Alabama Sen. Katie Britt graphically described a woman’s story of being “sex trafficked by the cartels starting at age 12,” during the Republican response to the State of the Union address on Thursday, using the story as an anecdote of, what she called, President Joe Biden’s failed immigration policies. But the story she seemed to describe didn’t take place during Biden’s time as president or vice president, nor did it happen in the United States.
“When I first took office, I did something different. I traveled to the Del Rio sector of Texas, where I spoke to a woman who shared her story with me. She had been sex trafficked by the cartels starting at age 12. She told me not just that she was raped every day, but how many times a day she was raped,” Britt said from her Alabama home.
She then described in detail how “the cartels put her on a mattress in a shoebox of a room, and they sent men through that door, over and over again, for hours and hours on end.”
“We wouldn’t be OK with this happening in a third-world country,” Britt said. “This is the United States of America, and it’s past time we start acting like it. President Biden’s border crisis is a disgrace. It’s despicable. And it’s almost entirely preventable.”
In a detailed video posted on TikTok on Friday, freelance journalist Jonathan Katz tracks down what appears to be the story Britt references and finds that it happened in Mexico in the mid-2000s, not while Biden was president or vice president.
Katz cites a 2023 press release from Sen. Marsha Blackburn, who, along with Sens. Britt and Cindy Hyde-Smith, went to Eagle Pass, Texas, in January 2023 – shortly after Britt took office – to hear from Karla Jacinto Romero, a human trafficking survivor, among others.
“The…
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