Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) is now facing significant pushback for claims she made about the manner in which illegal immigrants are treated at a detention center she recently visited.
Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, is now calling for the release of video from Ocasio-Cortez’s visit, which he says will thoroughly discredit her allegations.
“Let the cameras speak”
Judd hit back at Ocasio-Cortez during a radio interview Tuesday on Breitbart News Tonight. He believes video footage will expose the freshman congresswoman as a liar.
“Let the cameras speak,” he said. “The cameras will prove her wrong and they will prove that she is being false.”
Accordingly, Judd has asked the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency to immediately release the tapes of Ocasio-Cortez’s visit.
“I’m calling on CBP to release that footage so they clearly show that she was treated with the utmost dignity and respect,” he said.
The allegations
Ocasio-Cortez made claims on Twitter about the conditions in which illegals are being kept after making a visit to detention centers on Monday.
“It’s not just the kids. It’s everyone,” she asserted. “People drinking out of toilets, officers laughing in front of members Congress. I brought it up to their superiors. They said ‘officers are under stress & act out sometimes.’ No accountability.”
She further claimed that one illegal with whom she spoke, in a “cage,” said that the officers conducted “psychological warfare.”
“After I forced myself into a cell w/ women [and] began speaking to them,” wrote Ocasio-Cortez, “one of them described their treatment at the hands of officers as ‘psychological warfare’ — waking them at odd hours for no reason, calling them wh*res, etc. Tell me what about that is due to a ‘lack of funding?’”
The congresswoman summed up her experience, saying, “This has been horrifying so far. It is hard to understate the enormity of the problem. We’re talking systemic cruelty w/ a dehumanizing culture that treats them like animals.”
False narrative
During Tuesday’s interview, Judd directly addressed some of these individual claims.
“Nobody is forced to drink out of a toilet and nobody is told to drink out of a toilet,” he said, arguing that Ocasio-Cortez is “trying to paint a false narrative and a false picture” by not giving context. “It’s completely and totally a baseless and ridiculous allegation and frankly it needs to be investigated and she needs to be exposed.”
Judd went on to invoke the congresswoman’s own words, that she’d rather be “morally right” than “factually accurate,” asking: “How can you have the moral high ground if you are going to throw facts out the window and spew falsehoods?”
Ocasio-Cortez has yet to respond.