On Tuesday, as she is wont to do, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) began waxing philosophical on her Instagram account, explaining how the use of the word “surge” to describe the massive influx of illegal immigrants at the U.S.-Mexico border is promulgating “a white supremacist idea.”
Ocasio-Cortez did not specifically attach any blame for the border crisis to President Joe Biden, instead arguing it’s a whole host of other crises that are actually responsible for the surge.
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“It’s not a border crisis,” she said. “It’s an imperialism crisis. It’s a climate crisis. It’s a trade crisis. And also, it’s a carceral crisis, because, as I have already said, even during this term and this president, our immgration system is based and designed on our carceral system.”
At another point in the lengthy video, Ocasio-Cortez gave a lesson to anyone who refers to the influx as “a surge.”
“They want to say, ‘What about the surge?’” she said. “Well, first of all, gut check. Stop. Anyone who’s using the term ‘surge’ around you consciously is trying to invoke a militaristic frame 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 an other is coming in the population, that this is like an invasion of who we are.”
The comments from Ocasio-Cortez comes after conservatives have called the leftist lawmaker out for remaining largely silent on the border crisis since Biden took office.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) requested to hear Ocasio-Cortez’s opinion on the border, given that, during former President Donald Trump’s term in office, she likened immigration detainment facilities to “concentration camps” — a comparison that drew stark criticism from Holocaust survivors.
In June 2018, then-candidate Ocasio-Cortez took her now-infamous trip to the U.S. southern border, where she took mournful pictures. It was later revealed by Snopes that Ocasio-Cortez was not looking on at nearby children. Instead, she was looking through a gate to an access road that led to a migrant camp.
“Where is AOC?” Graham pondered. “Why aren’t you at the border looking at the things being reported? If you were worried about children under Trump being in bad conditions, this is worse. If you’re worried about people having COVID outbreaks, this is the biggest COVID spreader in the entire country. So, where are you?”
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