debates. Former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has run ads about it since last fall.

“The experience we got from Secretary Becerra didn’t lead to better outcomes,” San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan said during a CNN debate last week. “It led to 85,000 migrant children who were lost.”

Becerra has repeatedly called that a “Trump lie.” On Monday, in a brief press conference after a town hall in Sacramento, he again dismissed the criticism and said he wasn’t responsible for the children’s treatment after they left his agency’s care.

“What employers did after they left our care, after they left our jurisdiction, where the exploitation of children may have occurred, was not on my watch,” he said. “When people tell these Trump lies about kids that are lost, when Democrats repeat those lies, I just say, this campaign is better than that.”

Some Republicans who were critical of Biden’s handling of immigration did claim there were hundreds of thousands of “missing children,” which immigration advocates called misleading at the time.

But a 2024 audit by an independent watchdog validated the Times investigation and concluded Becerra’s agency did miss critical safety checks before releasing children to adult sponsors.

The report by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of the Inspector General found that caseworkers had in 16% of cases failed to document background checks and other vetting of the adults. In other cases they failed to conduct required home visits.

In more than one-fifth of cases the inspector general reviewed, Becerra’s agency failed to contact children one month after they were placed with sponsors, as required by agency policies to ensure the children were safe. In those cases staff didn’t call until four months later, on average, and at times as long as a year after the children were released from federal custody.

Becerra’s campaign did not respond to a CalMatters inquiry about the watchdog report.

Pressed about the warning signs detailed in the investigation, Becerra told a reporter after the town hall this week that she had “conflated a lot of different things that are unrelated.”

He also refused to answer when CalMatters asked whether he was certain Williamson couldn’t implicate him in the campaign fraud case during her court appearance this week.

“I’m moving forward,” he said.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

Mark Baldassare has seen his fair share of eyebrow-raising political polls in his decades-long career as a public opinion researcher.

Never, though, has he encountered a completely fake survey with made-up findings.

Until this week.

“It’s disturbing,” said Baldassare, survey director at the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonpartisan, nonprofit think tank.

“It’s a wake-up call for all of us.”

The poll in question, published last week by a group called Median Strategies, purported to show Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass leading City Councilmember Nithya Raman by double digits — a surprising result given Bass’s low approval rating and her administration’s recent setbacks on homelessness. It also claimed that Bass had won support from a vast majority of voters who supported insurgent Republican Spencer Pratt in the primary election.

But on Monday, Median Strategies retracted its poll and replaced its website with a disclaimer that the survey results were fabricated as part of a “short-term social experiment” and “should not be cited or treated as genuine polling data.” The group’s website also featured “polls” from the Wisconsin and Nevada gubernatorial races.

The fake results, first reported by the Los Angeles Times, duped the California Post, several local television and radio stations and even the mayor’s own campaign, which drew attention to the survey in a now-deleted X post.

The incident further underscores the importance of accuracy and precision in polling and presents yet another challenge for a public already struggling to separate fact from fiction and genuine content from AI-generated slop.

Bass’s spokesperson, Alex Stack, said campaign leadership had reviewed the polling memo that accompanied the results and decided it was legitimate given that “the poll was reported on by multiple news outlets.”

“Any bad faith attempts to influence elections should be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” Stack said in a statement.

A scheme to rig betting markets?

It’s unclear who’s behind Median Strategies, what their true intentions were with the bogus data and whether they would’ve disclosed the deception to the public if journalists hadn’t intervened. The group did not respond to a list of emailed questions from CalMatters.

“This definitely isn’t a research experiment, right? It sounds like an excuse for very bad behavior,” said Mindy Romero, director of the nonpartisan, nonprofit Center for Inclusive Democracy.

“If we take them at their word, that this is some sort of social experiment, that’s not what reputable researchers engage in,” Romero added. “We always have to think about the harm that we’re doing.”

One alternate theory is that the false survey results were meant to manipulate prediction markets, such as Kalshi and Polymarket, in the same way that securities fraudsters “pump and dump” penny stocks. They buy low, release disingenuous information to drive the price up, then sell high and reap the windfall.

