President Trump delivered his address on border security. It is a crisis. It is a growing humanitarian crisis, despite Democrats and the liberal media saying otherwise. The Trump border security agenda calls for a wall and more funding for our enforcement agencies, like Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ICE has been a prime target for progressives in the 2018 election cycle, being used as fodder for primary challengers.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) is one of the most prominent anti-ICE members of Congress, as well as one of the faces of the ascending progressive wing of the party. Last night, on MSNBC, the official network of liberal America, she went on a tear (via Free Beacon):
Ocasio-Cortez, the 29-year-old democratic socialist who was sworn into Congress last week, appeared on MSNBC's "Rachel Maddow Show" following President Donald Trump's primetime address to the nation from the Oval Office. During the interview, Maddow asked Ocasio-Cortez to respond to his speech, prompting her to castigate Trump for requesting funding for ICE, an agency she has said should be abolished.
"The president should not be asking for more money to an agency that has systematically violated human rights. The president should be really defending why we are funding such an agency at all because right now what we are seeing is death. Right now what we are seeing is the violation of human rights," Ocasio-Cortez said.
She argued that the primary reason for undocumented immigrants in the United States is "Visa overstay" versus people crossing over the border illegally. She then went on to accuse Trump of trying to restrict "every form of legal immigration there is in the United States."
This is not the first time that Ocasio-Cortez has attacked ICE. Last May, she tweeted that Congress must "abolish ICE."
Well, Virginia Kruta at The Daily Caller wrote today that this screed was odd, given that Ocasio-Cortez voted to give ICE more money [emphasis mine]:
…even as she laid out her challenge to the president, Ocasio-Cortez appeared to forget that Congress — not the president — controls budget appropriations and determines which agencies continue to receive what funding.
Moreover, she left out the fact that just a week earlier, when she voted “aye” on House Joint Resolution 1 on Jan. 3, 2019, she herself had voted to fund ICE through the end of the fiscal year.
H.J. Res. 1, according to the final roll call vote, passed with 100 percent Democratic support. Five Republicans joined with the Democrats in voting “aye.” The intent of the resolution was, “Making further continuing appropriations for the Department of Homeland Security [DHS] for fiscal year 2019, and for other purposes.”
Because ICE is funded through DHS, Ocasio-Cortez cast one of her first votes as a congresswoman to continue funding the agency she has repeatedly called for abolishing and has accused of “systematically” violating human rights.
Ruh-roh. Hey, what else would you expect from a woman who thinks the presidency, the House, and the Senate are the three branches of government. Then again, she's a fighter. She was elected to try and deliver uppercuts to Trump.
I mean, case in point:
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says that migrant “women and children coming here with nothing but the shirts on their back” are acting more American than President Trump.
— Kyle Morris (@RealKyleMorris) January 9, 2019
Is she forgetting she was elected to represent the American people? pic.twitter.com/bnAGbAxHwS