The House Oversight and Reform Committee held a hearing on the treatment of migrants at the southern border on Friday morning.
The meeting came after multiple reports of poor conditions in detention centers from the media and politicians, including Vice President Joe Biden.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was the sixth person to speak at the committee meeting after Republicans tried to challenge her. She recently visited migrant detention centers herself and has been open about the poor conditions.
Ocasio-Cortez did not back down even a little.
First, she requested to be sworn in to show that everything she was saying was true under penalty of perjury.
“The cruelty is manufactured. This is a manufactured crisis because there is no need for us to do this,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “It is unnecessary to separate children from their families.”
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The congresswoman submitted the names of 17 women she visited at the border into the record. She said that she believed their stories that they had been forced to drink from toilets, according to CBS News.
“When these women tell me that they were put into a cell and that their sink was not working, and we tested the sink ourselves, and the sink was not working. And they were told to drink out of a toilet bowl. I believe them. I believe these women,” she said. “We are not getting the accounts of migrants, of their treatment, of what they’re experiencing.”
The worst part? The worst part of Ocasio-Cortez’s visit to the migrant detention facility and the border crisis was that “there were American flags hanging all over these facilities.”
Ocasio-Cortez has called for major changes in the last week, including terminating the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in an interview with The New Yorker.
“It’s not even living…it was the physical manifestation of Trump’s rhetoric and calling migrants animals because that’s how these women were being treated,” Ocasio-Cortez said in the interview. “Their hair was falling out, they had sores in their mouths due to the lack of nutrition.”
