Ocasio-Cortez Doesn't Know What ICE Does, But Wants Dems to Occupy Their Offices
“How do you tell a Communist?” Ronald Reagan once rhetorically asked.
“Well, it’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin,” he explained. “And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It’s someone who understands Marx and Lenin.”
The Gipper was on to something: Ignorance is a prerequisite for those who support socialism in its various forms, because the ideology is blatantly at odds with how humans and the world actually work.
A lack of knowledge used to be frowned upon. Now, it’s being worn as a badge of honor by a major candidate. On Monday, Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez demonstrated that she doesn’t understand the issues she’s running on … but that isn’t stopping her from going full speed ahead.
The far-left candidate — she’s a “Democratic Socialist,” if you hadn’t guessed — declared during an interview with “Democracy Now” that Immigration and Customs Enforcement needed to be dismantled, but quickly revealed that she didn’t know what she was talking about.
First, she jumped on the anti-ICE bandwagon and demanded that President Donald Trump end the policy of child separation, which was being used to house illegal immigrants whose adult companions were repeat offenders or could not be verified as the lawful parents.
There was just one problem: Trump had already used an executive order to end the policy. Checking the headlines is apparently not a prerequisite to run for Congress.
Then, Ocasio-Cortez doubled down on the anarchist verbiage and tactics of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement and called on her supporters to literally disrupt government officials as they tried to do their jobs.
“We have to occupy all of it,” she said, according to The Daily Wire. “We need to occupy every airport. We need to occupy every border. We need to occupy every ICE office until those kids are back with their parents, period.”
It must not have occurred to her that one of the reasons many minors were in ICE custody was because their parents were nowhere to be found.
Some had been sent on a dangerous cross-border journey alone, while other children were in the hands of human smugglers and even sex traffickers who were only pretending to be their parents.
Digging deeper, the young New York candidate tried to show how informed she was on the issue, but ended up falling flat on her face.
“First of all, ICE is not (U.S. Customs and Border Protection). When we talk about abolishing ICE, we’re talking about ending family detention,” Ocasio-Cortez declared.
“We’re talking about ending an agency and ending a practice and a structure that is not accountable to the U.S. Department of Justice, that often takes on things that look a lot like enforcement activities,” she continued.
“So to have an enforcement agency that operates outside of the accountability of the Department of Justice, it’s no surprise to see the violations of civil and human rights that we’re seeing right now,” she prattled on.
It was fear-mongering at its finest. Not accountable to the Department of Justice! The image was of a rogue agency, a shadowy government operation that was snatching children out of their homes, and probably stealing their candy, too.
Here’s the thing: ICE has never directly reported to the Department of Justice because it’s part of the Department of Homeland Security.
This is a bit like complaining that, as an example, FAA airline crash investigators aren’t accountable to the Department of Justice, while conveniently leaving out that they get their oversight from the Department of Transportation. It’s ignorant and deceptive.
“DHS … reports to the Department of Justice. ICE is an investigative arm of DHS, which means that it concerns itself mostly with cases of human trafficking and possible terrorism, and those cases might have something to do with a border or they might not,” clarified The Daily Wire.
“ICE also tackles the ‘enforcement and removal’ of illegal persons found living within U.S. borders,” that outlet continued.
In other words, Ocasio-Cortez aspires to be a U.S. congresswoman but has never bothered to look at how the U.S. government is structured. Hey, who needs accuracy and knowledge when a wink and a smile will suffice?
There’s also the pesky fact that while the socialist candidate tried desperately to separate her attack against ICE from the hardworking men and women within the Border Patrol, there’s a significant amount of overlap between the two.
“The Border Patrol actually enforces (or enforced) the family detention policy; ICE handles any eventual deportations,” The Daily Wire pointed out.
Here’s the bottom line. Ocasio-Cortez is so busy trying to jump on the anti-law enforcement bandwagon that she didn’t stop to think about what the impact would be if she succeeded. Both ICE and CBP have important jobs to do, and both are facing an uphill battle enforcing important federal laws.
When someone says they want to dismantle ICE, they’re also saying they want to stop all deportations … and in the process, they’re endorsing the anarchist notion that lawbreakers should never face consequences for their actions.
There’s room for an honest discussion about the best immigration policies and different approaches to the problem. Throwing out all enforcement, however, is simply insane — and if Ocasio-Cortez bothered to understand what she’s rambling about, she would know that by now.
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