Karla Jacinto Romero, the sex trafficking victim whose story Katie Britt (R-Ala.) shared in the Republican response to the State of the Union last week, slammed the senator for inaccurately using her story to highlight Joe Biden’s immigration policies.
In an interview with CNN Romero said politicians who use the issue of human trafficking for political gain lack empathy.
“In fact I hardly ever cooperate with politicians because it seems to me that they only want an image. They only want a photo, and that to me is not fair,” Romero said.
In the State of the Union response, Britt told the story about a victim of sex trafficking she met during one of her visits to the border.
“When I first took office, I did something different. I traveled to the Del Rio sector of Texas, where I spoke to a woman who shared her story with me. She had been sex trafficked by the cartels starting at age 12,” Britt said. “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. And it’s almost entirely preventable.”
A reporter later revealed that the woman Britt mentioned is Romero and 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.
Romero told CNN that she met Britt with other government officials and anti-human-trafficking activists during her visit to the border last year, not one-on-one as Britt claimed during the SOTU rebuttal. Romero also said that she was trafficked by a pimp who operated as part of a family that entrapped vulnerable girls to force them into prostitution, not by Mexican drug cartels.
“I work as a spokesperson for many victims who have no voice, and I really would like them to be empathetic: all the governors, all the senators, to be empathetic with the issue of human trafficking because there are millions of girls and boys who disappear all the time,” Romero said. “People who are really trafficked and abused, as she [Britt] mentioned. And I think she [Britt] should first take into account what really happens before telling a story of that magnitude.”
In a statement to the Washington Post, Britt’s spokesperson Sean Ross claimed that what the senator said “was 100 percent correct.”
Asked if she meant to “give the impression that this horrible story happened on President Biden’s watch?” in a Fox News interview on Sunday, Britt said, “No.”
“I very clearly said I spoke to a woman who told me about when she was trafficked when she was 12,” she added 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.”
