Sen. Katie Britt delivered an emotional plea from the southern border on Wednesday, urging reporters to tell the horror stories like the ones the Alabama senator has witnesses over several visits.

“Drug cartels, guys, they have their tentacles all over this country,” Alabama’s junior senator said from Eagle Pass, Texas pm Wednesday. “We need you to start telling that story.”

Those tentacles extend to Alabama, according to Britt, where the senator said she talked recently with a constituent in rural Montgomery County who told her undocumented immigrants owe the cartels money for getting them across the border.

“Just the other day in Alabama a gentleman told me, ‘If you will come back here with me in this neighborhood right behind you, you will see migrants who are here illegally, and they will tell you about the drug cartels coming around every other week to collect,’” Britt recounted.

“Guys, that’s not the American Dream,” the senator said. “That’s an American nightmare.”

Britt has made a handful of visits to the southern border, which she deemed a top priority when she ran for the Senate in 2022.

During one stop, “I looked in the eyes of [Customs and Border Patrol] agents who said ‘We’re exhausted, we’re not only having to be paper pushers, we’re often trying to do what we took an oath of office to do and that is to protect this border,’” Britt recounted on Wednesday.

“But when they tell you about finding small children who had drowned in that river or pulling a lifeless body of a woman who is pregnant with twins it changes the way you think about what’s happening,” she said.

Britt said she agreed with Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who also participated in the news conference and said it was the media’s responsibility to report on the border crisis.

“To Sen. Cruz’s point, if you’re not telling it, that’s on you,” she said.

“Because when a woman sits there and she tells you not just about being raped, but how many times a day she’s raped — when she tells you about having to lay in that bed while they come in and out, in and out it’s disgusting and it’s despicable,” Britt said, pounding the podium with her fist in anger.

She blamed President Biden for the crisis at the southern border.

“Folks, you look at the number of people that have died at the border because Joe Biden has made it more and more enticing to come here,” she said. “Make no mistake, this is the result of failed policies. We can fix this. We cannot throw money at this and fix it, we have to actually change the policies.”