Sen. Katie Britt (R-Alabama) is seen at the Capitol during voting on Tuesday, January 9, 2024.
Anna Moneymaker | Getty Images
Alabama Republican Sen. Katie Britt is under fire for using her supposed experience as a sex trafficking victim in the early 2000s to criticize President Joe Biden and his border policies.
Britt hit back at Republicans this week over Biden’s State of the Union address to Congress.
In his rebuttal, Britt cited a visit to the Del Rio area on the Texas border and events he described there. A seemingly personal conversation with a survivor of mass sex trafficking in the United States.
“So I talked to a woman and she shared her story with me,” Britt said in the video. “She had been sex trafficked by a cartel since she was 12 years old.”
The victim Britt was referring to was Carla Jacinto Romero, who was sex trafficked in Mexico, not in the United States as the senator suggested, from 2004 to 2008, two decades before Democrat Biden became president. Ta.
Journalist Jonathan Katz first put together a TikTok video of Britt’s presentation about Jacinto Romero’s experience.
Britt seemed to be trying to present this anecdote as an abhorrent example of Biden’s border controls.
“We would not tolerate something like this happening in a third world country,” she added. “President Biden’s border policies are disgraceful. This crisis is despicable.”
But Jacinto Romero was not a victim of sex trafficking in the United States as a result of Biden’s border policies. Because Biden was not president from 2004 to 2008, and because she was a sex trafficker in Mexico.
Katz accused Britt of letting Jacinto Romero divulge his experiences personally.
“Britt tells this story as if he were sitting on the banks of the Rio Grande, as if holding his hand, as if making him tell a story that he wouldn’t tell anyone else,” he said. Told.
Instead, he added, Jacinto Romero is a public advocate for sex trafficking and has repeatedly shared her story publicly to shine a light on the issue.Jacinto Romero iss According to a brief 2015 profile in U.S. House documents, he has testified to the U.S. Congress, the Mexican House of Representatives, and the Vatican.
Britt visited the Del Rio area in January 2023 on a joint trip with Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Mississippi). During that trip, Jacinto Romero attended a press conference with Britt, Blackburn, and Hyde-Smith, where she publicly told her story of gruesome sex trafficking.
Since the anecdote was debunked, Britt has faced a barrage of online criticism, compounding existing disapproval of her rebuttal.
“So Katie Britt wasn’t just a fiery embarrassment. She was also an outright liar. The best person in Alabama!” political scientist Norman Ornstein wrote in X. Ta post.
Ornstein is part of a broader choir. journalist and author Blasted Britt’s storytelling.
“This was old Alabama politics. It was politics of fear and confusion,” said Alabama columnist Kyle Whitmire. I have written “Mr. Britt blamed Mr. Biden for an assault that appears to have occurred 20 years ago. Mr. Britt’s press secretary would not give a definitive answer when asked.”
Sean Ross, a spokesperson for Sen. Britt, did not deny that Jacinto Romero is a survivor of the sex trafficking in question, but further emphasized Britt’s story.
“Senator Britt was 100% correct,” Ross said in a statement to CNBC. “But now, more than ever, there are more innocent victims of this type of hateful and brutal human trafficking by cartels.”
Sex trafficking is happening in the United States under the Biden administration, but Jacinto Romero’s sex trafficking story is not an example of that.
A 2015 House document reads: “Today, Carla is a happy and successful mother of two beautiful girls, a wife, a student, and an international activist.”