Ilhan Omar: United Nations Should Handle Southern Border Crisis

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) on Tuesday called for the United Nations to handle the migrant crisis plaguing the U.S.-Mexico border, claiming the Trump administration’s immigration policies are costing the country its “moral high ground.”

“We should do what any other country does, by dealing with this situation in a serious way,” Omar told an audience in Minneapolis, according to the Star Tribune. “So we have to bring in the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees – an agency that has the expertise and the training to handle massive flows of refugees humanely.”

“We are treating people like criminals when they have not committed a crime,” she added.

The far-left “Squad” member went on to accuse the U.S. of violating the human rights of migrants and claimed the country runs the risk of hypocrisy by criticizing other countries’ immigration policies while the border crisis persists.

“It doesn’t make any sense for us to be committing these kinds of human rights violations, to have these policies in the way we interact with migrants and asylum seekers if we want to continue to be the kind of country that condemns countries in Africa, in Asia, or Latin American countries for its treatment of refugees and asylum seekers,” said the lawmaker.

Omar came to the U.S. as a refugee from Somalia in 1995 and became a citizen in 2000 at the age of 17.

Omar’s chilling suggestion for a U.N. takeover of the U.S.’s border crisis isn’t her first radical proposal on the issue of immigration. The Minnesota Democrat has joined the chorus of progressive Democrats, including fellow “Squad” member Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), in calling for the abolishment of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

“ICE is militarized, brutal, and unaccountable. Immigration policy should be based in compassion. ICE is not the solution, we need to abolish ICE,” Omar has said of the federal law enforcement agency.

In an effort to slow the flow the hundreds of thousands of migrants that have reached the southern border in the last year, the Trump administration has constructed new security barriers that have replaced old barriers in Arizona and Texas and struck asylum agreements with Mexico and Guatemala.