Katie Britt used decades-old example of rapes in Mexico as Republican attack on Biden border policy | The Hill
By: EMILY WAGSTER PETTUS (The Hill)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
The Republican senator who gave the party's response to President Joe Biden's State of the Union address used a harrowing account of a young woman's sexual abuse to attack his border policies, but the rapes did not happen in the U.S. or during the Biden administration.
First-term Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama in the GOP response criticized current immigration policies, describing how she had met a woman at the U.S.-Mexico border who told of being raped thousands of times in a sex trafficking operation run by cartels, starting at age 12.
The victim has previously spoken publicly about the abuse happening in her home country of Mexico from 2004 to 2008 — not in the United States during the Biden administration. Yet, Britt used the account to chastise Biden's action on the border.
"We wouldn't be OK with this happening in a third-world country. This is the United States of America, and it's past time we start acting like it," Britt said in the Thursday night speech televised from her home in Alabama. "President Biden's border crisis is a disgrace."
Britt has made immigration one of her top issues in her first years in the Senate, and Republicans have seized on a surge of immigrants entering the country during Biden's term to attack the president. Former President Donald Trump, the front-runner for the Republican nomination this year, blames Biden for the killing of a Georgia nursing student after an immigrant from Venezuela who entered the U.S. illegally was arrested and charged with her murder.
Independent journalist Jonathan Katz revealed in a TikTok video Friday that the sex trafficking of the victim mentioned by Britt on Thursday did not happen during the Biden administration or in the United States.
Britt spokesman Sean Ross on Saturday confirmed to The Associated Press that the senator was speaking about the account of a young Mexican woman who told of being repeatedly raped in Mexico from 2004 to 2008 — when Republican George W. Bush was the U.S. president.
Ross said people are still victims of "disgusting, brutal trafficking by the cartels."
Britt traveled to the border at the Del Rio Sector in Texas in January 2023 with fellow Republican Sens. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi, according to a news release issued then from Hyde-Smith's office.
"The Senators held a roundtable with former Mexican Congresswoman Rosa Maria de la Garza, Fox News Contributor Sara Carter and Karla Jacinto Romero, a survivor of human trafficking," the news release said. "The Senators learned about cartel activity in Mexico and the work being done to rescue victims of human trafficking."
Romero — an advocate against human trafficking — has spoken publicly about being a victim of child prostitution in Mexico, including during 2015 testimony to a subcommittee of the U.S. House. Romero, then 22, told the subcommittee that she was 12 when her mother threw her out on the streets, and a pimp trafficked her to more than 40,000 clients over four years. Romero said many of the clients were foreigners who had traveled to Mexico for sexual interactions with minors like her.
Britt's rebuttal, delivered from her own kitchen table, laid out a dark vision for the country under Democrats and warned of violence. She talked about her two children and warned that "life is getting more and more dangerous." She also called Biden a "dithering and diminished leader."
The Alabama senator, 42 and the youngest woman in the Senate, has said she wants to represent a new generation of leadership in Washington. She was endorsed by Trump in her 2022 election and has remained in touch with the former president, most recently pushing him to support in vitro fertilization after a ruling by her state's supreme court blocked some IVF procedures.
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Associated Press writers Mary Clare Jalonick and Adriana Gomez Licon contributed to this report.
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Scarlett Johansson parodies Katie Britt’s SOTU rebuttal in SNL cold open
Actress Scarlett Johansson parodied Sen. Katie Britt’s (R-Ala.) rebuttal to the State of the Union last week in “Saturday Night Live’s” cold open after the response was met with widespread criticism and mocking on social media.
The episode opened with a brief introduction from cast member Ego Nwodim, who was playing CNN’s Abby Phillips, before cutting to Mikey Day, who was playing President Biden delivering his “State of the Union” address.
“Folks, tonight I’m going to cover a lot. There’s going to be a lot of applause. So, Kamala, I hope you didn’t skip leg day, girl. You’re going to be up and down all night,” Day said, before Punkie Johnson, playing Vice President Harris, stood up and applauded.
He was later booed by Heidi Gardner, playing Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) — who had heckled Biden during his address Thursday night. He then introduced Britt to give the Republican response, saying, “I think she’s going to help me more than anything else I could say here.”
Johansson, playing Britt, delivered the mock rebuttal from a kitchen like the junior Alabama Senator did last week.
“My name is Katie Britt and I have the honor of serving the great people of Alabama. But tonight I’ll be auditioning the part of scary mom performing an original monologue called ‘This Country is Hell,’” Johnasson said.
“You see, I’m not just a senator. I’m a wife, a mother and the craziest b—- in the Target parking lot. I’m worried about the future of our children. And this is why I’ve invited you into this strange, empty kitchen because Republicans want me to appeal to women voters and women love kitchen,” she added.