Median’s fake poll spurred high volumes of trades shortly after it was posted, though the price movements were small. The Associated Press tracked thousands of trades from roughly 20 different accounts on Polymarket within six minutes of Bass’s campaign posting about the poll on X. On Kalshi, the price of placing a “yes” bet on Bass winning the mayoral race rose roughly two cents, from 63 to 65, within 15 minutes of the post, the AP reported.

“If nothing else, Median Strategies proved the concept that a pump-and-dump scheme is easily transferrable to election prediction markets,” wrote David Dayen for The American Prospect, a left-leaning policy publication.

Could bogus polls become more common?

For Jonathan Underland, a political strategist who works with Democrat Xavier Becerra’s campaign for governor, the Median Strategies debacle reinforces how important it is to vet a poll’s reputability before sharing it on official platforms.

“I get the excitement of a poll that shows you in the lead,” Underland said. “Everything is an opportunity for your opponent to hit you. The last thing I want to do is promote a poll that’s not real.”

Baldassare detests that public opinion polls drive financial decisions, from betting markets to more traditional political decisions such as which candidates from powerful donors and political groups pour money into. He acknowledged that copycats and wannabes could follow Median Strategies’ example and pump more noise and disinformation into the political ecosystem.

But he noted a silver lining: This is happening in August, when only a fraction of people are tuned into politics, rather than October when voters have their ballots in hand.

He hopes the Median Strategies incident reminds journalists and campaign operatives to recommit to verifying the source of the information before sharing it.

When in doubt, “Call the pollster,” Baldassare said. “Make sure I’m legitimate. You know — a real person.”

One of the last remaining checks on Immigration and Customs Enforcement and private-prison contractors running immigration detention centers has all but collapsed, leaving thousands of people trapped in a system with nearly nonexistent oversight, according to an NPR review.

The grievance system in immigration detention is designed to offer a safe channel to report violations of detention standards and seek redress, without fear of retaliation. It's often the only recourse for people to submit complaints about detention issues, including mistreatment, unsanitary conditions, medical neglect and sexual assault. But an NPR review of documents, available data and interviews with experts has found the system — which in the best of times was a complex patchwork — barely operates and even at times backfires for those using it. It is one of the few remaining safeguards for immigrants in federal custody after the Trump administration effectively dismantled other oversight offices.

Detainees and their families tell NPR that in the very worst cases the absence of transparency and accountability, and the subsequent failure to adhere to mandated grievance guidelines, is one of the leading factors for the record number of deaths in detention — at least 53 since the start of President Trump's second term.

Critics say it is the reason why more detainees are risking their lives to protest inhumane conditions and legal rights violations, in the form of widespread hunger strikes.

The Department of Homeland Security declined to answer specific questions about how it handles detainees' grievance claims, how DHS or private contractor employees are trained, what steps it takes to ensure private contractors — the largest being CoreCivic and The GEO Group — adhere to guidelines, or whether all detention facilities have a mandatory grievance committee. Instead, the office referred NPR to the 2011 Performance-Based National Detention Standards, which outline how the system is intended to work.

D.E.'s story

That system didn't work for D.E., who has had a brain tumor growing in his head for the last 12 years.

He was supposed to start chemotherapy the week he was picked up by ICE just a couple of blocks from his home.

The first seizure in detention was terrifying, but the second was the worst.

It was around 2 a.m. and D.E., one of more than a thousand detainees in the California City Detention Center, was lying on the lower bunk of his small cell. The CoreCivic guard who normally brought his nightly dose of Keppra, the medication he's relied on twice a day for years to keep seizures at bay, was more than five hours late, and it wasn't the first time. He'd had the first seizure just a couple of weeks earlier, and the telltale signs of an oncoming convulsion were in full effect: a relentless throbbing in his brain behind the 3-inch scar above his left ear. The blurred vision. The dizziness.

"I could feel it coming and I didn't want to hurt myself, so I jammed my arm between the metal bed frame and the wall to lock myself in place," D.E., a Mexican national who requested that NPR only use his initials because he fears government retaliation, said in Spanish. Trapping his arm was the best precaution he could come up with to keep himself from accidentally falling face-first into the shared toilet that was just inches from his bed, he said. "It's what I was most afraid of because I could have drowned."

