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Sen. Katie Britt has been roundly criticized for her State of the Union rebuttal. Now, Karla Jacinto Romero, the person at the center of a harrowing story she told about sex trafficking, has also publicly chastised the Alabama Republican for misusing and misrepresenting her experience.
To criticize President Joe Biden’s immigration policies, Britt’s speech referenced a story of a young woman being trafficked as a child. Although Britt did not mention Jacinto Romero by name, the details align with Jacinto Romero's experience. In an interview with CNN on Sunday, Jacinto Romero said that the senator should consider the enormity of the issue before invoking such a horrific personal story.
Asked if the senator had taken advantage of her story for political purposes, Jacinto Romero said, according to an English translation from CNN: "Yes. In fact I hardly ever cooperate with politicians because it seems to me that they only want an image. They only want a photo. And that, to me, is not fair."
In Britt's telling, she met a woman during a visit to Del Rio, Texas, last year, who recounted her experience of being sex-trafficked "by the cartels" from 12 to 16 years old. She implied that the incident had taken place in the United States and called Biden's border policies "a disgrace."
But as independent journalist Jonathan Katz first detailed, Britt's invoking Jacinto Romero's experience in the context of Biden's border policies was misleading. Jacinto Romero also told CNN that Britt got several details about her story wrong: She was not trafficked by cartels, but by a pimp who entrapped girls to force them into sex work. She was trafficked when George W. Bush was president — and never in the U.S. Jacinto Romero added that she met Britt at an event with government officials and other anti-trafficking activists, not one-on-one.
Britt's office has insisted that the story is "100% true," and Britt told "Fox News Sunday" that she did not mean to suggest it happened during Biden's presidency.
Moreover, Jacinto Romero told CNN that Britt's office did not reach out for permission to use her story in a political speech. She urged politicians to have more empathy for victims.
"I work as a spokesperson for many victims who have no voice, and I really would like them to be empathetic," she said. "All the governors, all the senators, to be empathetic with the issue of human trafficking, because there are millions of girls and boys who disappear all the time — people who are really trafficked and abused, as [Britt] mentioned. And I think she should first take into account what really happens before telling a story of that magnitude."