Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) is taking aim at anyone who refers to the migrant situation at the U.S.-Mexico border as a “surge.”
During an Instagram Live on Tuesday evening, Ocasio-Cortez said, “They wanna say, ‘But what about the surge?’ Well, first of all, just gut check, stop. Anyone who’s using the term ‘surge’ around you consciously is trying to invoke a militaristic frame.”
She continued, “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 another is coming in the population that this is an invasion of who we are.”
Watch the video below:
.@AOC on border crisis: "This is not a 'surge,' these are children, and they are not insurgents." pic.twitter.com/2V9GO5p8xe
— Eddie Zipperer (@EddieZipperer) March 31, 2021
Sen. Lindsey Graham (S-S.C.) recently questioned, “Where is AOC? Why aren’t you at the border looking at the things being reported?”
He continued, “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?”
Ocasio-Cortez has criticized both the Trump administration and the Biden administration for the migrant situation at the southern border.
Nearly 978,000 migrants were taken into custody at the U.S.-Mexico border in 2019, during former President Donald Trump’s presidency. It is now estimated border patrol agents could “encounter over a million people this year,” as Raul Ortiz, deputy chief of the U.S. Border Patrol, expects.
