The Republican senator who gave the party’s response to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address used a harrowing account of a young woman’s sexual abuse to attack his border policies, but the rapes did not happen in the U.S. or during the Biden administration.
First-term Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama in the GOP response criticized current immigration policies, describing how she had met a woman at the U.S.-Mexico border who told of being raped thousands of times in a sex trafficking operation run by cartels, starting at age 12.
The victim has previously spoken publicly about the abuse happening in her home country of Mexico from 2004 to 2008 — not in the United States during the Biden administration. Yet, Britt used the account to chastise Biden’s action on the border.
“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,” Britt said in the Thursday night speech televised from her home in Alabama. “President Biden’s border crisis is a disgrace.”
Britt’s comments reflect that border security is a key theme of the Republican party and former President Donald Trump’s campaign in this election year.
Independent journalist Jonathan Katz revealed in a TikTok video Friday that the sex trafficking of that victim did not happen during the Biden administration or in the United States.
Britt spokesman Sean Ross on Saturday confirmed to The Associated Press that the senator was speaking about the account of a young Mexican woman who told of being repeatedly raped in Mexico from 2004 to 2008 — when Republican George W. Bush was the U.S. president.
Britt traveled to the border at the Del Rio Sector in Texas in January 2023 with fellow Republican Sens. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi, according to a news release issued then from Hyde-Smith’s office.
“The Senators held a roundtable with former Mexican Congresswoman Rosa María de la Garza, Fox News Contributor Sara Carter and Karla Jacinto Romero, a survivor of human trafficking,” the news release said. “The Senators learned about cartel activity in Mexico and the work being done to rescue victims of human trafficking.”
Romero has spoken publicly about being a victim of child prostitution in Mexico, including during 2015 testimony to a subcommittee of the U.S. House. Romero, then 22, told the subcommittee that she was 12 when her mother threw her out on the streets, and a pimp trafficked her to more than 40,000 clients over four years. Romero said many of the clients were foreigners who had traveled to Mexico for sexual interactions with minors like her.
Emily Wagster Pettus, The Associated Press
