VANITY FAIR
Alabama Senator Katie Britt is defending herself from one of many self-inflicted wounds during her widely mocked State of the Union response address, as journalists have been poking holes into an anecdote she told as part of a critique of President Joe Biden’s immigration policies.
In an emotional rebuttal to the president’s address on Thursday, Britt briefly recounted the story of a woman who was “sex trafficked by the cartels” before she was even a teenager and appeared to imply that Biden’s border policy caused the horrific situation. “We wouldn’t be ok with this happening in a third-world country,” she said. “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.”
Independent journalist Jonathan Katz put out a viral TikTok video on Saturday scrutinizing the anecdote, in which he reported discovering that the person Britt was referring to was a woman named Karla Jacinto Romero, an activist who has spoken publicly for many years about her experience being sex trafficked and forced to work in Mexican brothels. But Romero was never brought across the southern border against her will, as Britt seemed to imply, and her horrific experiences in Mexico took place between the years of 2004 and 2008, when George W. Bush was president, The Washington Post confirmed.
Britt spokesman Sean Ross confirmed that the Senator was indeed speaking about Romero, whom she met at the southern border in 2023, but denied that her speech was misleading, saying in a statement that the story “was 100 percent correct” and that “there are more innocent victims of that kind of disgusting, brutal trafficking by the cartels than ever before right now.”
Britt went on Fox News on Sunday to defend her misleading use of Romero’s story. Asked by host Shannon Beamwhether she meant “to give the impression that this horrible story happened on Biden’s watch,” Britt said “no,” and proceeded to criticize Biden’s immigration policies. “In [Biden’s] first 100 days he had 94 executive actions, and those executive actions didn’t just create the crisis,” the freshman senator from Alabama retorted. “They invited it.”
“The truth is—and the media knows this, yet they’re not covering it—that human trafficking has gone up under President Biden,” Britt added. “If you look back to 2018, it was a $500 million industry, human trafficking by the drug cartels. It is now a $13 billion industry. Shannon, the drug cartels are winning under this. This is a story of what is happening now.”
Romero told The New York Times that she’d found out about Britt’s use of her story on social media, and that she didn’t know in advance that Britt was planning on talking about her in her rebuttal. “I am involved in the fight to stop trafficking, and I don’t think it should be political,” she added. “The work I do is not a game.”
The Biden administration took advantage of Britt’s ambiguous anecdote to bash her for her opposition to the bipartisan border bill negotiated in the Senate, which Republicans sunk in February. “Instead of telling more debunked lies to justify opposing the toughest bipartisan border legislation in modern history, Senator Britt should stop choosing human smugglers and fentanyl traffickers over our national security and the Border Patrol Union,” saidDeputy White House press secretary Andrew Bates. “Like President Biden said in his State of the Union, ‘We have a simple choice: We can fight about fixing the border, or we can fix it.’”
