Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) told Hunter Walker of Yahoo News that blame for the funding crisis ultimately falls on President Donald Trump and his effort to pay for a long-sought border wall.
“He creates a political moment where he can squeeze out money for a wall,” said Ocasio-Cortez, who is also known as AOC. “The reason that he does this is to create this outrage and to say we need more money.”
She added that the situation “is completely engineered by him.”
The comments came hours after Ocasio-Cortez on Monday toured migrant detention facilities run by Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), which she described as “horrifying.”
A report released by an internal government watchdog on Tuesday found the harsh conditions within migrant detention facilities are more pervasive than had initially been made public. The report details overcrowding, insufficient food provisions, and health problems that result from the conditions.
“In addition to the overcrowding we observed,” the Homeland Security Inspector General report noted, “Border Patrol’s custody data indicates that 826 (31 percent) of the 2,669 children at these facilities had been held longer than the 72 hours generally permitted under the TEDS standards and the Flores Agreement.”
President Trump has blamed Democrats for the immigration crisis based on the failure to strike a bipartisan immigration reform deal. He has also claimed child separation began under President Obama.
However, while some children were separated from their families during the prior administration, the scale of separations and detentions dramatically increased after the Trump administration began implementing a “zero tolerance” policy at the border in April 2018.
‘This whole congressional allocation was a farce’
The border wall funding fight has been ongoing for months.
In February, after a 35-day partial government shutdown, lawmakers declined to appropriate $5.7 billion for the wall but agreed to give $1.4 billion for fencing and other barriers. Trump then declared a national emergency to reallocate as much as $6.7 billion by drawing on emergency authorization.
In March, then-acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan announced a plan to transfer $1 billion for the building of 57 miles of new border fencing. Last week, Trump appealed a federal court ruling that had blocked the reallocation of $2.5 billion that had been intended to fight drug activities.
Ocasio-Cortez criticized what she considers Trump’s selective willingness to call for a state of emergency when it suits his policy aims.
“He declared a national emergency to move funds to build a wall,” Ocasio-Cortez told Walker. “If he actually cared about these kids lives he could have snapped his fingers and done that easily to get them the care that they needed.”
On Monday, Trump signed a $4.6 billion funding package for the U.S.-Mexico border that provides resources for CBP and other federal agencies to alleviate overcrowding in their facilities. The measure also calls for $200 million in funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and $110 million in overtime pay for CBP workers.
Ocasio-Cortez asserted that the “whole congressional allocation was a farce because if he really cared about human lives he wouldn’t have needed us the same way he bypasses us for a wall.”
The border funding measure split congressional Democrats, many of whom initially backed a House bill that put additional restrictions on the funds but later voted for a Senate version of the bill that didn’t include the protections. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, among those who initially rejected the Senate version of the measure, said she later backed it “in order to get resources to the children fastest.”
Ocasio-Cortez condemned lawmakers in her own party for supporting a flawed border funding measure, referring to those who backed the Senate version of the measure as “horrible Democrats.”
Check out AOC’s exclusive interview with Yahoo News >
Max Zahn is a reporter for Yahoo Finance.
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