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The fallout from Sen. Katie Britt’s State of the Union rebuttal continues. The junior senator from Alabama, considered a rising star in the GOP, has been widely panned for her bizarre affect and the tonal whiplash of her speech. But details of one of the more harrowing stories she told, meant to illustrate the human toll of President Joe Biden’s border policies, is under new scrutiny.
“We know that President Biden didn’t just create this border crisis. He invited it with 94 executive actions in his first 100 days,” Britt said in her response. “When I took office, I took a different approach. I traveled to the Del Rio sector of Texas. That’s where I spoke to a woman who shared her story with me. She had been sex-trafficked by the cartels starting at the age of 12.”
Britt goes on to detail the woman’s horrific experience of daily sexual assault. She concludes by saying, “We wouldn’t be OK with this happening in a Third World country. This is the United States of America, and it is past time, in my opinion, that we start acting like it. President Biden’s border policies are a disgrace.” Britt’s phrasing fairly clearly implies that the woman’s sexual abuse had taken place in the U.S.
But details of the story, as Britt tells it, and the connection she tries to make between the woman’s horrific experience and Biden’s immigration policies don’t hang together, as independent journalist Jonathan Katz first reported.
In January 2023, Britt traveled to Del Rio with Sens. Marsha Blackburn and Cindy Hyde-Smith. While there, according to a release from Blackburn’s office, they joined a roundtable to learn about “cartel activity in Mexico and the work being done to rescue victims of human trafficking.” The roundtable included activist Karla Jacinto Romero, who had testified before Congress in 2015 about being sex-trafficked in Mexico between 2004 and 2008 when she was between the ages of 12 and 16. At the time of her congressional testimony, Romero was 22. The New York Times reports that Romero currently lives in Mexico and does not appear to have ever lived or sought asylum in the U.S.
A YouTube video from Britt’s office recapping her visit to Del Rio includes shots of Romero, and the senator recounts hearing about her “gut-wrenching” experience.
When asked if the senator was referring to Romero in her story, her spokesperson, Sean Ross, told MSNBC:
The story Senator Britt told was 100% correct. 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.
Human trafficking is a persistent practice around the world, including across the U.S.-Mexico border, and one that the U.S. and Mexican governments and nongovernmental groups have been combating for decades. According to a 2023 Department of Justice report, the number of prosecutions for human-trafficking offenses in the U.S. doubled between 2011 and 2021, and in 2021, 95% of those charged were U.S. citizens. But again, if the experience of trafficking Britt mentioned in her response was Romero’s, that abuse happened two decades ago in another country.
Republicans have hammered Biden hard over the rising number of people seeking asylum across the border. And as criticism mounts over his immigration policies, Biden has increasingly embraced the kind of hard-line stance — and rhetoric — that he’d criticized Trump for in 2020.
If Britt was indeed referring to Romero in her speech, as seems likely, then not only was it misleading to mention Romero in the context of the border, but Britt also misleadingly implied that her abuse happened as a result of Biden’s policies.