“It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it,” Maurice Switzer wrote in 1906, rephrasing a biblical proverb.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is apparently unfamiliar with the adage. Nearly daily, she opens her mouth and confirms that she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.
Latest case in point: The Democratic socialist from New York took to the MSNBC airwaves to discuss Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which (and we’re sure you already know this, but just for the record) is very different from the U.S. Border Patrol, the uniformed law enforcement arm of U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
“The president should not be asking for more to an agency that has systematically violated human rights,” she said of ICE. “The president should be really defending why we are funding such an agency at all, because right now, what we are seeing is death. Right now, what we are seeing is the violation of human rights,” she said.
She added: “The one thing the president has not talked about is the fact he has systematically engaged in the violation of human rights on our border.”
On Wednesday, former acting ICE director Thomas Homan ripped the 29-year-old former bartender who was sworn into Congress last week, calling her an “embarrassment” to her alma mater Boston University.
“It’s incredible. Every time she opens her mouth she’s wrong. She supposedly went to college in Boston, she must be an embarrassment to that institution,” he said. “She needs to do her homework. First of all, no child died in ICE custody. That was a different agency, that was the Border Patrol. And they did everything they could to save that child’s life,” he said. “That child [was] in bad shape.”
A seven-year-old Guatemalan girl who died after trekking hundreds of miles with her father before illegally entering the U.S. likely suffered from septic shock, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said in December. The department said the girl had been apprehended with 161 others who illegally crossed the U.S. border and were taken to a holding station.
When she stopped breathing, she was revived twice by medical staff, then flown by helicopter to Providence Children’s Hospital in El Paso, Texas, where she passed away.
“You want to blame somebody for deaths in custody? Then blame the Democrats [who] refuse to close the loopholes that use these families to come in the first place,” Homan said.
“When you talk about human rights violations, does she realize that ICE has arrested and removed hundreds of human rights violators from this country, including Nazis and people that committed war crimes in certain parts of Europe?”
Then Homan added: “She ought to be saying thank you. She’s from New York. ICE agents have arrested and removed thousands of criminals from the streets of New York … So a thank you would be nice rather than misinformation that she always puts out.”
And apparently, Ocasio-Cortez can’t even keep track of what she thinks. Less than a week ago, she voted for a Continuing Resolution for the DHS to keep funding ICE and the U.S. Border Patrol at current levels.
