Senator Katie Britt.
Credit: The New York Times
Sen Katie Britt, R-Ala, on Sunday sought to defend comments she made in her response to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address Thursday, when she described the experience of a woman who was sexually trafficked in Mexico between 2004 and 2008 in a way that falsely implied it had happened in the United States under Biden.
“No,” Britt said on “Fox News Sunday” when the host, Shannon Bream, asked whether she had intended to suggest that. She went on to argue that viewers should have parsed her wording to understand that she wasn’t referring to a recent case.
“I very clearly said I spoke to a woman who told me about when she was trafficked when she was 12,” she said. “I didn’t say a teenager. I didn’t say a young woman. A grown woman, a woman, when she was trafficked when she was 12.”
Britt’s story has received intense scrutiny since an independent journalist, Jonathan Katz, posted a video on TikTok on Friday highlighting the misleading framing. Former President Donald Trump praised Britt for her speech. But it has drawn criticism even from some Republicans, who questioned her delivery and her choice to speak from her kitchen, and “Saturday Night Live” mocked it.
After criticising some of Biden’s immigration policies in his first 100 days in office — including a halt to border-wall construction, though construction has since continued, and a pause on some deportations, which she falsely described as his having “stopped all deportations” — Britt said in the Fox interview that she had referred to the woman, Karla Jacinto Romero, because Jacinto is an advocate for the welfare of victims of similar crimes that are “happening now at an astronomical rate.”
She said human trafficking had grown into a $13 billion industry from a $500 million industry in 2018. That statistic is from 2022, meaning the increase came over a four-year period roughly equally divided between the Trump and Biden administrations.
Andrew Bates, a White House spokesperson, noted that congressional Republicans opposed a bipartisan border-security deal earlier this year.