OPINION: This article contains commentary which reflects the author’s opinion
New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is not one to be shy and hide what she is thinking, even if it makes some of her Democrat colleagues furious.
The 30-year-old representative is incensed at the conditions at the border even as Joe Biden is the one heading the current policy, The Daily Mail reported.
“As we’ve seen there are arrivals and undocumented children – rather unaccompanied children that have come at the border and this had lead to completely inhuman and unacceptable, horrifying conditions of children in CBP [Customs and Border Protection] custody. And it’s unacceptable and it’s horrifying,” she said during a virtual town hall on Wednesday.
She said that families who were separated during Donald Trump’s administration are “owed reparations Period.”
“I’ve been in contact with the Biden Administration personally. What is different is they’re trying to figure out,” the representative said. “How to find the resources to end his problem.”
“I don’t want to excuse any of this,” she said referencing the Biden administration’s policies. “We should be doing better by now.’”
The congresswoman’s comments came the day after she was slammed for telling supporters during a lengthy Instagram live Tuesday night to stop calling the record number of migrants arriving at the border a ‘surge’, insisting it is not.
She said using that language places the crisis in a ‘militaristic frame’.
“They wanna say, ‘But what about the surge?’” Ocasio-Cortez said.
“Well, first of all, just gut check, stop. Anyone who’s using the term ‘surge’ around you consciously is trying to invoke a militaristic frame,” she theatrically said.
“And that’s a problem because this is not a surge, these are children and they are not insurgents and we are not being invaded, which by the way is a White supremacist idea-philosophy, the idea that if another is coming in the population that this is an invasion of who we are,” the congresswoman continued.
The mental gymnastics that are being performed here to turn the border crisis into a non-issue is astonishing.
Liberals went from calling migrant facilities “concentration camps” when Donald Trump was in office to now claiming it’s racist to call it a “surge.”
Democrats like AOC think if we call it different words, then suddenly it’s not a problem.
She also does not know what the word “surge” means.
A surge means there’s a large spike in something.
When discussing the border crisis, there’s a surge of immigrants – a large spike, and they are being treated terribly by the Biden administration.
It is tough to imagine what Rep. Ocasio-Cortez wants. Yes the conditions at the border are not what was promised but Biden has pledged to spend tens of millions of dollars to house some migrants in hotels on the taxpayer’s dime.
The Department of Homeland Security told Axios that it has awarded the $86 million contract for hotel rooms designed to house 1,200 migrant families.
The rooms, which will be in states on the border like Arizona and Texas, are designed to be used fr up to six months but “could be extended and expanded.”
The group organizing the hotel arrangements is Endeavors, which emanates from the liberal base of House Speaker and California Rep. Nancy Pelosi, San Francisco.
Endeavors describes itself as a group that “connects vulnerable populations across the United States to a wide range of helpful services.”
Its website says that it offers “Direct care, migrant wellness support, case management, home study and post-release services, staffing, and holistic programming for unaccompanied migrant children and families.”
All of this comes as border crossings has seen a tremendous rise in 2021 from around 7,000 in January to around 19,000 in February, according to numbers from U.S. Customs and Border Protection.