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THE MERCHANT OF VENOM: KATIE BRITT IN FIVE ACTS [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-05-21
If you’re looking for Katie Britt in the mainstream media, you might be wasting your time. Her most recent opinion piece was published April 23 in the Daily Caller, a dubious, right-wing “news” and opinion website that doesn’t list its members or owners. The Daily Caller is an interesting subject in its own right, an enterprise started by Tucker Carlson and funded initially by Foster Friess. It has published articles by, among others, the organizer of the white supremist rally in Charlottesville, Jason Kessler. So you can guess the site’s views on climate change (bad) and Donald (good).
Anyway, back to Britt. One thing you will notice in her written statements is that she is completely tone deaf to the contemporary political landscape and actually remains proud of her votes to confirm Trump’s clown car of cabinet picks, including sex-offenders Matt Gaetz and Pete Hegseth. But reading her is a far more pleasurable experience than listening to her, as many of us did in her response to Biden’s last State of the Union address. She was widely ridiculed and savaged in the media, of course, and who among us didn’t agree with Matt Fuller when he wrote that “Katie Britt’s speech will end when you give just $1 a day to help these starving dogs.”
Every sentence in her op-ed provides rich content for parsing. But I’ll just focus on her distortions of the truth regarding one specific issue—immigration.
Act One
Well, keep me company but two years more.
Thou shalt not know the sound of thine own tongue.
The Merchant of Venice (1.2., Act 1, Scene 1.
KB: For four years, millions of illegal aliens—including violent criminals—poured across our southern border unchecked.
This popular Trump talking point is patently and demonstrably false. Let’s start with the basic unit of illegal immigration, something called an “encounter.” This is the official term for a point of contact with the American government and is an unduplicated number. In other words, if a single person attempts to enter illegally ten times, he has ten encounters.
Looking at the period from February 2021 through October 2023, according to DHS’s Office of Homeland Security Statistics, 6.5 million encounters occurred at the southern border, including 700,000 migrants who lacked legal documentation at U.S. ports of entry. What happens to an immigrant after an encounter depends on many factors, but a useful way to categorize these actions would be to place these encounters into three groups: those removed or returned, those released into the US, and all the rest. What happens to those falling into the last category includes being transferred to HHS (particularly if they are an unaccompanied minor) or transferred to ICE, which means a further breakdown of options, including some form of detention or even release. About 2.5 million people through October have been released into the U.S, which includes 2 million released by Border Patrol, with a notice to appear in court or a notice to report to ICE, or released through prosecutorial discretion or granted parole, which allows people into the country for a temporary period (source for this information is the non-partisan website, PolitiFact). A major problem with assertions like Britt’s is that the data on encounters takes careful analysis. It may take years to “resolve” an encounter. But clearly her assertion that people poured across our border unchecked during the Biden administration is ridiculous.
An immigration researcher at the Cato Institute, David Bier, studied release and removal rates for the last two years of former President Donald Trump’s term and the first 26 months of Biden’s, using DHS data, including the lifecycle report, ICE detention statistics and other figures published by the Republican majority on the House Judiciary Committee. Bier noted that his analysis demonstrated that the Biden administration “has removed a higher percentage of arrested border crossers in its first two years than the Trump DHS did over its last two years. Moreover, migrants were more likely to be released after a border arrest under President Trump than under President Biden” (source for this information, PolitiFact). And let us not forget Biden’s bi-partisan Emergency National Security Supplemental Appropriations Act that Trump tanked, a bill that would have strengthened border security and a bill that Britt, in lockstep with Trump, voted against.
Act II
Our house is hell: and thou a merry devil.
Merchant of Venice (2.3.2)
KB: Far too many preventable tragedies occurred because our leaders looked away. Far too many Americans, many of them young and with so many years ahead of them, lost their lives to heinous acts committed by criminals who broke the law and came into our country.
This is another popular Republican talking point, meant to instill fear in their core supporters. In point of fact, no study supports the assertion that illegal immigrants represent a high incidence of crime. It’s true that there are a few high-profile heinous acts of violence committed by illegal aliens, but there is no evidential support for Britt’s characterization. There are many examples of what I’m saying, but here are just three examples posted by PolitiFact on April 28 of this year:
The Marshall Project found no link between crime and the migrant influx from April 2022 to May 2023 in New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C. and Denver, after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott began busing immigrants into those cities. The Marshall Project’s 2024 report looked at policing data in cases involving crimes such as robbery, murders and shootings.
A 2018 national study by University of Wisconsin and Purdue University sociologists found that increases in the immigrant population illegally in the U.S. are associated with significant decreases in violence. The study analyzed violent crime from 1990 to 2014, examining the association between changes in illegal immigration and violent crime at the state level in all 50 states and Washington, D.C.
A National Institute of Justice study of Texas Department of Public Safety data from 2012 to 2018 showed immigrants in the U.S. illegally are arrested at less than half the rate of native-born U.S. citizens for violent and drug crimes. Researchers separated arrest data for crimes committed by immigrants illegally in the U.S. from data for crimes committed by immigrants in the U.S. legally and native-born U.S. citizens.
