Sex trafficking victim says Sen. Katie Britt telling her story during SOTU rebuttal is ‘not fair’
The woman whose story Alabama Sen. Katie Britt appeared to have shared in the Republican response to the State of the Union as an example of President Joe Biden’s failed immigration policies told CNN she was trafficked before Biden’s presidency and said legislators lack empathy when using the issue of human trafficking for political purposes.
“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,” Karla Jacinto told CNN on Sunday.
CNN’s Freedom Project, which seeks to raise awareness about modern-day slavery, previously profiled Jacinto’s story.
Jacinto told CNN that Mexican politicians took advantage of her by using her story for political purposes and that it’s happened again in the United States.
“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. People who are really trafficked and abused, as she [Britt] mentioned. And I think she [Britt] should first take into account what really happens before telling a story of that magnitude,” Jacinto said.
Jacinto said she met the senator at an event at the southern border with other government officials and anti-human-trafficking activists, instead of one-on-one as Britt stated. She also said that she was never trafficked in the United States, as Britt appeared to suggest. She was not trafficked by Mexican drug cartels, but by a pimp who operated as part of a family that entrapped vulnerable girls to force them into prostitution, she said.
Jacinto said she was kept in captivity from 2004 to 2008, when President George W. Bush was in office and when Biden was a senator.