The woman at the center of the sex trafficking story Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., discussed in her State of the Union response criticized the senator on Sunday.
Britt last week came under fire for seeming to blame President Joe Biden for a harrowing tale of child sex trafficking that occurred in Mexico during the George W. Bush administration. The victim, Karla Jacinto Romero, shared her story in a congressional hearing in 2015.
“We wouldn’t be OK with this happening in a third-world country,” Britt said in her rebuttal to Biden’s speech last week. “This is the United States of America, and it is past time, in my opinion, that we start acting like it. President Biden’s border policies are a disgrace. This crisis is despicable.”
Fox News host Shannon Bream pressed Britt on Sunday about whether she intended to imply that “this horrible story happened on President Biden’s watch.”
“I very clearly said I spoke to a woman who told me about when she was trafficked when she was 12, so 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 replied.
“And so listening to her story, she is a victims’ rights advocate who is telling this is what drug cartels are doing, this is how they’re profiting off of women, and it is disgusting,” Britt continued. “And so I am hopeful that it brings some light to it, and we can actually do something about human trafficking, and that that’s what the media actually decides to cover.”
Katie Britt on Fox News Sunday (and not in the kitchen!) is asked about her misleading tale about sexual assault in her SOTU rebuttal. She claims not plausibly that she didn't meant to smear Biden by falsely implying an assault that happened 20 years ago happened under his watch. pic.twitter.com/KpPWSewZlS
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 10, 2024
Jacinto on Sunday told CNN that lawmakers lack empathy when they discuss sex trafficking for political purposes.
“I hardly ever cooperate with politicians, because it seems to me that they only want an image. They only want a photo — and that to me is not fair,” she said.
Jacinto told the outlet that Mexican politicians exploited her story for political purposes and not it is happening again in the United States.
“I work as a spokesperson for many victims who have no voice, and I really would like them to be empathetic: all the governors, all the senators, to be empathetic with the issue of human trafficking because there are millions of girls and boys who disappear all the time,” she said. “People who are really trafficked and abused, as she [Britt] mentioned. And I think she [Britt] should first take into account what really happens before telling a story of that magnitude.”
Jacinto told CNN that she met Britt at an event at the southern border with other officials, not during a one-on-one as Britt had stated. Jacinto said she was never trafficking in the U.S. as the senator appeared to suggest. And she said she was not trafficked by cartels but by a pimp who entrapped vulnerable girls and forced them into sex work.
WOW!
— Ed Krassenstein (@EdKrassen) March 11, 2024
Sex Trafficking victim Karla Jacinto has some very harsh words for Republican Senator Katie Britt.
Britt, who used Jacinto’s story in the GOP response to the State of the Union Address, not only seems to have gotten facts wrong, but she also didn’t ask Jacinto permission… pic.twitter.com/2UohWXKhfi
The White House on Sunday accused Britt of sharing “debunked lies.”
“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,” White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates said in a statement. “Like President Biden said in his State of the Union, ‘We have a simple choice: We can fight about fixing the border or we can fix it.’”
