The Republican response focused on a brutal story of sex trafficking, which actually took during George W. Bush’s presidency.

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Independent journalist Jonathan Katz put out a viral TikTok video on Saturday scrutinizing the anecdote, in which he reported discovering that the person Britt was referring to was a woman named Karla Jacinto Romero, an activist who has spoken publicly for many years about her experience being sex trafficked and forced to work in Mexican brothels. But Romero was never brought across the southern border against her will, as Britt seemed to imply, and her horrific experiences in Mexico took place between the years of 2004 and 2008, when George W. Bush was president, The Washington Post confirmed.

Britt spokesman Sean Ross confirmed that the Senator was indeed speaking about Romero, whom she met at the southern border in 2023, but denied that her speech was misleading, saying in a statement that the story “was 100 percent correct” and that “there are more innocent victims of that kind of disgusting, brutal trafficking by the cartels than ever before right now.”