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Katie Britt defends sex trafficking story she falsely links to Biden presidency
In her first interview since delivering her widely ridiculed rebuttal to Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech, Republican senator Katie Britt refused to apologize for invoking a story about child rape that she implied resulted from the president’s handling of the ongoing crisis at the southern US border – even though the abuse occurred years earlier in Mexico while her party controlled the White House.
Britt, 42, appeared on Fox News Sunday and denied hiding the fact that the rape and sex trafficking case to which she referred had actually occurred during the presidency of George W Bush. She also made it a point to criticize what she called “the liberal media” for how they have covered her rebuttal to Biden’s speech on Thursday, which earned being parodied on the latest episode of Saturday Night Live.
“I very specifically said … I very clearly said I spoke to a woman who told me about when she was trafficked when she was 12. So I didn’t say a teenager – I didn’t say a young woman,” Britt replied after being asked whether she intended to give the impression that the abuse occurred under the Biden administration’s watch. “[It was] a grown woman … trafficked when she was 12.”
Britt also said: “To me, it is disgusting to try to silence the voice of telling the story of what it is like to be sex trafficked.”
The junior Alabama senator’s remarks to Fox News Sunday came after even her fellow Republicans pronounced her rejoinder on Thursday to Biden’s State of the Union speech – from the setting of a kitchen – “one of our biggest disasters”.
During that rebuttal, as she oscillated between smiling and seeming to fight back tears, Britt described traveling to the Del Rio sector of the US-Mexico border and speaking to a woman whom the senator said had relayed horrific experiences.
“She had been sex-trafficked by the cartels starting at age 12,” Britt said. “She told me not just that she was raped every day – but how many times a day she was raped.”
Britt avoided saying when or where the abuse took place. But she strongly implied that it had stemmed from the Biden administration’s management of immigration issues at the southern 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. President Biden’s border crisis is a disgrace,” Britt said. “It’s despicable, and it’s almost entirely preventable.”
On Friday, in a seven-minute video on TikTok, author and former Associated Press reporter Jonathan Katz established that Britt was describing events that unfolded in Mexico in between 2004 and 2008, when Bush was president.
The tale centered on Karla Jacinto Romero, an activist who in May 2015 testified to Congress about her experiences at the hands of sex traffickers who held her captive between the ages of 12 and 16 in her native Mexico. Britt met Jacinto Romero on a visit to the border with other Republican senators in January 2023.
But while the meeting with Jacinto Romero, now 31, occurred shortly after Britt took office, her abuse occurred as many as two decades earlier and not in the US.
Katz lambasted Britt as dishonest and misleading, and many others have since done the same.
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A spokesperson for Britt confirmed to the Washington Post that the senator was referring to Jacinto Romero in her speech on Thursday. Yet that spokesperson also insisted Britt’s presentation of Jacinto Romero’s story was “100% correct”. And Britt doubled down on that position Sunday.
“This is a story of what is happening,” Britt said. “We have to tell those stories, and 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, and then there are victims all throughout the country.”
Britt’s guest spot on Fox News Sunday came hours after the actor Scarlett Johansson stood in a kitchen portraying the Alabama senator and parodied the latter’s State of the Union rebuttal on Saturday Night Live’s cold open.
Among other things, Johansson said sarcastically: “I’ve invited you into this empty kitchen because Republicans want me to appeal to women voters and women love kitchens.”
Britt went out of her way Sunday to explain “exactly why [she] was sitting at a kitchen table” when she rebutted Biden.
“Republicans care about kitchen table issues,” Britt said. “We care about faith, family. We care about freedom.”
new video loaded: The Rise of Deadly Trucks and S.U.V.s
By Michael H. Keller, Danielle Ivory, Irineo Cabreros, Eli Murray, Gabriel Blanco and Joey Sendaydiego
June 22, 2026
Demonstrators hold a sign saying “PROTECT MINORITY VOTING RIGHTS” outside the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., in 2025.
Jemal Countess/Getty Images for Legal Defense Fund
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Jemal Countess/Getty Images for Legal Defense Fund
By declining to take up a lower court ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court has dealt another blow to the Voting Rights Act.
The court announced Monday that it will not review an Arkansas-based lawsuit, leaving in place a 2025 appeals panel ruling that ends a long-used tool for protecting minority voters from discrimination under the landmark law in seven mainly Midwestern states.
That ruling found that in the states covered by the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals — Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota — private individuals and groups do not have the right to sue to enforce what’s known as Section 208 of the Voting Rights Act, which generally allows voters with a disability or inability to read or write to get help with voting from a person of their choice.
The Supreme Court’s move comes almost two months after its conservative supermajority issued a major ruling that further weakened the Voting Rights Act, setting off a groundswell in redistricting across the country.
In May, shortly after that undermining of Section 2 protections against racial discrimination in redistricting, the high court decided not to weigh in on what the legal world calls a “private right of action,” sending back to lower courts two cases brought by Black voters in Mississippi and Native American voters in North Dakota.
For decades, enforcement of these sections of the Voting Rights Act has mainly been driven by lawsuits by private individuals and groups.
But after conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch issued a single-paragraph opinion in 2021 questioning a private right of action, Republican officials in multiple states have raised a novel legal argument: Only the U.S. attorney general, they contend, has the right to bring lawsuits under these parts of the Voting Rights Act.
Such an interpretation of the law is likely to lead to a dramatic decline in voting rights lawsuits because of the Justice Department’s limited resources and shifting priorities under different presidential administrations.
The case that the justices decided not to take up was brought by the immigrant advocacy group Arkansas United, which has provided Spanish-language interpreters at polling sites to assist voters with limited English proficiency. The group challenged an Arkansas law that bans a person who is not a poll worker from helping more than six voters cast ballots. In 2022, a federal judge ruled that the state law violates Section 208 of the Voting Rights Act. But after GOP state officials appealed, an 8th Circuit panel found last year that private groups, like Arkansas United, do not have the right to bring this kind of lawsuit.
So far, the 8th Circuit — which also found that there is no private right of action under Section 2 — is the only federal appeals court to break with decades of precedent on this legal issue.
Edited by Benjamin Swasey
new video loaded: California Governor Declares State of Emergency for L.A. Warehouse Fire
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California Governor Declares State of Emergency for L.A. Warehouse Fire
A fire that broke out on Wednesday at a cold storage facility in Los Angeles continued to burn on Sunday. Gov. Gavin Newsom declared an emergency.
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We do realize that at times there are large amounts of smoke coming off this building, and that is to be expected. Now, the good news is, all of our air monitoring has shown that there are no additional toxic chemicals or hazards within that smoke other than normal structure fire smoke. That said, no smoke is good smoke. There are smoke advisories and particulate matter advisories out there around the community, spanning for several miles around this incident. We are going to continue to aggressively fight this fire and minimize the impact to the community as much as possible.
By Cynthia Silva
June 21, 2026
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