Recalling that night, D.E. described the episode as a sustained haze of torture. The next morning, he tried to document what he could remember in a medical grievance that has been reviewed by NPR.

In practice, the grievance system should act as an internal accountability mechanism for both federally run and contracted detention facilities; the guidelines establish mandatory review and adjudication time frames.

With limited space on the paper form, D.E. was as specific as he could be. "Hello. I am writing this letter to the Medical Services Department regarding a complaint about my medical condition," he wrote on March 6. "It is a very aggressive issue involving a brain tumor that causes headaches and has triggered epileptic episodes lasting up to four hours. I am requesting that you provide me with a doctor specializing in radiation and chemotherapy, as my treatment was interrupted when I was detained by ICE on January 19."

A breakdown of oversight

Lawmakers, immigration attorneys, advocates and detainees report that experiences like D.E.'s are ubiquitous across the nation's detention centers, reflecting a broken grievance process.

Trying to enforce the rules of the grievance system has always been challenging, Chris Brundage, the former deputy of the now-closed Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, told NPR.

That's partly because it's not one single set of standards that all operators must follow, Brundage said. "It's a patchwork system that has never worked as intended," he said, explaining that there are at least three different sets of detention standards that operators are working under, depending on when they signed their contracts. (Some operators are following guidelines established in 2011. Others, an updated version from 2016, and those with new contracts are following 2019 standards.)

D.E.'s documentation of medicine taken, his seizures and medical visits during his three months in detention.

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Over the last two years, those problems have been significantly exacerbated by the evisceration of nearly all immigration detention oversight offices by the second Trump administration, he said.

The Office of Detention Oversight, created by Congress to conduct internal inspections, and the Immigration Detention Ombudsman's office tasked with investigating detainee deaths and other issues have had their budgets gutted and suffered massive layoffs. Both agencies sit within DHS. In the case of the ombudsman's office, one of the only places that detainees could turn to to challenge a grievance denial outside of the immediate detention facility, it was fully shuttered in May.

Another office whose budget has been slashed is the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, Brundage noted. In 2025, the administration slashed the CRCL staff from roughly 150 employees down to just a handful, effectively halting operations. The Government Accountability Project reported more than 500 active civil rights and detention-abuse complaints — including allegations of medical neglect, sexual abuse and dangerous conditions in immigration detention — were frozen or left uninvestigated.

At the time, the Trump administration said cutting hundreds of staff positions at the congressionally mandated offices was necessary to save money and because DHS claimed they were "internal adversaries that slow down operations."

"I think what happened when these offices were effectively gutted and shut down, you lost that … legitimacy. And legitimacy means that they're following the laws, regulations. But what happens if you don't have transparency into the process and you don't have accountability? Without those two things, that legitimacy erodes, " Brundage said.

Tracking grievances

Even before the closures it has been virtually impossible for lawmakers or inspectors to know how many grievances are filed at any given detention center each year, because neither ICE nor any of the private prison companies contracted by DHS are required to disclose that data to any review body. Also, even internally detention facility operators are not required to track data on how many grievance complaints are deemed to be founded, how the issue was resolved, or if it was challenged, whether the initial rejection was overturned.

Lawmakers and immigrant rights activists say that without such mandates, they are unable to decipher any patterns that could shed light on systemic problems, either at a single facility or across the entire system. Some suggest it is a deliberate ploy to keep the public in the dark about conditions on the inside of the nation's fortress-like detention centers.

The ACLU of Northern California partnered with the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice to document the daily conditions of life in California immigration detention by tracking formal grievances during the Biden administration. The findings were published in a 2024 study called Resistance, Retaliation, Repression: Two Years in California Immigration Detention. The organization obtained grievances from detainees and their families, and Freedom of Information Act requests from the state's six detention centers, which are all run by The GEO Group, CoreCivic, and Management & Training Corp. (Two new facilities, also run by private contractors, have been added since then.)

In all, the study reviewed 485 grievance complaints, concluding that the absence of accountability and transparency keeps conditions of detention, the grievances filed and their outcome hidden from public scrutiny. An analysis of the collected grievances revealed that complaints about the staff and their conduct, including facility management and bullying by staff, were the most common reason for grievances, with 179 documented allegations. Poor living conditions, including contaminated food, sleep deprivation, exposure to toxic mold and access to legal counsel, were the second most common reasons, with 141 filed complaints. And 94, roughly 20%, were medical grievances related to insufficient medical care and denial of medications.

