Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) blamed Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) for a sudden increase of illegal immigrants entering the U.S., claiming that his sanctions against the socialist dictatorship in Venezuela caused the surge.
AOC made the remarks during a Sunday interview with CBS News’s Margaret Brennan on “Face The Nation” when asked to further elaborate on her recent remarks that she believes “immigration is arguably [the Biden] Administration’s weakest issue.”
The congresswoman responded by claiming former President Donald Trump “dramatically inflamed” the issue. She then pivoted to saying 500,000 Venezuelans who recently flooded into the U.S. needed to be given a pathway to citizenship because that would “reduce the strain on our public systems,” and went on to blame Rubio.
“I think we also need to examine the root of this problem, because if we are constantly engaging in foreign policy that drives people to our southern border in this specific instance, U.S. sanctions that were originally authored by Marco Rubio began and precipitated certainly took a large part in the driving of populations to our southern border shortly after those sanctions, those broad-based sanctions … we started seeing dramatic increases in these populations that were coming to our southern border,” she said. “And so we have to address the root of these population movements and the migration crisis. And we have to also have to address the domestic U.S. policy issues when it comes to immigration reform.”
Brennan pushed back, noting that dictator Nicolas Maduro, who has been president of Venezuela since 2013, was “responsible for large parts of that.”
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Ocasio-Cortez said that the U.S. should “reexamine” the sanctions it has placed on the oppressive regime and, when asked, would not answer whether President Joe Biden should go to the border or whether she would go to the border.
AOC also claimed that allowing illegal immigrants to work in the United States was “not what is driving millions of people” to come to America.
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