The Republican senator who delivered the party's response to President Biden's State of the Union address used a harrowing account of the sexual assault of a young woman to attack his border policies, but the rapes did not occur in the United States or during the Biden administration.
In a GOP response, first-term Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama criticized current immigration policies, describing how she met a woman on the U.S.-Mexico border who told her she had been raped thousands of times in a cartel-run sex trafficking operation, starting at age 12.
The victim had previously spoken publicly about abuse that occurred in her native Mexico from 2004 to 2008 — but not in the United States during the Biden administration. However, Britt used the account to rebuke Biden's actions at the border.
“We would not be OK with this happening in a Third World country. This is the United States of America, and it's time we start acting like it,” Britt said in a Thursday night televised speech from her home in Alabama. Biden is a disgrace.”
Britt made immigration one of her most important issues in her first years in the Senate, and Republicans took advantage of a wave of immigrants entering the country during Biden's term to attack the president. Former President Trump, the front-runner for the Republican nomination this year, blames Biden for the killing of a nursing student in Georgia after an immigrant from Venezuela who entered the United States illegally was arrested and charged with her murder.
Independent journalist Jonathan Katz revealed in a TikTok video on Friday that the sexual trafficking of the victim that Britt mentioned on Thursday did not occur during the Biden administration or in the United States.
Brett spokesman Sean Ross confirmed Saturday to The Associated Press that the senator was speaking about the account of a young Mexican woman who recounted being repeatedly raped in Mexico from 2004 to 2008 — when Republican George W. Bush was president of the United States.
Ross said people were still victims of “disgusting, brutal trafficking by gangs”.
Britt traveled to the Del Rio border in Texas in January 2023 with fellow Republican Senators Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi, according to a press release issued at the time by Hyde-Smith's office.
“The senators held a roundtable with former Mexican Congresswoman Rosa María de la Garza, Sarah Carter, a Fox News contributor, and Carla Jacinto Romero, a human trafficking survivor,” the press release said. “The Senators learned about cartel activity in Mexico and the work being done to rescue victims of human trafficking.”
Romero — an anti-human trafficking advocate — has spoken publicly about being a victim of child prostitution in Mexico, including during his 2015 testimony before a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee. Romero, 22, told the subcommittee she was 12 when her mother kicked her out onto 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 traveled to Mexico to have sex with minors like her.
Britt's response, delivered from her kitchen table, offered a dark vision of the country under Democratic rule and warned of violence. She spoke about her two children and warned that “life has become more dangerous.” She also described Biden as a “hesitant and shrinking leader.”
The Alabama senator, at 42 and the youngest woman in the Senate, said she wants to represent a new generation of leadership in Washington. Trump endorsed her in her 2022 election and has kept in touch with the former president, most recently pushing him to support in vitro fertilization after her state's Supreme Court ruled to ban certain IVF procedures.
Emily Wagster Pettus writes for The Associated Press. AP reporters Mary Clare Jalonick and Adriana Gomez Licon contributed to this report.