Based on the data, 71% of the 485 grievances were deemed as unfounded or rejected by detention center officials. Nearly 21% were either closed, undecided, or unknown. Only 8% of the total grievances found in favor of detained people. According to detention standards, officials are required to provide, in writing, a reason for a rejection of a complaint and detainees can appeal an unfounded determination up to two times. In the past, the issue could be escalated up to the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.

Ryan Gustin, senior director of public affairs at CoreCivic, which owns or operates 12 detention centers across the country, said its facilities are closely monitored by ICE and regularly undergo reviews and audits.

"We have a robust grievance process available to all detainees at each of our ICE-contracted facilities that provides multiple safe and discrete avenues for concerns to be raised, including toll-free telephone numbers," Gustin told NPR. He added that most detainee concerns are processed through ICE's Enforcement and Removal Operations' Detention, Removals and Information Line.

It is unclear if complaints made to one of the hotline numbers or those processed through ICE's ERO removals and information line are treated in the same way as a formal grievance, that is, whether it is documented and added to a detainee's file, and if detention center officials are required to abide by the same response timelines as a written complaint. CoreCivic referred all requests for clarification to DHS, which did not respond to NPR's requests for comment.

Mariel Villarreal, a senior attorney with the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice, told NPR that many of the denials she has reviewed rarely offer any meaningful explanation for the rejection. "It'll just be a few generic words," she said. In other instances, there is no written record of the denial on the submitted complaint. (This is what happened in all four of D.E.'s grievances, filed about two years after the study at California City.)

"But even grievances that are ultimately founded, there's often no real remedy to them. There's nothing with teeth or no enforcement mechanism for making sure the grievance is actually addressed in a meaningful way," Villarreal said.

Villarreal noted other violations that she has witnessed, including facilities that have ignored a rule prohibiting a staff member who is accused of wrongdoing from ruling on a complaint about them.

"We've heard complaints from people [saying], 'I filed the grievance about this officer or this staff who did something bad or mistreated me,' and they were the one that then adjudicated it. And the proof of that is that their name shows up in logs," she said.

The report also found that use of the grievance system can backfire. Villarreal said her clients have reported various forms of retaliation, including solitary confinement or getting transfers to detention facilities far from a complainant's family and lawyers.

"I have a feeling that a lot of people who are filing grievances in immigration detention are pretty aware of the fact that it's essentially a sham," Villarreal said. But the reason people in custody continue to file them anyway is because it's the only way to document what's happening to them, "because it's their word against the whole system," she said.

"People are at the whim of whatever ICE wants to do with them"

Despite the Trump administration's attempts to ban unannounced visits by federal lawmakers, members of Congress have the legal authority to visit ICE detention sites at any time.

Texas Congressman Joaquin Castro visits the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in south Texas about once a month. But, he told NPR, that's become more difficult as ICE is enforcing more restrictive policies designed to block unannounced visits.

"They no longer allow us to see people who want to sign up to see members of Congress when a [congressional delegation] is going to inspect the facility. Now we have to have specific permission to see particular people," Castro said after a visit to the facility in June.

U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, pictured at a press conference in Washington last year, visits the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in south Texas about once a month.

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Even so, Castro said he's witnessed operational violations on nearly every visit. On a chaperoned tour in June, the congressman said he was taken into a room with a phone bank for detainees to use to anonymously report abuses, including a connection to a national rape hotline. But when he tested the line, he said it asked for the caller's personal identification code.

"The [CoreCivic] warden said he didn't know why it was happening and that he would get back to me" about it, he said.

He added: "I think for all intents and purposes, the grievance process, the resolution process, is non-functioning at this point. And these people are at the whim of whatever ICE wants to do with them."

New Jersey State Attorney General Jennifer Davenport sued The GEO Group after staff at the Delaney Hall facility allegedly blocked health department inspectors from entering most of the complex during a scheduled visit in May. The inspection followed a hunger strike by detainees, who in a letter, complained about rotten or worm-infested food, medical neglect and being coerced into signing deportation orders. But the team of inspectors, which was tasked with conducting a biannual audit of more than 20 national detention standards, including the grievance system, was not allowed past the center's kitchen facilities.

