Senator Katie Britt lashed out at Biden for refuting the sex trafficking allegation

Alabama Republican Sen. Katie Britt is under fire for using what appears to be the experience of a sex trafficking victim from the early 2000s to condemn President Joe Biden and his border policy.

Britt rebutted the GOP at Biden’s State of the Union address to Congress this week.

During his rebuttal, Britt referenced a visit to the Del Rio sector of the Texas border where he represented a seemingly personal conversation with someone who had survived gang sex trafficking in the United States

“That’s where I talked to a woman who shared her story with me,” Britt said in the video. “She was a victim of cartel sex trafficking starting at the age of 12.”

The victim Britt referred to was Karla Jacinto Romero, a victim of sex trafficking in Mexico – not the United States, as the senator suggested – from 2004 to 2008, twenty years before Democrat Biden became president.

Journalist Jonathan Katz first reconstructed Britt’s presentation of Jacinto Romero’s experience in a TikTok video.

Britt apparently attempted to present the anecdote as a damning example of Biden’s handling of the border.

“We would not agree to this happening in a third world country,” he added. “President Biden’s border policies are a disgrace. This crisis is despicable.”

But Jacinto Romero was not sex trafficked into the United States because of Biden’s border policy, because he was not president from 2004 to 2008, and because she was a victim of sex trafficking in Mexico.

Katz criticized Britt for implying that Jacinto Romero had disclosed his experiences in private.

“Britt tells it as if she’s sitting on the banks of the Rio Grande, as if he’s holding her hand, as if he’s making her tell a story she won’t tell anyone else,” he said.

Instead, he added, Jacinto Romero is a public advocate for sex trafficking and has repeatedly shared her story publicly to shed light on the issue. Jacinto Romero ahS he has testified to the U.S. Congress, the Mexican House of Representatives and the Vatican, according to a brief 2015 profile in a U.S. House of Representatives document.

Britt visited the Del Rio area in January 2023 during a joint trip with Sens. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., and Cindy Hyde-Smith, R-Miss. During that trip, Jacinto Romero appeared at a press conference with Britt, Blackburn and Hyde-Smith where he publicly recounted his grueling history of sex trafficking.

Britt has faced a barrage of criticism online since the anecdote was revealed to be out of line, compounding previous disapproval over the delivery of his rebuttal.

“So not only was Katie Britt a huge embarrassment. She’s also a complete liar. Alabama’s finest!” Political scientist Norman Ornstein wrote in an send.

Ornstein is part of a larger chorus of journalists AND others criticizing Britt for his narration.

“This was the old politics of Alabama. The politics of fear and confusion,” said Alabama columnist Kyle Whitmire he wrote on

Christine Pelosi, political strategist and daughter of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, asked Saturday X post that Britt apologize “for lying about the horrific sexual assault case that you exploited for political purposes.”

Sean Ross, a spokesman for Senator Britt, did not deny that Jacinto Romero is the sex trafficking survivor in question, but reiterated Britt’s story.

“The story Senator Britt told was 100% correct,” Ross said in a statement to CNBC. “But there are more innocent victims of this kind of disgusting and brutal trafficking by the cartels than ever before right now.”

While sex trafficking has occurred in the United States under the Biden administration, Jacinto Romero’s sex trafficking story is not an example of it.

“Today, Karla is a happy and successful mother of two beautiful girls, a wife, a student and an international activist,” the 2015 Chamber document reads.



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