Misleading SOTU Migrant Remarks Called Out

Sen. Katie Britt (R-AL) listens throughout a information convention on border safety on the U.S. Capitol Constructing on September 27, 2023, in Washington, D.C. | Supply: Anna Moneymaker / Getty

Last week, we reported on Alabama Sen. Katie Britt and her rebuttal to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union Tackle. Really, media shops and folk on social media have been so centered on Britt’s absurdly dramatic efficiency in her rebuttal video, which weirdly seemed to be taken from her kitchen, that rather more time was spent specializing in her Karen-esque D-list overacting that wouldn’t be match for a Tubi manufacturing than was spent specializing in how truthful she was throughout her speech.

Nicely, it seems, a central a part of Britt’s speech, which largely centered on the border disaster, was primarily based on a deceptive anecdote a couple of sex-trafficking sufferer whose story Britt seems to have exploited with a purpose to bolster a story towards Biden’s immigration insurance policies, which might be high quality if it weren’t for the truth that the trafficking sufferer she was talking about hadn’t been trafficked throughout the administration of Presiden George W. Bush, which additionally doesn’t matter because the sufferer was trafficked inside Mexico, not the U.S.

“I traveled to the Del Rio sector of Texas,” Britt mentioned following Biden’s deal with Thursday. “That’s the place I spoke to a lady who shared her story with me. She had been intercourse trafficked by the cartels beginning on the age of 12. She instructed me not simply that she was raped day-after-day, however what number of occasions a day she was raped. The cartels put her on a mattress in a shoe field of a room, they usually despatched males by that door again and again for hours and hours on finish. We wouldn’t be okay with this occurring in a Third World nation. That is america of America, and it’s previous time, in my view, that we begin performing prefer it. President Biden’s border insurance policies are a shame.”

Based on the Washington Put up, Britt’s personal communications director, Sean Ross, confirmed that the freshman senator was speaking about Karla Jacinto Romero, who testified earlier than Congress about being compelled to work in Mexican brothels from 2004 to 2008. Romero’s story, whereas horrific, had nothing to do with Biden. Her story not solely occurred throughout the borders of Mexico in a timeframe that ended 13 years earlier than Biden took workplace, but it surely occurred nowhere close to the U.S. border. The truth is, when you concentrate on it, Romero’s story ought to, if something, function a counterpoint to Britt’s narrative because it illustrates a part of the explanation why so many South American migrants are looking for asylum within the U.S. After all, one actually couldn’t rely on anybody within the MAGA world to own the compassion or essential pondering capability to attract that conclusion.

However as a substitute of simply admitting that Britt’s feedback have been deceptive at finest and a blatant lie at worst, she and Ross are doubling down on it and pretending there’s a hyperlink between what occurred to Romero and Biden’s immigration insurance policies.

“The story Senator Britt instructed was 100% appropriate,” Ross mentioned in a written assertion. “And there are extra harmless victims of that form of disgusting, brutal trafficking by the cartels than ever earlier than proper now. The Biden administration’s insurance policies — the insurance policies on this nation that the President falsely claims are humane — have empowered the cartels and acted as a magnet to a historic degree of migrants making the harmful journey to our border. Alongside that journey, youngsters, girls, and males are being subjected to gut-wrenching, heartbreaking horrors in our personal yard. And right here at residence, the Biden administration’s insurance policies are resulting in an increasing number of struggling, together with Individuals being poisoned by fentanyl and being murdered. These human prices are actual, and it’s previous time for some on the left to cease pretending in any other case.”

Oh, any person is “pretending” alright, however on this occasion, it isn’t Biden.

Discover how rapidly, Ross is speaking about what’s occurring to migrants on the “journey to our border” versus what’s occurring on the border or within the U.S. Once more, Ross doesn’t probably perceive that he’s making a pro-asylum argument, however he actually refers to migrants as “harmless victims” of “disgusting, brutal trafficking.” Ross could not understand it, however he’s humanizing migrants in a method most conservatives refuse to, together with Trump himself, who likened migrants to Hannibal Lecter.

Britt is doing the identical.

“If we as leaders of the best nation on the planet will not be combating to guard essentially the most susceptible, we aren’t doing our job,” she mentioned in a YouTube video that options pictures of her hugging Romero throughout her 2023 journey to the border. (Once more, how is that this not pro-asylum rhetoric?)

However it clearly isn’t the intent of Ross or Britt to subvert the desire of MAGA America by portray migrants as human beings, they’re merely stretching themselves with Simone Biles-level psychological gymnastics to attract a hyperlink between Biden’s insurance policies and intercourse trafficking on the opposite facet of the border. They’re additionally perpetuating the large lie that was the primary focus of Britt’s speech: the concept that migrants are inflicting a surge in crime in “our personal yard.”

As I’ve written earlier than, Republicans can preserve selling the propaganda that unlawful immigrants are inflicting crime to surge in America as a result of they know their constituents gained’t do the naked minimal analysis it will take to know there haven’t been any surges in crimes within the cities most migrants have come to, and, the truth is, in a lot of these cities, crime charges have fallen. As for the trafficking of migrants that has occurred within the U.S., in line with the Put up, it largely isn’t unlawful immigrants who’re accountable.

From the Put up:

When Donald Trump was president, he often decried human trafficking that he claimed was occurring on the border, together with that “hundreds of younger women and girls” have been being smuggled throughout the border for prostitution. In 2019, we investigated that declare and located no proof to help it. Most human trafficking prosecutions typically contain authorized border crossings, visa fraud and journey into america on airplanes. Sufferer organizations say there are comparatively few instances that contain compelled kidnapping throughout the border. This may be one purpose Britt often cites a case that occurred way back and didn’t contain crossing the border.

In truth, we should always at all times be involved about human trafficking, brutal violence and the victimizing of our neighbors past the southern border, not simply when it’s politically handy. It must be about humanity, not politics, and if it have been, we’d be having a wholly totally different dialog concerning migrants, asylum and the function the U.S. performs in all of it.