By EMILY WAGSTER PETTUS (Associated Press)
The Republican senator who gave the get together’s response to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union tackle used a harrowing account of a younger girl’s sexual abuse to assault his border insurance policies, however the rapes didn’t occur within the U.S. or through the Biden administration.
First-term Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama within the GOP response criticized present immigration insurance policies, describing how she had met a girl on the U.S.-Mexico border who informed of being raped 1000’s of occasions in a intercourse trafficking operation run by cartels, beginning at age 12.
The sufferer has beforehand spoken publicly in regards to the abuse occurring in her dwelling nation of Mexico from 2004 to 2008 — not within the United States through the Biden administration. Yet, Britt used the account to chastise Biden’s motion 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 mentioned within the Thursday evening speech televised from her dwelling in Alabama. “President Biden’s border crisis is a disgrace.”
Britt has made immigration one in every of her high points in her first years within the Senate, and Republicans have seized on a surge of immigrants getting into the nation throughout Biden’s time period to assault the president. Former President Donald Trump, the front-runner for the Republican nomination this yr, blames Biden for the killing of a Georgia nursing scholar after an immigrant from Venezuela who entered the U.S. illegally was arrested and charged together with her homicide.
Independent journalist Jonathan Katz revealed in a TikTok video Friday that the intercourse trafficking of the sufferer talked about by Britt on Thursday didn’t occur through the Biden administration or within the United States.
Britt spokesman Sean Ross on Saturday confirmed to The Associated Press that the senator was talking in regards to the account of a younger Mexican girl who informed of being repeatedly raped in Mexico from 2004 to 2008 — when Republican George W. Bush was the U.S. president.
Ross mentioned persons are nonetheless victims of “disgusting, brutal trafficking by the cartels.”
Asked by Fox News Sunday if she had meant to provide the impression that the trafficking and rape in query occurred through the Biden administration, Britt mentioned “No.” She mentioned she had recounted the sufferer’s story to “bring some light to” intercourse trafficking by cartels.
Britt traveled to the border on the Del Rio Sector in Texas in January 2023 with fellow Republican Sens. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi, in keeping with a information launch issued then from Hyde-Smith’s workplace.
“The Senators held a roundtable with former Mexican Congresswoman Rosa María de la Garza, Fox News Contributor Sara Carter and Karla Jacinto Romero, a survivor of human trafficking,” the information launch mentioned. “The Senators learned about cartel activity in Mexico and the work being done to rescue victims of human trafficking.”
Romero — an advocate towards human trafficking — has spoken publicly about being a sufferer of kid prostitution in Mexico, together with throughout 2015 testimony to a subcommittee of the U.S. House. Romero, then 22, informed the subcommittee that she was 12 when her mom threw her out on the streets, and a pimp trafficked her to greater than 40,000 shoppers over 4 years. Romero mentioned most of the shoppers have been foreigners who had traveled to Mexico for sexual interactions with minors like her.
Britt’s rebuttal, delivered from her personal kitchen desk, laid out a darkish imaginative and prescient for the nation underneath Democrats and warned of violence. She talked about her two youngsters and warned that “life is getting more and more dangerous.” She additionally known as Biden a “dithering and diminished leader.”
The Alabama senator, 42 and the youngest girl within the Senate, has mentioned she desires to characterize a brand new era of management in Washington. She was endorsed by Trump in her 2022 election and has remained in contact with the previous president, most lately pushing him to assist in vitro fertilization after a ruling by her state’s supreme court docket blocked some IVF procedures.
Associated Press writers Mary Clare Jalonick and Adriana Gomez Licon contributed to this report.
Source: www.bostonherald.com”