In a statement to NPR, a DHS spokesperson said, "There are NO subprime conditions or abuse at Delaney Hall." However, a recently released report of an August 2025 inspection of the facility during which inspections and compliance specialists from the Office of Professional Responsibility were also blocked from touring the entire facility, noted a slew of health violations. And a review of the facility's suicide watch logs showed 19 instances where clinical staff failed to conduct mandatory 15-minute check-ins. Instead, documents showed gaps of up to 65 minutes.

The GEO Group referred NPR's questions to DHS.

In California, a U.S. District Court judge issued a preliminary injunction in a class-action civil suit brought by detainees and immigrant advocacy groups against ICE for allegedly subjecting immigrants to inhumane and illegal conditions at the Adelanto Processing Center — one of the largest immigration detention centers in the United States. At least four people have died in custody while detained at The GEO Group-run facility since September 2025.

The lawsuit called Adelanto's grievance process "slow and often futile," adding that "detained individuals routinely wait more than a month for response after filing a grievance." It also states that in some cases, The GEO Group staff have pressured detained individuals into withdrawing their grievances in order to receive help.

The judge's July ruling said the plaintiffs "have demonstrated they are likely to prevail — or at the least, raise serious questions — on the merits of their Fifth Amendment and Rehabilitation Act claims."

She ordered the facility to immediately provide basic necessities. In addition, two independent monitors will have access to the detention center for unannounced inspections and to provide monthly reports, and detainees will have direct access to them in a confidential grievance system.

D.E.'s grievances

D.E., 44, says he moved to the U.S. when he was 18 so he could help support his parents and siblings back home in Mexico. He's been undocumented the entire time.

As he was being handcuffed and pushed into an unmarked van in January, D.E. says he asked the officers to stop by his apartment so that he could grab his medication. They didn't. Then when he arrived at Delaney Hall detention center in Newark, N.J., hours later, he told the medical intake staff about his condition.

"I even told them in English: I have a Stage 4 brain tumor. I have to take 1,000 mg of Keppra at 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. I'm supposed to start chemotherapy this week," he said.

He also gave them the name of his doctor and the hospital where he was being treated about an hour away. "Please call them," he begged.

It's unclear whether anyone at Delaney ever spoke to his medical team, but D.E. says the on-staff doctor at the detention facility reviewed his records and recommended that he be sent to a local hospital for chemotherapy. About two weeks later, he said an officer told him he didn't need chemotherapy.

Eventually, word got out and local activists started lobbying elected officials to intervene on his behalf. Days later, D.E. was transferred to a facility in Arizona for about a week, then shipped off to California City, where he says the inconsistent delivery of his meds triggered four seizures.

All in all, the second seizure lasted about four hours off and on. It's the worst one he's ever had. Throughout it, he lost control of his body and the ability to speak. He recorded the details of the episode in a formal grievance the following morning. It was one of four medical grievances D.E. filed with the CoreCivic staff in March alone.

"I filed them even though I knew nothing would change," D.E. said. "My lawyer told me they were supposed to respond to the grievances within a week, but I never got any kind of response," he added.

NPR reviewed all four complaints and confirmed that the documents do not contain a response to D.E.'s requests for chemotherapy, access to cancer specialists, or plans to ensure the timely delivery of his medications from CoreCivic or DHS staff.

According to the guidelines set by the DHS, a designated "grievance coordinator" is responsible for reviewing complaints, and staff must investigate and provide a written response, usually within five days. If the grievance involves an immediate threat to health or safety, the facility must respond within 24 hours.

"That never happened," D.E. said. Instead, "They would tell me that I would get treatment 'soon' but not set an appointment or a time frame," he said. D.E. was eventually released from detention after filing a petition in state court.

In more than three months in detention, D.E. never saw an oncologist.
Copyright 2026 NPR

Xavier Becerra says California needs to build more housing by reducing permitting times and making affordable housing funding easier to access, but he doesn’t want to say how many new homes he would deliver as governor. To address inequality, he’s considering whether the public should own shares of artificial intelligence companies, but he won’t commit to pursuing that policy.

