Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg criticized Alabama Sen. Katie Britt. She used a misleading anecdote on sex trafficking to criticize President Joe Biden’s border security record in her response to his State of the Union address.
“I’ll leave it to her to explain the falsehoods, but I think it illustrates the bigger issue,” Buttigieg told ABC News “This Week” anchor George Stephanopoulos. “She’s a United States senator and the United States Senate right now could be acting to help secure the southern border.” He highlighted a recent bipartisan agreement on immigration changes that didn’t pass the chamber.
Buttigieg said the proposal included “tough compromises for all sides, something that the bases of both parties might not have loved but that would have made a real positive difference — only for that to be killed by the chill effect that the former president put on congressional Republicans, telling them not to support anything that would represent a policy win for President Biden.”
Thursday night, in delivering the official Republican response to Biden’s State of the Union speech, Britt told the story of meeting a woman at the border. The woman recounted her experience of being raped by cartels beginning when she was 12 years old.
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According to several reports, including from The New York Times and Associated Press, the apparent victim Britt was referencing has chronicled her abuse in the past. She said it happened in Mexico between 2004 and 2008, during George W. Bush’s presidency.
The woman, Karla Jacinto Romero, a Mexican citizen, told the Times she learned about Britt’s remarks via social media and found them “very strange.”
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“I am involved in the fight to stop trafficking and I don’t think it should be political,” she told the paper. In her State of the Union rebuttal, Britt made it appear that Biden’s actions related to that victim’s experience.
“We wouldn’t be OK with this happening in a third-world country,” she said. “This is the United States of America, and it is past time, in my opinion, that we start acting like it. President Biden’s border policies are a disgrace. This crisis is despicable.”
She defended her word choice in a separate appearance on Fox News on Sunday, insisting that Biden’s actions had made human trafficking incidents more likely.
However, Buttigieg shot back on “This Week,” telling Stephanopoulos, “We have a very clear choice between congressional Republicans who seem to prefer that this issue remain bad so that they can attack the president over it and those who would actually like to solve it or at least improve it and address it.”
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The secretary also pointed to failed efforts since the Bush administration to pass bipartisan immigration reform, including the Senate deal this year. “Will 2024 go down in history as yet another failed attempt with bipartisan compromise, or will congressional Republicans follow the lead of their own negotiators and the president of the United States and actually do something about it?” Buttigieg said.
However, polling shows that Americans are split between Biden and Trump, who is set to be the Republican nominee for president, on who would do a better job leading the country.
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