Rep. Dan Crenshaw says Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has opted for “insanity” and outright “lies” while talking about the immigration crisis along the U.S. southern border with Mexico.
The Texan Republican told Fox News this week that rhetoric by his Democratic counterpart — she claimed that illegal immigrants have been drinking out of toilets at detention facilities and that she was sexually harrassed by border guards — boils down to “dishonest behavior” for partisan political gain.
“It’s sad to see. She’s getting bolder with her lies on this,” Mr. Crenshaw told Fox News. “This is what’s actually happening and this is what the American people need to understand: People like AOC are operating off of a false premise, and it’s deliberately designed to misinform the American people for her own political ends.”
“Remember, first there was no crisis at all,” he continued. “Then it was a manufactured crisis. Then it was a crisis completely created by Trump and then there were ’concentration camps.’ Then people are ’Nazis.’ Now she’s saying that Border Patrol agents harassed her and forced migrants to drink out of toilets?”
Mr. Crenshaw called these claims non-credible and uncorroborated, at best.
“This is insanity. This is not true. There’s no one else corroborating these kinds of reports, and yet she’s using it to try and make her case that we shouldn’t have any enforcement and that we should have open borders. This is really dishonest behavior from a member of Congress and I honestly can’t believe it,” he concluded.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has also made national headlines in recent weeks by insisting that “concentration camps” operate along the southern border with Mexico.
“What they really want is no enforcement, and this is the crux of it,” Mr. Crenshaw said. “They don’t talk about what the actual problem is, which is tens of thousands of people coming across are overwhelming our system.”
Mr. Crenshaw, a former Navy SEAL who wears an patch to cover the eye he lost to a bomb attack in Afghanistan, said the left has an agenda of which it dare not speak.
“Then they have to answer the question — ’Should we have a system at all?’ — and they say no. Then what is the point of having a border? … They don’t want to answer these tough questions because, in the end, they want open borders,” he said.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez countered by saying her claims about people drinking from toilets were “corroborated by other members of Congress, court documents, migrant testimony, and now photos released today by the Inspector General.”
Rep. Judy Chu from California and Rep. Joaquin Castro of Texas, both Democrats, echoed Ocasio-Cortez’s sentiments.
“CBP takes allegations of mistreatment of individuals in our facilities seriously, and reports all allegations to both the DHS Office of the Inspector General and the CBP Office of Professional Responsibility,” the agency said in a statement released Tuesday. “Any employee found to have violated our standards of conduct will be held accountable.”
• Douglas Ernst can be reached at dernst@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.