Sen. Katie Britt (R-Ala.) defended her use of a sex trafficking story from 20 years ago to criticize Joe Biden’s border policies in the official Republican response to the president’s State of the Union address.
In the rebuttal, Britt spoke about her visit to the border in the “Del Rio sector of Texas,” where she spoke to a woman who said she had been sexually trafficked from Mexico to the U.S. at the age of 12.
Britt presented the story as a failure of the Biden administration’s border policies.
“This is the United States of America, and it’s past time we start acting like it. President Biden’s border crisis is a disgrace. It’s despicable,” she said. “And it’s almost entirely preventable.”
But the incident occurred in Mexico—not in the U.S. as Britt suggested—and was between 2004 and 2008 during a time when Biden was not in the White House.
In an interview on Fox News Sunday, anchor Shannon Bream confronted Britt about the story, asking if she meant to “give the impression that this horrible story happened on President Biden’s watch?”
Britt dodged the question, choosing instead to criticize Biden’s policies, including stopping deportations, halting construction of the border wall and giving amnesty to millions, which according to Britt, act as a “magnet” to immigrants looking to enter the country illegally.
“But to be clear, the story that you relate is not something that’s happened under the Biden administration?” Bream pressed.
Britt claimed she wasn’t suggesting the story—which occurred 20 years ago—happened while Biden was in office.
“I very clearly said I spoke to a woman who told me about when she was trafficked when she was 12,” Britt said in a clip shared by Mediaite. “So I didn’t say, a teenager. I didn’t say, a young woman, a grown woman, a woman when she was trafficked when she was 12. And so listening to her story, she is a victims’ rights advocate who is telling … this is what drug cartels are doing. This is how they’re profiting off of women. And it is disgusting.”
White House spokesperson Andrew Bates slammed Britt for using a story from the George W. Bush administration to criticize Biden on the border and pointed to the fact that the Alabama senator voted against a bipartisan border deal earlier this year.
“Instead of telling more debunked lies to justify opposing the toughest bipartisan border legislation in modern history, Senator Britt should stop choosing human smugglers and fentanyl traffickers over our national security and the Border Patrol Union,” Bates said. “Like President Biden said in his State of the Union, ‘We have a simple choice: We can fight about fixing the border or we can fix it.’”
