Amid criticism, Britt tries to defend her misleading boundary comments
Senator Katie Britt of Alabama on Sunday sought to defend comments she made in her response to President Biden’s State of the Union address on Thursday, when she described the experience of a woman who was sexually trafficked in Mexico between 2004 and 2008 a way that falsely suggested it had happened in the United States under President Biden.
“No,” Ms. Britt said on “Fox News Sunday” when the host, Shannon Bream, asked if she planned to suggest that. She further argued that viewers should have analyzed her wording to understand that she was not referring to a recent case.
“I said very clearly that I spoke to A woman who told me about the time she was traded 12,” she said. “I didn’t say a teenager. I didn’t say a young woman. A grown woman, A womanwhen she was traded when she was twelve.”
Ms. Britt’s story has come under scrutiny since an independent journalist, Jonathan Katz, posted a video on TikTok on Friday highlighting the misleading framing. Mr. Trump praised Ms. Britt for her speech. But it has even drawn criticism from some Republicans, who questioned her speech and her choice to speak from her kitchen, and “Saturday Night Live” mocked it.
After criticizing some of Mr Biden’s immigration policies during his first 100 days in office – including a halt to border wall construction, although construction has continued since then, and a pause on some deportations, which she wrongly described as having ‘stopped all deportations’” – Ms. Britt said in the Fox interview that she had referred to the woman, Karla Jacinto Romero, because Ms. Jacinto is an advocate for the welfare of victims of similar crimes that are “now happening at an astronomical rate.”
She said human trafficking has grown to a $13 billion industry, from a $500 million industry in 2018. That statistic is from 2022, meaning the increase happened over a four-year period, split roughly evenly between governments of Trump and Biden.
“We need to tell those stories, and the liberal media needs to cover them, because there are victims all the way to the border, there are victims at the border and then there are victims all over our country,” Ms. said. Britt said. “And I think it’s disgusting to try to silence the voice of telling the story of what it’s like to be a victim of sex trafficking, when we know that this is one of the things that the drug cartels benefit from the most .”
Andrew Bates, a White House spokesman, noted that Republicans in Congress opposed a bipartisan border security treaty earlier this year. The bill stalled after former President Donald J. Trump spoke out against it, saying he did not want it to pass because Republicans might not be able to continue campaigning on a border crisis.
“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,” the Mr Bates.
Nicholas Nehamas reporting contributed.