Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said on Monday that Congress should not give any money to “unstable” President Donald Trump for a border wall.
“This idea that we should be compromising and giving $5 billion to an unstable person… and say, okay… well, let’s just incarcerate a few more kids this year. No,” she said at the MLK Now 2019 event at New York’s Riverside Church. “The answer is no.”
The freshman Democratic-Socialist Representative, who said Democrats do not have to compromise their values to find common ground with others, has previously called Trump a “racist” and the border wall a “racist” “monument to hate.” She also ran on a platform that included abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
After Trump offered on Saturday to extend the work permits of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients and those with Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for three years in exchange for $5.7 billion for the construction of physical barriers along U.S.-Mexico border, other amnesty activists said “no way” to the deal.
Greisa Martinez Rosas, United We Dream’s executive director, said Trump’s deal would lead to “more kids in cages, more deportations, and more misery. NO way.”
Former Rep. Luis Gutierrez, who is now a senior policy adviser for the National Partnership of New Americans (NPNA), which condemned Trump’s proposed deal, even compared Trump to Leonid Brezhnev.
“President Donald Trump sharing remarks during his shutdown over his border wall in front of a U.S. citizenship oath ceremony is like Soviet strongman Leonid Brezhnev giving a speech on freedom in front of the Berlin Wall,” Gutierrez said over the weekend. “President Trump has worked systematically to build a ‘Second Wall’ to prevent immigrants from becoming U.S. citizens and fully participating in our democracy.”
Avideh Moussavian, legislative director at the National Immigration Law Center, blasted Trump for “rehashing nonstarter proposals to once again torpedo every good-faith effort to fix the very harms he created in service of his racist, xenophobic agenda.”
“To blindly trust that this isn’t just another attempt to hurt our immigrant and border communities would be foolish,” Moossavian added. “The Trump administration has taken immigrant youth and other immigrant communities, our government, and the financial well-being of 800,000 federal workers hostage to his demands. We should call this so-called ‘deal’ what it really is: an extortionist wishlist dressed up to look like an offer.”