The Republican senator who gave the party’s answer to the president

Joe

Biden’s State of the Union address used a harrowing account of the sexual abuse of a young woman to attack his border policies, but the rapes did not occur in the US or during the Biden administration.

First-term Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama criticized current immigration policies in the Republican response and described meeting a woman at the U.S.-Mexico border who said she had been raped thousands of times in a cartel sex trafficking operation, starting at age 12 .

The victim has previously spoken publicly about the abuse that took place in her home country of Mexico between 2004 and 2004.

up to 20

08 not in the United States during the Biden administration. Still, Britt used the story to rebuke Biden’s action at the border.

We would not approve of this happening in a third world country. “This is the United States of America, and it is past time for us to behave like this,” Britt said in the speech broadcast Thursday evening from her home in Alabama. President Biden’s border crisis is an embarrassment.

Takeaways from Biden’s State of the Union Address: Combative attacks on an enemy without a name

Britt has made immigration one of her top issues in her first years in the Senate, and Republicans have seized on a wave of immigrants entering the country during Biden’s term to attack the president. Former President

Donald

Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican nomination this year, blamed Biden for the killing of a nursing student from Georgia after an immigrant from Venezuela who entered the US illegally was arrested and charged with murder.

Independent journalist Jonathan Katz revealed in a TikTok video on Friday that the sex trafficking of the victim named by Britt on Thursday did not take place during the Biden administration or in the United States.

Britt spokesman Sean Ross confirmed to the Associated Press on Saturday that the senator was speaking about the story of a young Mexican woman who said she was repeatedly raped in Mexico between 2004 and 2004.

up to 20

08 when Republican George W. Bush was US president.

Ross said people continue to be victims of disgusting, brutal human trafficking by the cartels.

Britt traveled to the border at Texas’ Del Rio Sector in January 2023 with fellow Republican Sens. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi, according to a press release issued from Hyde-Smith’s office at the time.

Biden’s State of the Union address draws 32 million TV viewers, topping last year’s speech

The hero of the senators a round table featuring former Mexican Congresswoman Rosa Mara de la Garza, Fox News contributor Sara Carter and Karla Jacinto Romero, a human trafficking survivor, the press release said. Senators heard about cartel activity in Mexico and the work being done to rescue human trafficking victims.

Romero, an anti-trafficking advocate, has spoken publicly about being a victim of child prostitution in Mexico, including during 2015 testimony before a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee. Romero, then 22, told the subcommittee that she was 12 when her mother threw her out on the street, and a pimp trafficked her to more than 40,000 clients in four years. Romero said many of the clients were foreigners who had traveled to Mexico for sexual interactions with minors like them.

Britt’s rebuttal, delivered from her own kitchen table, painted a dark vision for the country under Democrats and warned of violence. She spoke about her two children and warned that life is becoming more and more dangerous.” She also called Biden a hesitant 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 for her 2022 election and has remained in contact with the former president. She recently pushed him to support in vitro fertilization following a ruling by her state government.

S

supreme

c

The court blocked a number of IVF procedures.

Emily Wagster Pettus writes for the Associated Press. AP reporters Mary Clare Jalonick and Adriana Gomez Licon contributed to this report.