The fallout from Sen. Katie Britt’s (R-Ala.) widely panned rebuttal to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address Thursday continued into the weekend after it was revealed that she recycled an old story about a sex trafficking victim from two decades ago to attack Biden’s border policies.
In the official Republican rebuttal to Biden’s speech, Britt spoke about her visit to the border in the “Del Rio sector of Texas.” While there Britt said she spoke to a woman who said she had been sexually trafficked from Mexico to the U.S. at the age of 12.
“She told me not just that she was raped every day, but how many times a day she was raped…We wouldn’t be OK with this happening in a third-world country,” Britt said.
But Britt’s portrayal of the story is inaccurate as Talking Points Memo journalist Jonathan Katz revealed in a TikTok video.
From Britt’s story Katz was able to piece together that the sex trafficking victim the senator likely spoke to was Karla Jacinto Romero.
Romero had previously shared her story publicly, including at a hearing by the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Global Human Rights in 2015, according to CNN.
Romero was trafficked at a young age, like Britt said, but it happened entirely within Mexico from 2004 to 2008–nearly two decades before Joe Biden was elected president.
“These events didn’t happen in the United States,” Katz said. “These crimes didn’t take place in the United States. Or even near the border. They took place in Mexico.”
But in her rebuttal, 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,” Britt said. “And it’s almost entirely preventable.”
In a statement to Newsweek, Britt’s spokesperson Sean Ross confirmed that she was referring to Romero and claimed that what the senator said “was 100 percent correct.”Â
“The story Senator Britt told was 100% correct,” Ross said. “And there are more innocent victims of that kind of disgusting, brutal trafficking by the cartels than ever before right now. The Biden administration’s policies — the policies in this country that the President falsely claims are humane — have empowered the cartels and acted as a magnet to a historic level of migrants making the dangerous journey to our border.”
