A Trafficking Victim Asked Xavier Becerra Why He Didn’t Protect Her. Two Days Later, He Walked Out of the Capitol Without Taking Questions.
On August 3, 2026, RedState published the account of Juana Rebecca Pérez Santay, who says she crossed the border alone at 17 in May 2021, was placed with a sponsor by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement, and ended up worked nearly around the clock, sleeping on a floor with adult men, and nearly raped. “Xavier Becerra failed me because he never cared about my safety,” she says. Two days later, on Wednesday, August 5, Xavier Becerra (D) — the HHS Secretary during her placement, now the Democratic nominee for California governor — stood at a Capitol press conference on election integrity, then left without taking a single question from the reporters who followed him to his car.
Santay’s testimony is unadjudicated — sourced to Republican rival Steve Hilton’s campaign, not to a court or federal investigator. But it lands on top of a federal paper trail that is not in dispute: HHS’s and DHS’s own inspectors general, and the Government Accountability Office, have spent two years documenting exactly the sponsor-vetting gaps her account describes.
Becerra is not currently a government official of any kind. He left HHS when the Biden administration ended in January 2025 and is now a private citizen running against Steve Hilton (R) in California’s November 3 general election. What follows separates what federal auditors documented from what a whistleblower campaign is alleging — and traces Becerra’s pattern of declining to answer questions about either.
- 319,000+ children whose location and status ICE could not effectively verify after release from HHS custody — DHS Office of Inspector General, OIG-25-21, March 2025
- 16% of sampled ORR case files had no documentation that a legally required sponsor safety check was ever completed — HHS Office of Inspector General, Feb. 2024
- 11,488 migrant children placed with sponsors who were never fingerprinted or background-checked, Jan. 2021–Jan. 2025 — HHS data via Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA)
- 0 questions Becerra took from reporters at the Capitol, two days after the Santay testimony went public — ABC10, August 5, 2026
Santay’s account, published by RedState on August 3 and followed up by Townhall on August 5, describes being handed off by an ORR social worker at an airport to a woman posing as a family sponsor. What followed, in her telling: nearly round-the-clock work making food with no pay, no water, and a threat of deportation if she complained; nights on a ceramic floor in a room with four men; and one night when an intoxicated man in the household tried to rape her while the sponsor told her to let it happen. “They kept me like a slave,” she says. “They didn’t let me talk to my family. I ended up in the hands of child traffickers, and I was almost raped.”
Her account is the latest in a string of testimonies that Hilton’s campaign has released since late July. On July 27, a former caseworker at the Pomona Fairplex emergency intake site alleged the sponsor-vetting process had become “a complete joke” — fake IDs accepted, sponsor identity confirmed over WhatsApp, children’s names written on their arms in marker. On July 28, a second whistleblower described male minors sexually harassing female staff at the same sites. None of the three has been tested in court, and Becerra has publicly dismissed the entire line of attack as a “Trump lie.”
SHOCKING new whistleblower testimony: 200 migrant kids sent to the same container park. Xavier Becerra KNEW and covered it up. Employees who objected were FIRED. 'She got terminated. Becerra was aware.'
Strip away the campaign testimony and the documented record still stands on its own. HHS’s Office of Inspector General found, in a report issued while Becerra ran the department, that 16% of sampled unaccompanied-child case files had no documentation that a required sponsor safety check — fingerprints, a child-abuse-registry check — had ever been completed. Nearly one-fifth of pending background checks were never updated with results after the child was already placed. In 22% of cases, ORR did not complete the mandatory follow-up welfare call on time.
Separate HHS data, released by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA), shows that between January 2021 and January 2025 — spanning nearly all of Becerra’s tenure — 11,488 children were placed with non-parental sponsors who were never fingerprinted or background-checked, and 79,143 children under twelve never received the home study the law contemplates. Downstream, DHS’s own inspector general found in March 2025 that ICE could not effectively verify the whereabouts of more than 319,000 of these children after release, a group that includes both children never placed into removal proceedings and children who missed scheduled court hearings. The GAO has been tracking the same failures since 2016 and, as of its most recent November 2024 report, still lists several of its recommendations as only partially addressed.
