The woman at the center of a story Alabama Sen. Katie Britt invoked to attack President Joe Biden’s immigration policies in the Republican response to his State of the Union speech last week denounced the Republican lawmaker as another politician using her story to score political points.
“Someone using my story and distorting it for political purposes is not fair at all,” Karla Jacinto told CNN in Spanish in an interview that aired on Monday, also saying: “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.”
“I think [Britt] should first take into account what really happens before telling a story of that magnitude,” Jacinto added.
Jacinto says she was raped thousands of times between 2004 and 2008, which was during the administration of George W. Bush, over a decade before Biden became president. Beyond implying the violence inflicted on Jacinto was a product of the current president’s policies, Britt also got numerous details wrong, Jacinto contended.
Many of the discrepancies in Britt’s remarks were first reported by independent journalist Jonathan Katz, formerly of the Associated Press.
Britt was tapped by Republican leaders to present the party’s official rebuttal to the State of the Union on Thursday. In her address from her kitchen in Alabama, Britt told a story of meeting a woman who was trafficked by cartels beginning at age 12 and said “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. It’s despicable. And it’s almost entirely preventable,” the Alabama Republican added. Her office later confirmed to the Washington Post she was referring to Jacinto and said Britt’s retelling was “100% correct.”
But Jacinto was not trafficked by drug cartels, she told CNN, and she never was trafficked in the United States as Britt seemed to imply. According to CNN’s previous reporting on Jacinto, she was trafficked in Mexico City and Guadalajara, Mexico — cities hundreds of miles away from the border. The two did meet in January 2023, alongside other Republican senators, but Jacinto said she was not contacted before Britt’s speech last week.
“I work as a spokesperson for many victims who have no voice, and I really would like them to be empathetic — 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,” Jacinto said.
Defending herself, Britt said on “Fox News Sunday” this weekend that she was not intending to imply the story was from Biden’s tenure in the White House, instead saying it was representative of the human trafficking she claims Biden’s policies enables.
“To me, it is disgusting to try to silence the voice of telling the story of what it is like to be sex trafficked, when we know that that is one of the things that the drug cartels are profiting most often,” Britt said. “I very, very clearly said I spoke to a woman who told me about when she was 12.”
Britt’s speech was quickly parodied and derided, including on the right, for its cadence and periodically hostile tone.
“From our small towns to America’s most iconic city streets, life is getting more and more dangerous,” Britt said, calling Biden “a dithering and diminished leader.”
But former President Donald Trump and Republicans in Washington jumped to her defense. And even Biden had caveated praise.
“I thought she was a very talented woman,” Biden told reporters before boarding Air Force One in Maryland the day after the State of the Union. “I didn’t quite understand the connections she was making."