Former Acting ICE Director Slams AOC for Migrant ‘Surge’ Critiques

Former Acting ICE Director Tom Homan said on Fox News this week Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who criticized characterizations of the border “surge” as “white supremacy philosophy,” needs to go to the border and talk to agents to see that the situation is a “national security crisis.” He added she “shouldn’t be in Congress at all” if she cannot grasp that concept.

This week, Ocasio-Cortez slammed those who have characterized the current migrant crisis as a “surge,” taking specific issue with the language used.

“Stop. Anyone who’s using the term ‘surge’ around you, consciously, is trying to invoke a militaristic frame,” she said during an Instagram Q&A.

“And that’s a problem because this is not a surge. These are children, and they are not insurgents, and we are not being invaded,” she continued, categorizing the language as part of a “white supremacy philosophy”:

I’ve been using the term “surge” because there’s a higher than usual amount of people illegally crossing into the U.S.

I’ve seen it with my own eyes on a nightly basis for the past week. https://t.co/3684dzzvSa

— Julio Rosas (@Julio_Rosas11) March 31, 2021

The New York lawmaker, Homan said, “needs to come down and talk to the men and women who put the uniform on every day and stand in that line.” He added that the “men and women of the Border Patrol say it’s a surge.”

“The men and women of the Border Patrol [say] it’s a crisis,” he stated. “The men and women of the Border Patrol know what Brian Babin said, that these cartels are using these children or family units to throw them across the border and tie up their assets, 40 percent of Border Patrol is assigned to the vicinity, no longer in line,” he told Fox News this week.

“So, these cartels are moving drugs and bad people through unguarded areas, this is a national security crisis and if she can’t understand that or accept that, then she shouldn’t be in Congress at all,” he added.

Homan also echoed the sentiments of several GOP lawmakers, attributing the current surge to the Biden administration’s decisions to roll back many of the Trump era immigration policies, such as the Remain in Mexico agreement. Via the Daily Wire transcription:

It’s the worst because this was totally preventable. Now the Biden administration, the incoming administration was warned, they said if you if you end these programs, we’re going to see a surge that you’ve never seen before. They were briefed by leadership at ICE, at CBP, I’ve talked to people that briefed them. And so they knew this would happened. Look, Brian, I wrote an op-ed in July of last year saying this would happen if they ended these policies. They knew what they were doing, again this isn’t incompetence, this isn’t you know bad management, this is open borders. They designed an open borders agenda and that men and women of Border Patrol feel abandoned because they’re no longer enforcing the law, they’re just facilitating illegally entry at the instruction of the administration.

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