Documented, by federal audit: the sponsor-vetting gaps, the missing background checks, and ICE’s inability to track hundreds of thousands of released children — all independently confirmed by HHS OIG, DHS OIG, and GAO.
Alleged, by campaign-sourced testimony: the specific trafficking, sexual abuse, and cover-up claims from Santay and the two anonymous whistleblowers — reported by RedState and Townhall, not yet tested by any court or agency.
The Capitol walkout on August 5 was not an isolated moment. In May, sitting for a KTLA interview, Becerra opened before the camera had finished rolling by asking reporter Annie Rose Ramos: “By the way, this is a profile piece, this is not a gotcha piece, right?” and asked that the segment not carry “only tough questions.” Ramos told colleagues the exchange was “dramatically different” from her interviews with other candidates. Greg Gutfeld turned it into a Fox News segment days later.
Hilton has publicly noted that Becerra has not accepted any of eight debate invitations extended to both campaigns — Hilton has accepted all eight — though a Becerra spokesperson told reporters at the Capitol, “We’ll be doing a debate.” On the trafficking allegations specifically, Becerra’s public position has been to call the reporting “MAGA talking points” and a “Trump lie,” while separately posting about his own record on trafficking as California’s attorney general.
As California's Attorney General, I prosecuted sex traffickers, took down predators, and put them behind bars. I fought for survivors then — and I'll always fight for the people as Governor.
The record on Becerra’s own instructions to staff is not campaign spin — it comes from a leaked internal recording first reported by the New York Times, and Becerra addressed it directly under oath before the House Energy and Commerce Oversight Subcommittee on July 26, 2023. On the recording, he pushes staff to move faster on releasing children to sponsors: “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.” That same year, 26 House Democrats — including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) — wrote to Becerra directly, citing “disturbing firsthand accounts of children who have suffered from forced labor, trafficking, and abuse” documented in the Times investigation and demanding “comprehensive changes to HHS policies.”
“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.”
Xavier Becerra, then-HHS Secretary, on an internal recording first reported by The New York Times
At that same 2023 hearing, Becerra disputed characterizations that children were “lost,” testifying that HHS attempts to reach each child and sponsor three times by phone and that more than 81% of households are ultimately reached — though he acknowledged the department has no authority to compel a sponsor or child to answer. He has repeated that defense in the governor’s race, telling audiences the missing-children framing amounts to “no lost kids.” The federal audits describing gaps in documentation, background checks, and follow-up calls came from his own department’s inspector general — not from a partisan source.
Becerra advanced from June’s primary as the Democratic nominee and led Hilton by roughly 25 points in the most recent Public Policy Institute of California poll. President Donald Trump (R) endorsed Hilton ahead of the primary, calling him a “truly fine man” who could reverse what Trump described as Governor Gavin Newsom (D)’s record on crime and taxes — an endorsement aimed at the broader race, not specifically at the trafficking allegations that have surfaced since.
I have known and respected Steve Hilton, who is running for Governor of California, for many years. He is a truly fine man, one who has watched as this once great State has gone to Hell... Steve Hilton has my COMPLETE AND TOTAL ENDORSEMENT!
Posted ahead of the June primary — an endorsement of Hilton's candidacy generally, not a response to the trafficking testimony that surfaced afterward
A trafficking victim’s testimony against Xavier Becerra is unadjudicated campaign material, and it deserves to be labeled that way. The federal audits underneath it are not: HHS’s own inspector general found documented gaps in the sponsor checks meant to prevent exactly what Juana Rebecca Pérez Santay describes, and DHS’s inspector general says more than 319,000 released children still can’t be effectively tracked. Two days after her account became public, Becerra took no questions about any of it. He is not required to answer to a campaign press release. As a candidate for governor of the largest state in the country, he is going to have to answer to voters — eventually, in a debate he hasn’t yet scheduled, or on a stage he can’t leave early.
