For Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Border Crisis is All About Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

For Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the border crisis is all about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Every step of the way, she has recklessly positioned herself as the focal point of this humanitarian crisis. As public understanding of the challenges we face at the border has evolved, her intellectually empty positions have shifted like the wind as she maneuvers into the political spotlight again and again.

Her compulsive need to play the heroic liberal contrarian has made it infinitely harder to provide the relief our southern border desperately needs.

For months, tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors have arrived at a border ill-equipped to receive them. The Department of Health and Human Services cares for these children as they are placed with relatives in safe homes. But in the face of these overwhelming numbers, HHS ran out of funding and bed space.

Well-intentioned but outdated legislation trapped these unaccompanied minors at underfunded and overcrowded Customs and Border Patrol detention facilities as they wait weeks for HHS beds to open up. These facilities were never designed for minors or long-term care. The result is the horrible conditions we’ve witnessed children enduring in Clint, Texas.

On April 4th, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar reported that they expected to run out of money to care for migrant children and will have to ask for more.

What we are witnessing today has been building for months. Without increased HHS and CBP funding, by law this crisis was inevitable. The same situation occurred under the Obama administration.

Yet Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez continually chose to call the escalating situation a “manufactured crisis.” She torpedoed Health and Human Services funding and bipartisan efforts to provide emergency relief to a desperate border. It suited her carefully cultivated political image as the Trump administration’s greatest foil.

She put herself before the children, until the very real humanitarian crisis became undeniable.

As public awareness of the desperate situation we face at the border grew, it became impossible to reject. Ocasio-Cortez pivoted, throwing herself back into the center of the new political reality.

“I want to talk to the people that are concerned enough with humanity that ‘Never Again’ means something. The fact that concentration camps are now an institutionalized practice in the home of the free is extraordinarily disturbing and we need to do something about it.”

What was once a ‘manufactured crisis’ was now akin to Nazi concentration camps — a statement she has refused to back down from. The comparison is abhorrent and morally bankrupt, but the controversy put her back in the spotlight. As she basked in it, a bipartisan effort was underway to provide relief to our border facilities.

The Senate passed H.R. 3401 by an overwhelming majority of 84–8, allocating $4.5 billion in emergency humanitarian assistance for the southern border. But when the bipartisan bill made its way to the House, Ocasio-Cortez stood loudly in opposition over just $200 million in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement funding. Here’s the breakdown:

$35,943,000 for the transportation needs of unaccompanied minors; $11,981,000 for detainee transportation for medical needs, court proceedings, or relocation; $20,000,000 for alternatives to detention; $45,000,000 for detainee medical care; $5,000,000 for the Office of Professional Responsibility for background investigations and facility inspections; and $21,286,000 for Homeland Security Investigations into human trafficking.

Out of the $200 million, the only funding not allotted for the direct care of people in ICE custody is $69,735,000 allocated for temporary duty, overtime, and other on-board personnel costs.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did not vote for $4.5 billion in emergency relief for children trapped in what she believes are ‘concentration camps’, over $70 million to pay government employees to do their jobs.

Ocasio-Cortez does not speak compromise. She previously warned moderate Democrats that they ‘were putting themselves on a list’ if they weren’t on board with her agenda. If it wasn’t for the Democrats who are part of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, she may have had her way. It was never about the children; it was always about her.

Indignant, Ocasio-Cortez threw herself again into the spotlight with more calculated controversy during a recent trip to the border detention facilities in Clint, Texas. During her brief trip, she claimed that border Patrol Agents forced migrants to drink toilet water.

Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, the president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, the world’s largest Hispanic Christian organization, painted a different picture:

“To my surprise, I saw something drastically different from the stories I’ve been hearing in our national discourse. Even as a veteran of immigration advocacy in the U.S., I was shocked at the misinformation of the crisis at the border. “We found no soiled diapers, no deplorable conditions and no lack of basic necessities.”

There is no conspiracy between Rev. Samuel Rodriguez and U.S. Border Patrol Agents. There are serious health and wellness consequences arising from the mass overcrowding these facilities are experiencing, but they are rarely the result of malice.

Ocasio-Cortez has a self-centered agenda, and her campaign of misinformation and vitriol has handcuffed our ability to make impactful lasting change.

She shames without governing; she is quick to blame but slow to lead. The only solution she provides to a crisis she helped enable is dissolving ICE and implementing policy that would effectively open our borders.

Our public schools are overcrowded and underfunded; we have a healthcare system that is often inaccessible and unaffordable; there is a national shortage of more than 7.2 million affordable rental homes for low income households; 1.5 million American families, including 2.8 million children, live in extreme poverty on less than $2 a day before any benefits; homelessness has increased in Los Angeles by 17% this year alone; and tonight 58,000 veterans will sleep on our streets.

Open borders are not the answer.

It will take bipartisan cooperation to tackle the complex issues we face as a country, but as long as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez continues to revel in her own spotlight at the expense of real progress, she will not be part of the solution.

Joshua Wexler, 2019