Opinion: Katie Britt’s outrageous statements about migrants

Editor’s Note: Dean Obeidallah, a former attorney, is the host of SiriusXM radio’s daily program “The Dean Obeidallah Show.” Follow him on Threads. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. Read more opinion at CNN.

Republican Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama delivered the GOP response last week to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union, and America has been ruthlessly delivering its response to Britt ever since.

Social media exploded with brutal reviews of Thursday’s speech, mocking everything from Britt’s “acting class energy” to her decision to deliver the address from her kitchen (suggesting, perhaps, that some in the GOP think that’s where women belong), as well as her breathless delivery.

“Saturday Night Live” piled on this weekend, with Scarlett Johansson making a surprise appearance portraying the senator in the show’s opening sketch, overperforming every line including “tonight I’ll be auditioning for the part of scary mom” and “I’ll be performing an original monologue called ‘this country is hell’.”

At least one person truly loved Britt’s speech: Former President Donald Trump praised Britt for delivering what he called a “GREAT” speech that was “compassionate and caring.” His accolades should not come as a surprise. After all, Britt took a page from his playbook by baselessly ratcheting up fears about an influx of migrants to scare voters into supporting the GOP.

In her address, Britt blamed Biden for the “border crisis,” claiming he “invited” it with his executive actions. During the speech, she told the harrowing story of a woman she said she’d met on the Texas side of the southern border who told her about having 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,” Britt said. After sharing additional details of the woman’s story, the senator declared, “We wouldn’t be OK with this happening in a Third World country. This is the United States of America and it is past time, in my opinion, that we start acting like it.” She added, “President Biden’s border policies are a disgrace.”

The senator’s words might have led some listeners to conclude that Biden’s border policies resulted in this child being sex trafficked beginning at the age of 12. However, that was not even close to the truth.

As fact checkers detailed — and Britt’s own staff admitted after strong pushback by critics of the speech — this sex trafficking did not happen during Biden’s presidency. And contrary to what Britt seemed to imply, the vile abuse didn’t occur on US soil. It took place in Mexico.

“SNL” mocked the speech and its speaker, with Johansson-as-Britt declaring, “I’m going to do a pivot out of nowhere into a shockingly violent story about sex trafficking.” She quickly added, to big laughs, “Rest assured, every detail about it is real … except the year, where it took place and who was president when it happened.”

Amid the uproar over the story’s accuracy, Britt’s spokesperson defended it as “100% correct,” but conceded that the individual at the center of the account was Karla Jacinto Romero, who testified to Congress years ago about having been forced by traffickers to work in Mexican brothels between 2004 and 2008 — during the George W. Bush administration.

Britt’s border narrative was grossly misleading, but exaggerated stories designed to gin up fears of non-white migrants are exactly what Trump has been delivering from the day he descended the gilded elevator in Trump Tower and kicked off his 2016 presidential run. Trump launched that campaign by falsely telling voters that Mexico was sending people to the United States who were “bringing crime” and were “rapists.” Britt’s story conjures up the very same theme — one that the former president and his supporters have returned to repeatedly since his election.

During the 2018 midterm elections, for example, Trump and the Republican establishment put out a message that “caravans” filled with “thugs” and bringing “crime” were heading to the United States. After the election, however, when voters rejected the GOP scare tactics and flipped control of the House of Representatives to the Democrats, the GOP suddenly became suspiciously quiet about migrant “caravans.”

Despite that election loss, scaring people about immigrants is still a major part of Trump’s playbook. In December, he invoked the dangerous language of Adolph Hitler, claiming that immigrants were “poisoning the blood” of America. (Trump has said he was unaware that the quote had been uttered by Hitler.) Last month, while visiting the southern border, Trump lied that jails “throughout the world” were being emptied so that former inmates could migrate to the US.

And just last week, after the Super Tuesday primaries, Trump claimed, “Our cities are being overrun with migrant crime, and that’s Biden migrant crime.” The data does not support the assertion that migrants are responsible for higher rates of crime — quite the contrary, in fact. But facts don’t seem to matter when you are trying to scare voters.

The Republican Party was not always associated with racist, anti-immigrant rhetoric. GOP President Ronald Reagan in 1989 declared that immigrants were making our “nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas.” The 40th US President added, “If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”

But that GOP is dead. It’s now the party of Trump. That’s why Britt’s misleading statements about crime and migrants are applauded by Trump. So, laugh at Britt as much as you want. As long as she stokes fear about migrants, she will be beloved by Trump and the MAGA base.

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