Sen. Katie Britt Grilled on Fox News for Using 'Decades-Old' Sex Trafficking Story in SOTU Response

Alabama Senator Katie Britt found herself in the hot seat on Fox News this Sunday. It was about her State of the Union rebuttal speech, specifically her use of a decades-old story of a human trafficking victim to criticize President Joe Biden. Shannon Bream, the moderator of Fox News Sunday, didn't let Britt off easy. She pressed the senator on the criticism she faced for her speech, which centered on a story of a woman who'd been trafficked and raped by a cartel since the age of 12, as per Mediaite.

The senator seemed to be referring to Karla Jacinto Romero's testimony before Congress in 2015, during which she stated that between 2004 and 2008—under George W. Bush's presidency—she was molested and trafficked in Mexico, far from the border with the United States.

“Nobody is questioning that the story happened and she is actually who she is and says she is and that does happen, the question is about the timing and implication of you telling this story," the Fox News Host said, as per Rolling Stone. Bream then asked, "Did you mean to give the impression this horrible story happened on President Biden’s watch?"

Britt then said, "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... 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." The senator added, "If you look back under 2018, [human trafficking] was a $500 million industry, human trafficking by the drug cartels. It is now a $13 billion industry. Shannon, the drug cartels are winning under this. This is a story of what is happening now at an astronomical rate, and we have to bring attention to it." 

According to Britt, "The liberal media needs to pay attention to it because there are victims all the way coming to the border, there are victims at the border, then there are victims all throughout our country. To me, it’s disgusting to try to silence the voice of telling the story of what it is like to be sex trafficked when we know that is one of the things the drug cartels are profiting most off of," as per The NYT.

"To be clear, the story you relayed is not something that’s happened under the Biden administration, that particular person?" asked a skeptical Bream in response to the senator. "I very clearly said I spoke to a woman who told me about when she was trafficked when she was 12," the senator emphasized before adding, "I didn’t say a young woman or a grown woman, a woman when she was trafficked when she was 12." “So listening to her story, she was a victims-right advocate who is saying this is what drug cartels are doing, this is how they’re profiting off of women, and it is disgusting. So I am hopeful that it brings some light to it and we can actually do something about human trafficking and that that’s what the media actually decides to cover.”