When you mention the young, I always think of the Trump 101 child separation policy, unbelievably cruel and inhumane. When the images of young children, as young as three months, being ripped from their mothers and placed in holding tanks and cages without contact with parents swept across the media landscape, Stephen Miller was glad. (Miller is currently Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff.) “Stephen actually enjoys seeing those pictures at the border,” said an advisor to Trump to a Vanity Fair reporter. “He’s a twisted guy, the way he was raised and picked on…He’s Waffen-SS.” As a reminder, more than 5,500 children, including infants, were separated from their mothers. At the end of the first Trump administration, more than 14,600 minors were housed in detention centers. These children have “so many years ahead of them,” too.
Act III
Ay, but I fear you speak upon the rack,
Where men enforced do speak anything.
Merchant of Venice (3.2.32-33)
KB: The Laken Riley Act, named for the young woman whose life was taken by an illegal alien who had already been arrested multiple times in the U.S., stalled in the Senate before Republicans took the majority. Once the 1119th Congress began, with President Trump back in the oval office, we passed this legislation, and it was quickly signed into law.
Laken Riley was a twenty-two-year-old nursing student at the University of Georgia murdered while jogging on the university campus. The murderer was a 26-year-old Venezuelan who had been apprehended in El Paso, processed, and released into the United States, probably because he had demonstrable family connections with current legal residents. He had previously been arrested and released in New York City for a motor scooter violation involving a minor and in Athens for theft and possession of stolen goods. He was released by ICE pending trial, an action publicly regretted by the agency. He was convicted of the murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole on November 20, 2024.
I think we can all agree that the Laken Riley murder was a very tragic event among many in the immigration landscape. But the bill was highly flawed. It was opposed by most Democrats on democratic principles. “There is huge concern because we’re talking about the mandatory imprisonment based on an accusation without a person even being charged, let alone being convicted, and this applies to kids,” one senator said. “It’s a sweeping assault on core principles, and it doesn’t even have a judicial review component.” The bill passed without the usual vetting beforehand by committees. And now we have people, including graduate students, just snatched off the street and imprisoned or deported without any semblance of due process. Do you see the evolutionary pathway here? Just today, as a matter of fact, it was revealed that at least fifty of the Venezuelans imprisoned in El Salvador were in the United States legally and had committed no crime.
Katie often publicly provides an eyewitness account of the proceedings related to the Laken Riley Act but is completely silent about DHS and its own current miscarriages of justice. Yes, these issues are moving through the courts, but not anywhere nearly fast enough to suit the American people. Americans will not quit protesting until Congressional investigations are well under way after the mid-terms. This whole Trumpian milieu makes me think of a similar time back in 1978 when Congress was slow to investigate reports of mass rape, coercion, and other crimes by Jim Jones in Jonestown, Guyana. Finally, Congressman Leo Ryan of California could stand the inaction no longer and flew there to inspect for himself. For his trouble, he was shot 47 times, dying along with almost 1,000 other Americans, including 300 under seventeen. A number of infants received injections of cyanide, sedatives, and powdered fruit juice. Jim Jones was born in Indiana.
Act IV
Shylock, the world thinks, and I think so, too,
That thou but leadest this fashion of thy malice
To the last hour of the act.
Merchant of Venice, 4.1.17-19.
KB: Now illegal aliens who commit theft-related offenses, assault a police officer, or perpetuate crimes resulting in death or serious bodily injury will be subject to mandatory detention.
Illegal aliens who assault a police officer? Seriously? Can we talk about January 6th? The hypocrisy of Republicans is astounding. And I’m just talking about the 1,200 who were charged with violence and insurrection from January 6, bad enough in itself without even mentioning the fact that they all received blanket presidential pardons.
Act V
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.
Merchant of Venice, 5.1.64-65.
KB: President Trump did not stop at just signing the Laken Riley Act. He has singlehandedly driven down illegal border crossings to levels unprecedented in recent history. Our Border Patrol officers have encountered 94 percent fewer migrants than they did in February of last year and 96% percent fewer than the all-time high, reached during the Biden-Harris administration.
This is what Fox News does all the time, using gerrymandered statistics to fit their agenda. Britt is citing a popular talking point that dishonestly “uses the total number of border encounters for Biden’s last seven days in office and compares it with a daily average for Trump’s first seven days in office” (PBS, 2.28.25).
The truth of the matter is that rates of illegal immigration fluctuate constantly due to any number of factors, including weather and wildcards like the use of the Covid-inspired Title 42. Illegal immigration was already dropping before Trump’s second term even began. Yes, border encounters increased from 2020 to 2023 but were falling throughout 2024.
I could write a whole other reflection on the inherent racism in all of this. Trump and his surrogates, like Britt, are demonizing immigration by whom? Hispanic and Black immigrants. That’s it. You don’t hear a thing about people escaping genocide and persecution in Serbia or Ukraine. This makes me think of Michael Cohen’s recollection of Trump driving through a black neighborhood when Obama was president saying that no decent country has ever been run by a black person. And who can forget his false claim when he was running the first time that 80% of all murders of white Americans were perpetrated by blacks.
I found the perfect metaphor for the historical importance of Katie Britt in the travel log of Thomas Ashe in his 1811 book History of the Azores. He was describing a powerful whirlpool on the island of San Miguel when two young ladies visited the lake to collect water chestnuts. One slipped into the fringes of the pull, and the other attempted to pull her to safety. In Ashe’s account, “The companion lost her hold before aid could be administered; and the poor sufferer, after whirling round and round in the presence of her bewailing friends and relatives, uttered a scream of agony and finally vanished from the sight.”
[END]
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