Juana Rebecca Pérez Santay was 17 years old when she crossed the southern border in May 2021. The Office of Refugee Resettlement — the agency under Health and Human Services tasked with keeping unaccompanied minors safe — placed her in a sponsor home. She was sexually abused, slept on a ceramic floor with four men, and worked seven days a week in conditions she describes as slavery.
The man who ran HHS at the time now wants to be governor of California.
Xavier Becerra served as Joe Biden's Health and Human Services Secretary during the period when Santay says the system designed to protect children like her did the opposite. His department oversaw ORR, the pipeline that moved migrant minors from federal custody into sponsor homes across the country. Becerra himself once described the migrant flow his department managed as an "assembly line." For Santay, that assembly line delivered her straight into a nightmare.
"I have been sexually abused. I slept on a ceramic floor, in a room with four men who were sleeping there," Santay testified, as reported by LifeZette. She was told she'd work 20 hours a week. Instead, she worked seven days a week. "They kept me like a slave," she said.
There's no ambiguity in her account of who bears responsibility.
"Xavier Becerra failed to protect us. He failed me because he didn't protect me," Santay said. And then the line that should follow Becerra into every campaign stop, every debate, every mailer between now and election day: "I was sexually abused because of Xavier Becerra."
Santay's testimony lands at a particularly inconvenient moment for the former HHS Secretary. Becerra is running for governor of California against Republican Steve Hilton, and the race has already drawn national attention. Becerra's pitch leans heavily on his record of public service — attorney general, cabinet secretary, decades in government. Santay's testimony is a direct challenge to the version of that record he'd prefer voters see.
"Xavier Becerra failed me because he never cared about my safety," Santay said. "If he were to become governor of California, it would be horrible, because I would not want what happened to me to happen to other children."
Now, Becerra's allies will point out that no cabinet secretary personally manages every placement decision at ORR. And that's true in the same way that a CEO doesn't personally approve every product that ships — but when one of those products injures a child, we don't let the CEO run for higher office on the strength of his "leadership." Becerra ran the department. He described his own operation as an assembly line. When the assembly line produces child abuse and forced labor, that's not a rogue employee problem. That's a system failure, and it happened under his name.
The Biden administration's border policy moved hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied minors through a federal system that was never built to handle the volume. Reports of children ending up in exploitative labor situations, dangerous sponsor homes, and worse surfaced repeatedly throughout 2022 and 2023. The New York Times documented children working overnight shifts in slaughterhouses. Congressional investigations followed. But the officials who designed and managed the pipeline — the ones who kept it running at full speed even as the red flags piled up — largely moved on without consequence.
Becerra didn't just move on. He's running for promotion.
There's something clarifying about Santay's testimony, though, because it puts a specific face and a specific name on a story that policy debates tend to flatten into statistics. She's not a data point about ORR placement failures. She's a teenager who was told the United States government would keep her safe, and then that government — run by Xavier Becerra — placed her in a home where she was assaulted and worked like a slave.
Becerra called his system an assembly line. Santay can tell you exactly what came off it.