She's long called for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to be abolished, but now, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) wants its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, eliminated as well.
During an interview with The New Yorker's David Remnick published Wednesday, the freshman representative said that the Department of Homeland Security, which was established in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, is one of several "large threats to American civil liberties." People "sounded the alarm back then that these agencies are extrajudicial, that they lack effective oversight, and it is baked into the core foundational structure of these agencies."
When Remnick asked Ocasio-Cortez if the department should be dismantled, she said yes, because "we need to undo a lot of the egregious mistakes that the Bush administration did. I feel like it is a very qualified and supported position, at least in terms of evidence and in terms of being able to make the argument that we never should have created DHS in the early 2000s."
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Ocasio-Cortez also said she believes the country has a "misunderstanding of the issue of immigration. We think of it as a stand-alone issue. It's like asking, what are you gonna do about homelessness? But these are systemic issues. Once you're at the point where you are mitigating what is happening at the border, you are already dealing with the symptoms of a large amount of other U.S. policies." One example is President Trump withdrawing humanitarian aid to Central American countries. "We think of everything as south of Mexico, and we treat it that way," she said. "And because of that, our largest interaction with Latin America is what happens at our border. And so that's how it manifests in our country." For more on this, and what Ocasio-Cortez considers "sane immigration policy," visit The New Yorker.
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