“Saturday Night Live” also took aim at some aspects of her speech that were criticized online, including her telling a story about a woman who was sexually abused in a sex trafficking operation run by cartels to make her points on immigration. However, The Associated Press reported that the incident did not occur in the United States or under Biden’s administration.
“And like any mom, I’m going to do a pivot out of nowhere into a shockingly violent story about sex trafficking. And rest assured every detail about it is real, except the year, where it took place and who was president when it happened,” Johansson said.
Only Democrats and leftists deny the harsh reality that is the US southern border.
Spin, spin, spin, all you want; but nothing can change the reality of Brandon's wide open southern border and failure to enforce our immigration laws.
Why did your hero Katie Britt lie
She fucking lied about the border having a massive amount of rapes?
Read the damn articles I linked. They are all recent.
Take your misogynistic spin machine and go.
Speaking of spin...
1) All of your links are about rapes that occurred outside the US, some as far away as Colombia and Panama.
2) The border isn't "wide open." Some people do get through undetected, but the vast majority of reported numbers are Border Patrol encounters. Saying it's wide open implies there's no one intercepting migrants at all, and that just isn't true.
While wearing a Christian necklace in plain sight, Katie Britt misled the public in an utterly disgusting and vile way in her SOTU response, by falsely attributing a specific rape incident to the border crisis and Biden. A spokesperson for Britt has confirmed that she was referring to Karla Jacinto Romero, a Mexican native whose trafficking and rapes occurred in Mexico, but not on the border, and from 2004 to 2008, when Bush was in office. Now that's some freaking spin.
It's worth noting that the bipartisan border bill that Republicans walked away from because Benedict Donald wants the border crisis to be an election issue (and unsolved) would have disincentivized large numbers of future potential migrants from trying to take advantage of years-long asylum cases by drastically shortening the process.
But keep on with your bullshit political theater.
Dig, is Benedict Donald the same as ''Walking Eagle Trump'' seen below?
He was named by our tribe ''Walking Eagle'' cuz he is so full of shit he can't fly.
The one and only.
The fallout from Biden’s state of the union has turned into such a disaster that democrats are furiously deflecting to attack Katie Britt. The front page makes that very clear,
also, imagine being a Biden cheerleader and being mad that a politician suppoedly lied (she didn’t). How you unfamiliar do you have to be with Biden’s entire oveure to ever criticize a politician for supposedly lying?
The republicans biggest mistake was simply not replaying Biden’s SOTU rebuttal where he attacks the president for not securing the border and for not putting criminals in jail.
The fallout from Biden’s state of the union has turned into such a disaster
Welcome to Opposite Day! There’s always a fearsome boogeyman for a Republican Karen to sell.
The worst polling SOTU in history coupled with the president apologizing tor offending a murderer who beat a woman to death. no wonder you have to resort to misogyny to feel better.
Misogyny like filming her in her Alabama kitchen? I guess the man of the house was busy using the office.
Keep telling a us senator what a real women can or can’t do without being attacked because she’s living up to your demands for gender roles.
Next call Clarence Thomas an Uncle Tom because he doesn’t live up to your standard of how black people should act.
Clarence Thomas is an Uncle Tom because he votes against the interests of 99.9% of black Americans.
That remark is racist.
Which decisions have especially affected blacks?
Isn't EVERY black person who has ever strayed from the Democratic Party called that?
Explain the racism part.
If ypu thought that was misogyny, perhaps a review of the definition is in order.
You called him an Uncle Tom.
That is racist.
Now, what decisions impacted blacks more than other people?
So you can’t explain how it was racist then … got it.
I just did.
pretending I didn't is a child's game.
Now, what decisions affected blacks more?
I wonder if he thought it was racist when in 2016 trump looked out at a rally audience and shouted "where's my African American?"
I'm guessing not.
That is a very poor guess and even poorer deflection.
Thank you for proving my point. Textbook racism on display,
The paternalistic white liberal telling blacks how they have to act in order to be a proper black. No wonder you like Biden so much.
No, you didn’t. I made a short 17 word comment. You pretend the last 11 words were somehow irrelevant.
Calling someone an Uncle Tom IS racist!
Now. what decisions have affected blacks more than others?
OK all you have to do then is say that trump was racist when he said that
Calling someone an Uncle Tom is not racist. Unjustly calling someone an Uncle Tom could be though.
Do non racists consider people race traitors? Because the only people I know who do are well over the racist line and many ended up at tried at Nuremberg
So you are comfortable dictating which blacks are race traitors too?
not a good look. Biological determinism has been frowned upon since 1945.