If the Democratic candidate’s promises remain vague to Californians who, polls show, widely favor him for governor this November, he has an explanation — in the form of a regret dating back to 1993.

After campaigning against the North American Free Trade Agreement, the first-term Los Angeles-area congressmember was persuaded to vote for it, believing that adding some labor protections and a domestic lending program would shield American workers and small businesses from foreign competition. It only took a few years, Becerra recalled in an interview with CalMatters, to see American jobs displaced anyway.

For the young politician, it was a “pivotal lesson” with an enduring takeaway: Don’t back anything until you’re sure.

“No one gets my vote unless I know what I’m voting for completely,” he said.

Becerra would go on to serve a dozen terms in Congress, including in House Democratic leadership, and become California’s first Latino state attorney general, then the first Latino U.S. secretary of health and human services. Now he’s approaching the governor’s office with a mix of the deliberativeness he learned earlier and a painstaking effort against overpromising.

As a result, he’s been slow to declare specific policy directives and pushes back when pressed to take positions or outline goals. Instead, he points to past experiences as proof he can take on the state’s challenges, and says his best offer for voters is a steady hand to run the government.

To pay for the state’s public healthcare programs, he says he wants to eliminate some administrative spending, waste and fraudulent billing — but won’t say how or how much he would save. On housing, he criticized fellow Democrats for setting moonshot targets like 2 or 3 million new housing units in a four-year term. But even as he considers a more realistic goal, such as doubling the current output of about 106,000 units a year, he hesitates to say he would deliver it — concerned it “could be an inflated promise.”

No incentive to go out on a limb

It’s a marked contrast from not only the Democratic opponents Becerra beat in the primary, but also his Republican opponent Steve Hilton, who has rolled out numerous policies and big promises, like $3-a-gallon gas and halving electricity bills with a deregulatory agenda. The current governor, Democrat Gavin Newsom, won on a campaign full of lofty goals — millions of homes, single-payer healthcare, strong climate regulations, universal preschool and more. He has not achieved all of them.

While fellow candidates this year honed in on proposals to limit insurance regulations or control utility spending to rein in the cost of living, Becerra proposed to declare a state of emergency so he could study the causes of high electricity and insurance rates — effectively avoiding deciding what to do until later.

He has been noncommittal on whether he would keep the state’s mandate to phase out the sale of new gas cars by 2035.

“If we invest in it, it absolutely is feasible,” he said onstage during a Politico event last week. “If we don’t invest in the infrastructure, then it’s not feasible.”

He also said “there’s a lot of room to expand” on AI regulation and that “we could buy some equity in AI to make sure that we all gain from having this new technology.” But to reporters afterward, he denied supporting such a policy outright, saying “if there’s something along those lines, it wouldn’t be totally far-fetched.”

The vagueness of Becerra’s positions is “textbook political science,” said Melissa Michelson, a political science professor at Menlo College.

Because he faces Hilton in the general election, Becerra is likely to win based on Democrats’ voter registration advantage in California alone. He doesn’t have to do much to persuade Democrats to pick him, needing only to excite liberal voters enough to turn out in the last few weeks before November, Michelson said.

California gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra speaks during an election night event in Los Angeles on June 2, 2026.

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“He doesn’t have an incentive to go out on a limb” on policies, she said. “You don’t want to mess up, you don’t want to do anything crazy.”

But Becerra’s distaste for risk goes beyond avoiding controversies. Asked onstage last week what voters could expect him to do as governor, he declined to name a single policy commitment.

“I would prefer not to run on inflated promises,” he said. “I will run on my record.”

Mulling things over

Born in Sacramento to working-class Mexican immigrant parents and educated at Stanford Law School, Becerra, 68, rose to power during a wave of Latino political activism in the early 1990s.

He first clinched a state Assembly seat in an upset in the east Los Angeles suburbs in 1990, then just two years later was elected to Congress in a safe Democratic seat he held onto until 2017. He and his wife, OB-GYN Carolina Reyes, moved to Washington, D.C. during that time and raised three daughters; the couple have now settled back in Sacramento.

