Opinion: Katie Britt’s outrageous statements about migrants

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’.”

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.”

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.”