According to reporter Anna Giaritelli, rep. AOC screamed at federal law enforcement agents “in a threatening manner” during a visit to a U.S. Border Patrol facility in El Paso, Texas, Monday afternoon and refused to tour the facility, according to two people who witnessed it.
SCOOP: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., screamed at federal law enforcement agents “in a threatening manner” during a visit to a U.S. Border Patrol facility in El Paso, Texas, Monday afternoon and refused to tour the facility, according to two people who witnessed it.
— Anna Giaritelli (@Anna_Giaritelli) July 1, 2019
AOC claims her first experience at the CBP facility included officers keeping women in cells and telling them to drink out of toilets.
She also claims CBP officers were “being so physically & sexually threatening” towards her.
Just left the 1st CBP facility.
I see why CBP officers were being so physically &sexually threatening towards me.
Officers were keeping women in cells w/ no water & had told them to drink out of the toilets.
This was them on their GOOD behavior in front of members of Congress.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) July 1, 2019
Now I’ve seen the inside of these facilities.
It’s not just the kids. It’s everyone. 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.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) July 1, 2019
After I forced myself into a cell w/ women&began speaking to them, 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?”
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) July 1, 2019
A report from DailyMail says a CBP official directly disputed AOC’s claim, pointing out all the toilets have sinks with safe drinking water and “no one is drinking toilet water.”
From DailyMail
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said Monday that illegal immigrants and asylum-seekers detained at a pair of U.S. Customs and Border Protection stations she visited are ‘drinking out of toilets’ – a claim an agency official quickly denied.
Speaking outside a Border Patrol station in Clint, Texas, as she left she raged: ‘There’s abuse in these facilities.
‘This was them knowing a congressional visit was coming. This was CBP on their best behavior. Telling people to drink out of the toilet.’
AOC said she ‘forced’ herself into a cell with detainees and one woman told her officers were waging ‘psychological warfare’. The woman said they were often called ‘wh***s’ by the agents.
The congresswoman claimed officers laughed in response to migrants drinking out of toilets.
The inflammatory statement – including the suggestion that she witnessed toilet-drinking herself – came hours after a news story established the existence of a private Facebook group where current and former CBP agents distributed lewd illustrations of the Democratic socialist congresswoman from New York.
But a CBP official said Monday in the early evening that plumbing fixtures at the locations Ocasio-Cortez visited are standard-issue jail appliances with sinks that dispense safe drinking water attached to toilets in a single unit.
‘Of course that’s what we have,’ the official said. ‘No one is drinking toilet water. They’re drinking potable water from the sink attached to the toilet. It’s what you would find in every municipal jail in the United States.’
A photo filed in a federal court case in 2016 illustrates the setup in a Tucson, Arizona CBP holding facility. The official confirmed that it’s identical to what detainees at Texas border stations have access to.
After this story was published, Ocasio-Cortez confirmed on Twitter that ‘[t]his was in fact the type of toilet we saw in the cell.’