Former staffers described Becerra as detail-oriented, sending back memos if they contained typos and insisting on marking even a few thousand dollars in costs as a potential “fiscal impact” when evaluating legislation that affected the attorney general’s office. On policy matters he was focused, they said, on how immigrants or middle- and low-income Americans would be affected.

“I think he always kept people like his parents in mind,” said Sirat Attapit, who worked for both Becerra’s congressional office and as his liaison to the California Legislature when he was attorney general. “You always knew based on the kinds of questions he asked, that was always in the back of his mind.”

Attapit said his reputation for being a slow and thorough decision maker was a sign of good policymaking, enabling him to consider multiple perspectives “even if we were diametrically opposed.” Becerra in the early 2010s was part of a bipartisan group of House members meeting secretly to discuss immigration reform.

“He was thoughtful and methodical to the point where perhaps some of his colleagues thought he mulled things over or took too long to make a decision,” she said. “Whenever he made a decision, you had to get to a point where he had educated himself and heard from all of the stakeholders. Everybody who had a perspective, he wanted to hear from.”

Then-U.S. Rep. Xavier Becerra spends time with two of his daughters, Natalia, 3, and Olivia, 4, at his campaign headquarters in Los Angeles on Jan. 9, 2001. Becerra was running for mayor of Los Angeles.

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Gina Ferazzi

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Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

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That approach was apparent later in one of his most controversial decisions as attorney general. In 2019, he refused to release records of police investigations of officer misconduct, as required by a new state transparency law. Local police unions were fighting the law in court, arguing it could endanger officer privacy.

Becerra said he would wait for further direction from judges on whether the law covered retroactive records that journalists sought, even after one appellate court ruled the records were public. Brian Marvel, president of the politically influential Peace Officers Research Association of California, said he appreciated the attorney general’s caution.

“He just wanted to make sure that it was a clear direction on what needed to be released,” Marvel said.

But David Snyder, executive director of the First Amendment Coalition, said it was clear the law covered the sought-after records, and called Becerra’s position “baffling.” A coalition of news organizations sued, and the courts ordered Becerra’s office to release the records and pay over $1 million in attorneys’ fees.

“In fairness, I suppose, it was a brand-new law,” Snyder said. “But I can’t recall a time where an agency simply refused to interpret the law itself and said, ‘We don’t know what the law means until a court tells us.’”

Asked whether being so deliberative could hinder being bold or decisive as a leader, Becerra said there’s a time and place for quick action — like when he leapt to sue the Trump administration to preserve the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals immigration program or to intervene in a lawsuit with Texas to preserve the Affordable Care Act.

A pragmatic progressive

If he becomes governor, the cautious Becerra will become de facto leader of a state Democratic Party that is pushing further left.

Supporters like Amanda Renteria, who worked in the U.S. Senate and drafted parts of the federal healthcare law with Becerra, said his unassuming style belies progressive goals.

He was an early supporter of LGBTQ+ rights and universal public healthcare. Since his earliest days in Congress he took firm stances on defending the rights of asylum seekers and immigrants’ access to public benefits, sometimes clashing with fellow Democrats over it.

“He can work between two worlds,” Renteria said, praising “his ability to both be in Democratic leadership and at the same time be one of those members of Congress that (was) also pushing the progressive agenda where he sees it's possible.”

But Becerra himself hesitated to portray his potential term as governor the same way. He considers himself a “pragmatic” progressive, and suggested his agenda itself is flexible.

When President Joe Biden, nominating him as health secretary, warned him he was against single-payer healthcare, Becerra said he accepted it despite being a longtime supporter and agreed to focus on increasing enrollment in Medicaid or the ACA market instead. (During the primary campaign, Becerra reportedly told the state’s doctors’ association he would not push for single-payer as governor.)

Gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra at the Planned Parenthood offices in Sacramento on June 1, 2026.

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Miguel Gutierrez Jr.

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CalMatters

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“Just because I didn’t get single-payer, doesn’t mean I’m not a progressive, and just because I didn’t fight for single-payer doesn’t mean I am establishment,” he said. “At this stage of my life, at this stage of my career, I just want to get things done.”

To that end, he’s careful to trade ambition for achievability.