If that will make you happy, here.
That remark by Trump was racist.
Do you recognize calling someone Uncle Tom is racist?
We will disagree on that then.
Should I just post the entire article I linked? No need to recreate the wheel.
Yeah, and I wonder if it were racist when the "Acting Leader" point blank stated that "if you don't vote for me, you ain't Black"
Nah - he's got a "D" after his name.
I have asked 3 times for you to answer a simple question based solely on what you wrote and each time you have ignored it.
I guess you don't think it's relevant.
I guess you don’t want to click the link so I’ll just repeat the article for [you Deleted:]
“For four decades, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has extolled the importance of “personal responsibility.” He has chastised those who “make excuses for black Americans” and argued there is a need to “emphasize black self-help.” He has denigrated affirmative action programs on the grounds that they “create a narcotic of dependency” where there should be “an ethic of responsibility and independence.” He bemoans the “ideology of victimhood” that allows the marginalized to “make demands on society for reparations and recompense.”
In light of recent revelations that Thomas has been showered by billionaire Harlan Crow with over two decades’ worth of getaways on superyachts and private jets and various other gifts, none of which he ever reported, the jurist’s long con of principled advocacy for Black self-reliance and opposition to white largesse has finally run its course. Turns out, Thomas was never against reparations—he just wanted them for himself. He is and always has been precisely what he wrongly accuses Black folks of being.
It’s been a con run by a self-serving fabulist all along. In 1980, Thomas caught the attention of the incoming president, Ronald Reagan, with a speech in which he used the “welfare queen” stereotype against his own sister. “She gets mad when the mailman is late with her welfare check. That is how dependent she is,” Thomas told an audience of fellow Black Republicans. “What’s worse is that now her kids feel entitled to the check too. They have no motivation for doing better or getting out of that situation.” A 1991 Los Angeles Times investigation found Thomas’s sister was, in fact, an underpaid single mother who used the social safety net during a brief rough patch; her children weren’t the entitled layabouts depicted by Thomas, either.
A few years later, while serving as the second-highest-ranking Black official in the Reagan administration, Thomas observed that “to be accepted into the conservative ranks and to be treated with some degree of respect, a black was required to become a caricature of sorts, providing sideshows of anti-black quips and attacks,” adding that Black conservatives “must be against affirmative action and against welfare. And your opposition had to be adamant and constant.” Forty years later, it’s hard not to think Thomas wasn’t so much airing grievances as reassuring his white conservative compatriots that he understood the assignment.
Consider that there may be no single person in American history who has benefited more from affirmative action than Clarence Thomas. It is an oft-repeated fact that Thomas got into Yale Law School based on race-conscious admissions. Claiming he was “humiliated” by possessing a law degree that “bore the taint of racial preference,” he went on to become a prominent opponent of affirmative action—even suggesting that race-based policies represented the new slavery or Jim Crow, but for white people. Nonetheless, Thomas continued to benefit from his race long after his days at Yale. He was selected for a leadership position in the Office for Civil Rights in Reagan’s Department of Education, during which time civil rights groups attempted to have him held in contempt for inadequately enforcing civil rights laws, and then was promoted to lead the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, despite lacking almost any relevant experience. Though his legacy at the EEOC was mostly a shameful one—he allowed 13,000 age-discrimination claims to expire—he was named to the federal appeals bench by President George H.W. Bush. A mere 15 months later, he was nominated for the Supreme Court. For all his bluster about self-reliance, Thomas has evidently never refused an unearned promotion.”
You can call Clarence Thomas all sorts of things. If you think he’s corrupt or a phony call him that. but racists unnecessarily racialize their attack. Declaring Someone a race traitor is the nuclear Bomb of racist attacks, because of all that you have to believe in order to even consider that people primarily owe a duty to their race.
Out of curiosity, who do you believe deputized you as the arbiter of how black people have to think and act in order to be considered authentic blacks?
thanks for answering. why couldn't you have simply provided the link when I asked?
You copied and pasted a whole bunch of stuff but none of it answers what you were asked
Clarence Thomas has been proven to be a lying sack of shit. The wife he adores is a QAnon nut job beholden to Donald Trump. He has no business being on the Supreme Court. The more we find out about how corrupt he is, the more believable Hunter S. Thomson’s decades old characterization of him is.
Why do you see Uncle Tom pejoratively?
What SCOTUS decisions have impacted blacks greater than others?
Thomas appears to be a self-hating Black American
And yet, you can not or will not link even one SCOTUS vote that affected blacks more than others to back your claim up.
I don't believe your claim for a second.
Do you find it at all odd that many white liberals seem to think blacks should ALL think only one way?
While we all know others are diverse in thinking?
Isn't that rather racist?