Alabama Republican Senator and covert Handmaid Katie Britt was referring to the tragic saga of a migrant sex trafficked by Mexican cartels in Mexico during the George W. Bush administration in the ’00s, not a recent case, her spokesperson confirmed to the Washington Post, adding another indignity to the roundly-panned Republican response to Biden’s well-received State of the Union address.

Worse, the tale appears to have been lifted from sworn testimony before a Congressional subcommittee in May 2015 from the trafficking victim, Karla Jacinto Romero, years after her ordeal, which happened from 2004 to 2008. In her performance, Britt said that she talked to the woman who had been sex trafficked during a recent visit to the Mexican border in Texas and implied that the incident had happened recently and in the United States, saying, “This is the United States of America, and it is past time, in my opinion, that we start acting like it.”

Britt’s story, that she “talked to” Romero, is also less intimate than she suggests:  According to Marsha Blackburn’s website, she and Britt were part of a Republican photo op at the border in January 2023 during which they talked to Romero and others as they saw numerous presentations on human trafficking. [Side note:  none of the male members of the Republican delegation, which numbered in the dozens, opted to attend because apparently, they believe human trafficking is only a “woman problem.”]

“The story Senator Britt told was 100% correct. And there are more innocent victims of that kind of disgusting, brutal trafficking by the cartels than ever before right now,” Britt’s spokesperson said in a written statement without being able to cite any actual evidence of the claim, nor acknowledging the misrepresentations made by the senator.  “The Biden administration’s policies — the policies in this country that the President falsely claims are humane — have empowered the cartels and acted as a magnet to a historic level of migrants making the dangerous journey to our border.”