Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley Compares ICE to Slave Auction Blocks
Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts claims the “abuses” perpetrated by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency resemble the “auction block during slavery.”
While generally less vocal than her colleagues, Pressley is a member of “the squad,” a group of four freshman Democratic congresswomen who hold particularly far-left extremist views.
She made her remarks Aug. 29 on “Pod Save America,” a left-leaning political podcast, during an interview with former Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama speechwriter Jon Lovett.
“I didn’t buy for a second that the humanitarian crisis at the border had anything to do with a deficit of funding,” Pressley said, before echoing the Democratic narrative that “the cruelty is the point.”
She later made more direct accusations against ICE while defending her push to abolish the law enforcement agency.
“There are plenty of agencies that I think are in dire need of reform, and I do that work with my team every day to hold them accountable, but an agency that is using what throughout history has been proven as one of the most effective tools of oppression, which is to separate families,” she said.
Pressley did not acknowledge that those who were separated from their children had broken the law, often placing their children in danger in the process.
“We’re all shocked by what we see,” she continued, “but we’ve been here before on reservations with indigenous and native people, at the auction block during slavery.”
So far, there is no evidence of the federal government removing illegal immigrants from their own land or selling them into involuntary servitude.
Later, the congresswoman reiterated a false claim about deferred action, first put forth by Democratic presidential front-runner and former Vice President Joe Biden.
“Now we are deporting children with terminal illnesses,” Pressley said.
On the contrary, the policy she was referring to merely shifted the responsibility to determine eligibility for deferred action to ICE. It did not change the eligibility requirements themselves, and illegal residents can still qualify to stay for medical reasons.
Pressley went on to discuss how she was able to use racial division to be elected to the House in 2018, and she advised other leftist politicians to do the same.
“We decided to invest in ethnic and specialty media,” she said, “and the Latino community in [Massachusetts’s 7th District] is about 7 percent, so, you know, I had consultants at the table that said, ‘Hey, we’ll walk away. This is going to be the death knell of your campaign. You’re going to go on Telemundo and Univision in a primary?'”
Pressley bragged, “That’s what we did, and we grew the Latino vote by 71 percent.”
Increasing turnout for such a small portion of the electorate will hardly constitute a victory in a broader election, so it’s doubtful that the congresswoman’s pandering strategy is repeatable on a grand scale.
Pressley also praised the efforts of those whom she called “activists and agitators” and asserted that the “people closest to the pain should be closest to the power.” Unsurprisingly, she included herself among those “closest to the pain.”
She claimed that their ultimate goal was to get “our democracy … working again,” culminating with “evicting” President Donald Trump, whom she exclusively referred to as “the occupant of this White House.”
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