Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) blamed the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and former President George W. Bush for the immigration crisis on Saturday while speaking on immigration at a town hall event in her home state.
“And when people say ‘Oh, you wanna to talk about dismantling DHS or abolishing ICE or all of these things, these are such radical agendas,’” Ocasio-Cortez said. “First of all, I think that reorganizing and getting rid of DHS is not as radical as George Bush’s creation, implementation of DHS in the first place.”
“DHS, this is part of a larger strategy, when you have to put FEMA in the same organization as ICE that doesn’t make any sense,” Ocasio-Cortez continued. “The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has the Coast Guard, it has FEMA, it has CBP, and it has ICE. It has a whole bunch of agencies consolidated under one very largely unaccountable, um, unaccountable structure, umbrella.”
“It doesn’t make any sense, it’s a power play, and it’s created the crisis that we have today,” Ocasio-Cortez concluded on the subject. “So it’s not that radical to say maybe George Bush wasn’t right. It’s really not that radical.”
WATCH:
Ocasio-Cortez then appeared to suggest that there should not be any restrictions or criteria on determining who should be allowed to enter the U.S.
“I think migration, to me, is liberation. It’s the ability to move and be — it’s the freedom to be, really, is what we’re talking about,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “And I think that all people should be free, to be, here and in our communities.”
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Ocasio-Cortez later called for a “9/11-style” commission to investigate President Donald Trump’s immigration policies, noting that the 9/11 commission was “charged with the investigating and making sure they dug out every nook and cranny of what happened and how it happened in our system.”