I was rehearsing on Thursday night, so I didn’t hear Joe Biden’s State of the Union Speech, but I did get to hear Alabama Senator Katie Britt’s response.
Oh boy.
Honestly, just listening to it, it sounded kind of breathy and dramatic, but not as dramatic as it was when you add the visuals. Aside from the over-acting — which frankly, I can forgive, considering this was this unknown Senator’s first brush with the spotlight — what I can’t forgive is two things:
- Her complete misappropriation of another woman’s story, which had nothing to do with the Biden administration;
- Her “Willie Horton” moment by also misappropriating the story of Laken Riley.
And then, of course, Senator Britt doubled down on her misappropriation, as if she had been honest or correct.
It was so “on brand” for Republicans.
So here is what Senator Britt said in her speech (taking this from the transcript)
We know that President Biden didn’t just create this border crisis. He invited it with 94 executive actions in his first 100 days. When I took office, I took a different approach. I traveled to the Del Rio sector of Texas. That’s where I spoke to a woman who shared her story with me. She had been sex trafficked by the cartels starting at the age of 12. She told me not just that she was raped every day, but how many times a day she was raped.
Katie Britt, State of the Union Response.
That placement certainly made it sound like somehow Joe Biden was responsible for the rape of this woman (whom Senator Britt did not name) because of his “lax” border policies. Of course, the actual facts are these:
- The woman in question is Karla Jacinto Romero, a human trafficking victim who became an anti-trafficking advocate;
- The captivity in question occurred between 2004 to 2008 during the George W. Bush administration;
- The captivity was not actually the fault of a “Mexican drug cartel” but of a pimp operating independently of a cartel;
- All of this took place in Mexico, and not in the United States.
Oh boy!
One might think that Karla Jacinto is the kind of woman that we should let into the United States, the kind that is deserving of asylum.
All of this misinformation became public because of the enterprising work of an old-fashioned investigative reporter named Jonathan Katz, who happened to know about the story.
As if that weren’t enough, Senator Britt also misappropriated the story of Laken Riley, a young woman who was killed by José Antonio Ibarra, a 26-year-old Venezuelan citizen who entered the US illegally. The murder made international news, generating extensive media attention, especially after the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) confirmed that Ibarra was caught crossing the border but was released into the United States.
The implication here is that “illegal” immigrants are overrunning our country and bringing massive amounts of crime, when the truth — well-known to public safety professionals — is that immigrants commit fewer crimes than native born Americans.
This is a Willie Horton moment, where a single incident of a furloughed inmate going rogue was used without mercy to derail the 1988 run for President by Mike Dukakis.
Both the Laken Riley case and the victims of Willie Horton are individual tragedies. For their families, for their loved ones, it is horrible. But they don’t convict entire populations of immigrants or those on furlough.
That clearly does not matter to Senator Britt.
So, Alabama has now brought us Senators Tommy Tuberville and Katie Britt, proving once and for all that what flies in Alabama does not necessarily fly in the rest of the country.