By Emily Wagster Pettus —
The Associated Press
The Republican senator who responded on behalf of the party to President Joe Biden's State of the Union address took advantage of a heartbreaking case of sexual abuse of a young woman to attack the president's border policies, but the violations did not happen in the United States or during the current Government.
Alabama Senator Katie Britt criticized current immigration policies by describing how she met a woman on the border between Mexico and the United States, who told her that since she was 12 years old she had been raped thousands of times due to a sex trafficking operation run by cartels.
The victim had spoken publicly about
the abuse that happened in Mexico, her native country, between 2004 and 2008
, not in the United States during the Biden Administration.
Even so, Britt took advantage of the events to rebuke the president's actions at the border.
Senator Katie Britt during her response to Joe Biden's State of the Union address, from Alabama, on March 7, 2024. Official channel of Senator Katie Britt
“We would not agree with this happening in a third world country.
“This is the United States of America and it is time for us to start acting like it,” Britt said in a Thursday night speech televised from her home in Alabama.
“President Biden’s border crisis is a disgrace.”
Britt has made immigration one of his main issues in his first years in the Senate, and Republicans have taken advantage of the increase in immigrants entering the United States irregularly during Biden's term to attack the president.
Former President Donald Trump, the front-runner for the Republican nomination, has blamed him for the murder of a Georgia nursing student after a Venezuelan who entered the country illegally was arrested and charged with her death.
It didn't happen under Biden's presidency.
Independent journalist Jonathan Katz revealed on Friday in a TikTok video that the sex trafficking of the victim mentioned a day earlier by Britt did not happen during the Biden Administration or in the United States.
Britt's spokesman, Sean Ross, confirmed to The Associated Press on Saturday that the senator was speaking about the events of a young Mexican woman who told him that she was repeatedly raped in Mexico between 2004 and 2008, when Republican George W. Bush was president of USA.
[Greg Abbott says the border crisis is the “number one” problem facing the United States]
Ross stressed that people continue to be victims of “brutal and disgusting trafficking by cartels.”
Britt traveled to the Del Río, Texas, sector on the border with Mexico in January 2023 with Republican Senators Marsha Blackburn and Cindy Hyde-Smith, for Tennessee and Mississippi, respectively, according to the press release issued at the time by Hyde's office. Smith.
“The senators organized a round table with former Mexican congresswoman Rosa María de la Garza, Fox News collaborator Sara Carter and Karla Jacinto Romero, who was a victim of human trafficking,” the statement said.
“The senators learned about the activity of the cartels in Mexico and the work being done to rescue victims of human trafficking,” he added.
Romero, an anti-human trafficking activist, has spoken publicly about being a victim of child prostitution in Mexico, including during testimony in 2015 before a subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives.
Romero, who was 22 years old at the time, told the subcommittee that she was 12 years old when her mother threw her out on the street and a pimp sexually exploited her for four years with more than 40,000 clients;
many of them foreigners who had traveled to Mexico to have sexual interactions with minors like her.
The youngest woman in the Senate
Britt's response, delivered from her own kitchen table, laid out a dark vision of the country under Democratic rule and warned of violence.
He talked about his two children and maintained that “life is becoming more and more dangerous.”
He also called Biden a “hesitant and diminished leader.”
The Alabama senator, 42 years old and the youngest woman in the Senate, has said she wants to represent a new generation of leadership in Washington.
Trump endorsed her in his 2022 election and has remained in touch with the former president, most recently pressuring him to support in vitro fertilization after a ruling by his state Supreme Court blocked some of its procedures.