Last week, he floated a “power hour” proposal to give low-income utility customers two free hours of electricity in the middle of each day during the sunny but temperate period when power suppliers produce excess solar energy.

When asked by CalMatters whether that idea counts as a campaign promise, he ran through an analysis of whether he could commit to it: there were still stakeholders to consult, like the utility companies and the California Public Utilities Commission, which regulates electricity rates. On the other hand, low-income households are already enrolled in utility discount programs, so it would be easy to deliver the free power to them. And because it wouldn’t be a universal program for all customers, it wouldn’t create too much demand, he mused.

“I’d like to make it a promise, because it’s not pie-in-the-sky,” he said. “Is it realistic? Can I make it into a promise? I probably can, because I’ve limited it.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

The wait is over, and the Vision Theatre Performing Arts Center is preparing to reopen, ushering in a new era of performance, events and Black culture in Leimert Park. 

The L.A. Department of Cultural Affairs is scheduled to hold an invite-only ribbon-cutting ceremony Thursday at the historic theater, marking a major milestone for a project that began the first phase of construction in 2011. 

“The Vision Theatre has long been a special place in Leimert Park and in the lives of so many who call this community home,” said Heather Hutt, who represents District 10 for L.A. City Council where the theater is located. “Its reopening represents both a celebration of that history and an investment in our future.” 

The city has invested nearly $40 million in the renovation project, which has unfolded in multiple phases and was slowed by funding challenges, the COVID-19 pandemic and supply-chain disruptions, a cultural affairs spokesperson previously told The LA Local.

The restored theater features a reconfigured 729-seat auditorium, new mezzanine and balcony seating, a lounge area, a full stage with wings and crossover space, dressing rooms and a green room. 

The project also includes restoration of the theater’s historic Art Deco features and auditorium ceiling mural, along with upgraded audio, visual and lighting systems and a broadcast room.

“The renovation of the Vision Theatre unites historic preservation with state-of-the-art venue upgrades to create a world-class cultural venue that all Angelenos can be proud of,” said Daniel Tarica, general manager of the cultural affairs department.

The Vision Theatre in Leimert Park in South L.A. is expected to reopen this year.

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Steve Saldivar

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The LA Local

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The Vision Theatre’s reopening is expected to bring thousands of new patrons to Leimert Park, giving surrounding small businesses an opportunity to boost their bottom lines. The theater is also poised to strengthen the neighborhood’s identity as a Black Cultural Arts District by attracting top-tier talent, hosting major events and creating opportunities for emerging local artists.

“Anytime a business opens, especially something as big as the Vision Theatre , it’s going to be amazing for the entire Village and Crenshaw Corridor,” said Odessa Bowden-Sierra, owner of LA Native clothing store near Crenshaw Boulevard and 43rd Place. 

Genelle Brooks-Petty, vice president of the Leimert Park Village Merchants Association and co-owner of ALL CHILL hip-hop ice cream shop, said the theater reopening is an opportunity to showcase the historic community. 

“‘One Village. One Destination’ is our creed, and we’re excited to see this institution restored and reinvigorated, as Leimert Park Village continues to thrive,” Brooks-Petty said.

The original front entrance of the Vision Theater on 43rd Place, shown here on Aug. 19, 2026, remains after renovations.

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LaMonica Peters

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The LA Local

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The theater’s cultural impact could be just as significant.

The city has partnered with the WACO Theater Center, founded by actor Richard Lawson and Tina Knowles, Beyoncé’s mother and former clothing designer, to expand artistic and educational programming at the venue. 

Shay Wafer, WACO’s executive director, told The LA Local that the organization’s mission includes creating opportunities for emerging artists of African descent, as well as local, national and international artists whose work reflects the African diaspora .  

“I’m overwhelmed and excited,” Wafer said about the reopening. “I’m optimistic that the philanthropic community and ticket buyers will support us.” 

Wafer said WACO, who’s responsible for the theater’s programming, will hold its own grand opening at the theater in November and soft launch performances, community events and a membership program. 

The first full season, about 15 to 20 shows and events, will launch in February 2027, Wafer said. 

“The time that it takes to fully activate a performing arts center the size of the Vision has to occur in phases,” Wafer said.  “The first season is going to look totally different from the second season. We’ll be at full capacity by the second year.”