It has been noted that Senator Katie Britt (R-AL) has recently come under fire for using a decades-old story from a sex trafficking survivor in her State of the Union response to attack President Joe Biden’s border policies via Mediaite.
It has come to light that an interview on Fox News Sunday, anchor Shannon Bream confronted the Alabama Senator about the story — in which she said the following:
“We know that President Biden didn’t just create this border crisis. He invited it with 94 executive actions in his first 100 days. When I took office, I took a different approach. I traveled to the Del Rio sector of Texas. That’s where I spoke to a woman who shared her story with me. She had been sex trafficked by the cartels starting at the age of 12. She told me not just that she was raped every day, but how many times a day she was raped. The cartels put her on a mattress in a shoe box of a room, and they sent men through that door over and over again for hours and hours on end. We wouldn’t be okay with this happening in a Third World country. 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.”
“Did you mean to give the impression that this horrible story happened on President Biden’s watch?” Bream asked Britt.
Here was the senator’s response.
“Look, I very specifically said this is what President Biden did during his first 100 days. Minutes after coming into office, he stopped all deportations. He halted construction of the border wall. And he said, I am going to give amnesty to millions, those types of things. Act as a magnet to have more and more people here. I then said in his first 100 days he had 94 executive actions. And those executive actions didn’t just, create the crisis. They invited it.
I then contrasted it with my first 100 days. Shannon, I went to the border three times in my first 100 days in office, and when I was there, I asked for the real, unvarnished truth. I wanted to sit down. I asked the Border Patrol agents. I asked the people there. I asked the victims, previous victims of drug cartels, tell me what it’s like. Tell me what we need to do. Tell me what we need to know.”
Bream was not convinced that Britt was not trying to link the incident to Biden.
“But to be clear, the story that you relate is not something that’s happened under the Biden administration, that particular person?” Bream asked.
“I very clearly said I spoke to a woman who told me about when she was trafficked when she was 12,” Britt replied. “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. 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.”
In a statement, White House spokesperson Andrew Bates slammed Britt for the story.
“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. 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.’”
