Before her appearance at the highly-touted and heavily-promoted announcement of the nonbinding Green New Deal, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) appeared at a Thursday rally to call for an end to Donald Trump’s “deportation force” and an end to even a “single dollar” going to support Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
With Democratic Reps. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan at her side, Ocasio-Cortez delivered a rambling anti-ICE diatribe that exposed not only a lack of basic understanding of the immigration issue, but a reliance on mistruths and a belief in rights that simply do not exist in law.
Ocasio-Cortez argued that because ICE “repeatedly and systematically abuses human rights,” they “do not deserve a dime until they can prove that they are honoring human rights, until they can make a good faith effort to expand and embrace immigrants .”
The self-avowed Socialist went on to claim somewhere there exists a “right of human mobility ” and that Latinos cannot be illegal because they are “descendants” of Native Americans.
“We are standing on Native land, and Latino people are descendants of Native people. And we cannot be told and criminalized simply for our identity and our status,” said Ocasio-Cortez.
The fact that no such right of mobility exists anywhere, except for in her mind . And nowhere in the real world are Latinos or any other group exempted from having to comply with the law.
But the fantasy show did not end there.
She insisted that President Trump dislikes all immigrants because he wanted to end the unconstitutional Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), the Obama policy to defer deportation and grant work permits to illegal aliens who arrived in the United States as youths.
By ending DACA, Ocasio-Cortez said that Trump was “taking away the documented status of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of Americans.”
It may be news to the freshman congresswoman that individuals are given DACA status because they are residing in the United States illegally and are not Americans.
But it could also be another sign Ocasio-Cortez is willing to sacrifice the truth on the altar of her own radical policy goals.
In an interview with The Intercept just last May, Ocasio-Cortez claimed ICE was “separating children from their parents in order to kind of force the state to take over their custody” and that it “is the only criminal investigative agency, the only enforcement agency in the United States, that has a bed quota.”
Then a congressional candidate, she went on to claim that ICE is “required to fill 34,000 beds with detainees every single night, and that number has only been increasing since 2009.”
In fact, a 2016 appropriations bill did stipulate ICE “shall maintain a level of not less than 34,000 detention beds through September 30, 2016.” The provision, which dated back to 2009, however, never required the beds be filled. Furthermore, appropriations measures after 2016 have not included similar language.
Maybe Ocasio-Cortez should take some time to away from the microphone to listen and learn about what ICE does every day to protect immigrants and citizens alike , such as working to dismantle transnational criminal networks, combat human and drug trafficking, and investigating a broad range of illicit activity from gang violence, money laundering to other financial crimes.