Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Illegal Aliens Deserve ‘Right of Passage’ to Freely Enter U.S.

Socialist Democrat candidate for Congress Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is taking her campaign for open borders even further to the political left, now saying that all border crossers and illegal aliens deserve a “right of passage” into the United States.

Last week, Ocasio delivered an upset to establishment Democratic power player Rep. Joe Crowley (D-NY) in the district’s primary election, running on a platform that promises to abolish all immigration and border enforcement.

Now, in an interview with AJ+, owned by the Al Jazeera Media Network, Ocasio says that not only should the U.S. abolish the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency — which is tasked with enforcing interior immigration laws — but that foreign nationals, border crossers, and illegal aliens are entitled to enter the U.S.

Ocasio said:

I think that immigration should be safe. I think that we should grant people a safe and documented right of passage. Republicans try all these scare tactics. And they go ‘Oh, open borders.’ Because they’re trying to incite fear. But what we really need to do is demilitarize a lot of what’s going on in terms of the detention of people, which has been happening for a very long time by the way. [Emphasis added]

So I think that when we talk about replacing it with a system, we talk about having a system that is safe, that documents people effectively, that is also not rooted in the discrimination that our immigration system was initially built on. [Emphasis added]

The first immigration law in the United States was the Chinese Exclusion Act. The first law about immigration in the United States was about how do we exclude a specific type of people. And our immigration system has really kind of evolved from that initial root and I don’t think it necessarily has to be that way. [Emphasis added]

Ocasio is increasingly shaping the Democratic Party’s open borders platform ahead of the 2018 midterm elections. Since her beating of Crowley in the Bronx, Democrats in the House and Senate, along with progressive liberals like Cynthia Nixon in New York, have been demanding ICE be abolished and all immigration enforcement be ended.

House Democrats are now crafting legislation that would officially abolish ICE, while Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has been purged from the Democratic party for failing to endorse the “abolish ICE” campaign like his fellow left-wingers such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA).

The latest Harvard/Harris Poll, though, reveals that swing voters are overwhelmingly opposed to the Democrats’ plan to end all immigration enforcement across the U.S. Nearly 3-in-4 swing voters, about 73 percent, said they do not want ICE to be disbanded, as Breitbart News reported. Less than 30 percent of swing voters said they support the abolishment of ICE.

Even Democrat voters are opposed to the abolishment of ICE. Nearly 60 percent of Democrats said they do not want ICE to be disbanded.

Abolishing the deportation agency, as Breitbart News reported, would have allowed more than 1.6 million illegal aliens to have gone free throughout the U.S. in the last five years.