Democratic socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) celebrated America’s birthday by attacking federal law enforcement officials that are charged with protecting the nation’s borders, spreading misleading information and engaging in partisan attacks.
In one tweet, Ocasio-Cortez wrote: “Republicans & CBP (as if they would tell on themselves?) are working overtime to discredit my account from the camps. However, you could remove my entire account & the claims still stand. Details are now being corroborated by independent 3rd parties, from courts to inspectors.”
The congresswoman’s claim is false: no one has corroborated her claim that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers told detained women to drink water from toilets if they were thirsty, a claim that Ocasio-Cortez made earlier this week and initially refused to give details on when she was confronted.
Ocasio-Cortez made her comment in a quote retweet of a journalist who showed pictures that were released by the Office of the Inspector General.
CBP officials and the Trump administration have warned for months that conditions on the border were dire and that more resources were desperately needed to address the current problem and to get to the crux of the problem.
Ocasio-Cortez ignored the problem for months, insisting that the crisis didn’t exist. “Gotta love how the same folks who tolerate+ acquiesce to building a medieval wall along the entire US southern border as a (non-evidence based) solution for a ‘crisis’ that doesn’t exist are now suddenly concerned that pursuing a nat’l response to climate change is ‘unrealistic,'” she tweeted in March.
Ocasio-Cortez, who claims that she cares about the conditions inside the facilities, voted against Democrat and Republican bills to send billions of dollars in aid to the border to help address the crisis. In an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper last week, the freshman representative said that she voted against both bills because she wanted to “send a message.”
Ocasio-Cortez continued her attacks on CBP officials on Independence Day, tweeting: “CBP is trying to refute the toilet drinking story by saying their toilets have sinks. The sink in the cell we visited wasn’t functional. Guards told these women, Cuban refugees, they could drink out of the bowl. This account has been corroborated by other members of Congress.”
Once again, Ocasio-Cortez is making a false claim about the situation. No members of Congress heard CBP officials tell women to drink water from the toilets.
The Washington Examiner reported that, according to CBP officials, a detained migrant “wanted water, didn’t know how to use the faucet in the cell, and drank from the toilet. She never told AOC that we made her drink from the toilet. AOC, of course, changed it.”
The event did not happen when members of Congress were at the facility and the detained migrant was not told to drink out of the toilet. The sink that is in the cells is connected to the toilet, context Ocasio-Cortez left out of her initial claims.