Alabama senator Katie Britt’s official GOP response to Joe Biden’s State of the Union address on Thursday night has been widely criticized, primarily for how wholly bizarre it was but also for the lurid stories Britt included in an attempt to illustrate why he has been a terrible nation-destroying president. A key anecdote Britt featured to that end was about a young woman she met during a January 2023 trip to the U.S. southern border who had been a victim of rape and sex trafficking as a teenager. She used the story as example of Biden’s failed border policies, clearly suggesting the woman had suffered these crimes inside the U.S. and as a direct result of the president’s failure to secure the southern border — but the crimes she referenced happened decades ago in Mexico.
Here is the story she told and how she told it from the transcript of the speech released by Britt’s office:
[R]ight now, the American dream has turned into a nightmare for so many families. The true unvarnished state of our union begins and ends with this. Our families are hurting. Our country can do better.
And you don’t have to look any further than the crisis at our southern border to see it. President Biden inherited the most secure border of all-time. But minutes after taking office, he suspended all deportations, halted construction of the border wall, and announced a plan to give amnesty to millions.
We know that President Biden didn’t just create this border crisis. He invited it with 94 executive actions in his first 100 days.
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. She told me not just that she was raped every day, but how many times a day she was raped.
The cartels put her on a mattress in a shoe-box of a room, and they sent men through that door, over and over again, for hours and hours on-end.
We wouldn’t be OK with this happening in a third-world country. 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.
On Friday, former Associated Press reporter Jonathan Katz highlighted several details that called Britt’s framing of the woman’s story into question. In both a Bluesky thread and a TikTok video, the independent journalist said that he tried to confirm the details Britt shared, noting that during her trip to the border in January 2023, Britt and two other GOP senators, Marsha Blackburn and Cindy Hyde-Smith, held a roundtable press conference with a Mexican congresswoman, a Fox News contributor, and a Mexican sex-trafficking survivor named Karla Jacinto Romero.
In 2004, Romero was forced into sex slavery in Mexico when she was 12 years old, and after she escaped her pimp four years later, bravely dedicated her life to activism against slavery and sex trafficking. Since then, she has repeatedly recounted the horrific details of her experience, including in testimony before Congress in 2015 and again with Britt, Blackburn, and Hyde-Smith in 2023.
@katzonearth This isn’t going to make her like TikTok more. #katiebritt #sotu #stateoftheunion #lies #politicians #biden2024 #trump2024 #immigration #traffickingawarenes #mexico #bordersecurity #fyp
♬ original sound - Jonathan M. Katz
As Katz pointed out, Britt clearly cited the sex-trafficking victim’s experience as a consequence of President Biden’s border policies, but those crimes happened in Mexico at a time when George W. Bush was president. In addition, Britt framed the story as having happened amid the current border crisis, in the border region, perpetrated by drug cartels — right before she began citing alleged migrant-perpetrated violence inside the U.S. during Biden’s presidency.
When reporters reached out the Britt’s office about the story, and Britt spokesperson Sean Ross initially replied with a statement insisting that “the story Senator Britt told was 100 percent correct. There are more innocent victims of that kind of disgusting, brutal trafficking by the cartels than ever before right now.” The statement further claims that the Biden administration’s policies “have empowered the cartels and acted as a magnet to a historic level of migrants making the dangerous journey to our border. Along that journey, children, women, and men are being subjected to gut-wrenching, heartbreaking horrors in our own backyard.”
Britt’s office later confirmed that the story the senator referenced was indeed Romero’s.
During a Fox News appearance on Sunday, Britt suggested she had not misrepresented the story or implicated Biden, because, “I very clearly said I spoke to a woman who told me about when she was trafficked when she was 12.” She also tried to spin the criticism of her misrepresentation as a “disgusting” attempt to “silence the voice of telling the story of what it is like to be sex trafficked when we know that is one of the things the drug cartels are profiting most off of.”
Per the Daily Beast’s report on the interview:
“I very clearly said I spoke to a woman who told me about when she was trafficked when she was 12, so I didn’t say a teenager. I didn’t say a young woman or a grown woman, a woman when she was trafficked when she was 12,” the senator insisted. “So listening to her story, she was a victims-right advocate who is saying this is what drug cartels are doing, this is how they’re profiting off of women, and it is disgusting. So I am hopeful that it brings some light to it and we can actually do something about human trafficking and that that’s what the media actually decides to cover.”
During a CNN appearance on Sunday, Romero criticized Britt, noted that the crimes done to her were not linked to the Mexican drug cartels, and expressed frustration with politicians who are only interested in using her as a prop:
“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,” Karla Jacinto told CNN on Sunday. CNN’s Freedom Project, which seeks to raise awareness about modern-day slavery, previously profiled Jacinto’s story. Jacinto told CNN that Mexican politicians took advantage of her by using her story for political purposes and that it’s happened again in the United States.
“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. 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,” Jacinto said. …
Jacinto said she met the senator at an event at the southern border with other government officials and anti-human-trafficking activists, instead of one-on-one as Britt stated. She also said that she was never trafficked in the United States, as Britt appeared to suggest. She was not trafficked by Mexican drug cartels, but by a pimp who operated as part of a family that entrapped vulnerable girls to force them into prostitution, she said.
In a video about the January 2023 border visit produced by Senator Blackburn’s office, Britt referenced Romero’s account while footage of her and Romero appeared. In those remarks, Britt argued that the U.S. needed to do more to prevent such crime:
If we, as leaders of the greatest nation in the world, are not fighting to protect the most vulnerable, we are not doing our job.
That’s not the argument Britt made in her State of the Union response on Thursday. Britt made up a totally false context in her speech in order to suggest Biden was to blame for something that happened two decades ago.
This post has been updated throughout.
