AOC has difficult day at border facilities, but Sen. Blumenthal confirms Trump’s deal with Mexico is working

By J.E. Dyer
AOC has difficult day at border facilities, but Sen. Blumenthal confirms Trump’s deal with Mexico is working
At a CBP facility in Texas, 1 Jul 2019. Fox News video

It’s really tiring trying to keep up with Rep. Ocasio-Cortez.  On Monday she hate-visited a pair of U.S. Customs and Border Protection facilities Texas, which in the case of the first one reportedly means she screamed and cried at CBP agents, ultimately decided not to actually take the tour she was there for, and then tweeted a series of scurrilous smears about CBP personnel as if she had taken the tour.

Here, for the record, is what the Washington Examiner believes actually happened as regards how much of the tour Ocasio-Cortez completed:

A group of 14 House Democrats, including Ocasio-Cortez, and their aides kicked off their visit to the region at about 11 a.m. MST Monday at the El Paso Station on Hondo Pass Drive.

The group was standing inside the station near an area where migrants are held when Ocasio-Cortez left them to sit inside a nearby holding area with a family as the other lawmakers and aides were briefed on station operations.

There’s an account of the screaming and crying, and then this follow-up:

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A second official said she went in and out of the cell during the group’s briefing nearby and returned to the group several times to share information she had learned from detainees, including that one person had drunk from a toilet.

The congresswoman told the group she would not go with the 13 other House Democrats on the tour of the facility and stayed with the family.

Ocasio-Cortez says she didn’t scream and cry.  She tweeted her allegations after being present at the first facility.  A selection:

If she had any credibility, it might be worth discussing her characterizations. But she doesn’t have credibility.  If you’re confused, start with the point that the CBP holding facilities are not detention “camps” where people spend weeks.  They’re places to temporarily put people who will be processed for asylum claims, until the initial border processing is completed and they can be moved elsewhere.  The facilities are overstretched because so many migrants are being encouraged right now to cross the border illegally and turn themselves in so they can claim asylum — but Congress has repeatedly, for years, refused to fund expansion of the facilities.  (It would be nice, incidentally, if Americans, where Congress won’t act, could donate to help relieve the conditions at the CBP border facilities, as many have wanted to do.  A GOP congressman from Texas, Chip Roy, is trying to make that possible.)

At any rate, the AOC smear that’s gone viral is that CBP agents told a migrant woman to drink water out of a toilet.  People scurried around for hours tracking down likely refutations of such an allegation.

Ocasio-Cortez responded basically that journalist David Martosko’s potential point in refutation was actually confirmation: the toilet photograph he tweeted was like the toilets she saw, and she says the migrant women were told they could drink out of the bowl.

The Washington Examiner spoke with witnesses who said no one was seen drinking out of a bowl, and what the woman who mentioned it actually described was not knowing how to obtain water through the “potable water” sink fixtures, and deciding on her own to drink water from the bowl.

Tweeps have been chiming in all day to either angrily denounce this obvious excuse-making, or point out that it’s perfectly probable a woman from a very poor village in Central America has never seen an assemblage like the sink-and-toilet combinations in the CBP holding facilities.

Whatever.  AOC screams and doubles over in agony looking at empty lots, so I’m inclined to be skeptical from the get-go on this.  The last thing I’m going to do is homework trying to reconstruct something sensible out of it.  The American people merit much, much better than incoherent, unparsable allegations about our overworked Border Patrol.  If there’s something that needs fixing, these congressional representatives — hint — need to get to it, instead of wasting the taxpayers’ time and money defaming Border Protection agents.

The president of the National Border Patrol Council, Brandon Judd, told Breitbart in no uncertain terms: “Nobody is forced to drink out of a toilet and nobody is told to drink out of a toilet … It’s completely and totally a baseless and ridiculous allegation and frankly it needs to be investigated and she needs to be exposed.”

Judd is urging the CBP to release security video of the tour so members of the public can see everything that actually happened, and decide for themselves if Ocasio-Cortez’s allegations actually, er, hold water.

For whatever reason, the other allegations from Ocasio-Cortez — her assertions about CBP personnel being “physically and sexually threatening” toward her — aren’t catching the same fire on social media.  Possibly because there’s nothing to even argue about their absurdity.  With toilet water you can at least explore theories about how any such allegation could make it through a BS filter.

Meanwhile, it’s starting to look like a suspiciously timed pile-on against the Border Protection force.  The New York Times came out with its op-ed on Saturday calling for border agents to be “publicly shamed” so that they’ll quit their jobs.

In the piece, Cronin-Furman envisions a scenario where a U.S. government employee who has been filmed at a migrant facility faces scrutiny at church from fellow congregants.

“The knowledge, for instance, that when you go to church on Sunday, your entire congregation will have seen you on TV ripping a child out of her father’s arms is a serious social cost to bear,” she writes, while insisting she is not making “an argument for doxxing.”

Ocasio-Cortez seems to have taken this editorial as a set of marching orders.  And maybe a “large and unruly” group of migrants read the New York Times over the weekend and decided to create an embarrassing scene that could be screened in church next Sunday, and that’s why they assembled at the international border bridge facing El Paso shortly after midnight on Monday, 1 July, chanting “vamos a cruzar” — “we are going to cross.”  Or maybe they just happened to pick the same window being targeted by the other agitators over the last 72 hours.  CBP decided to close the bridge to traffic for about three hours while the chanting crowd was dealt with.

First thing Monday morning, meanwhile, the Soros-funded media site Pro Publica put up an article claiming to expose a secret Facebook group of Border Protection agents in which lewd jokes are posted and unconscionable things said about detainees.  In a shocking coincidence, the Facebook group has salacious posts about Ocasio-Cortez, which figured prominently in the report (and in the tweet stream on it).

With preternatural promptness, Democrats in Congress began calling for Border agents to be fired.  Perhaps the quick response was due to Pro Publica’s assiduous tweeting and references to the congressional visits in Texas being done the same day.  (The Pro Publica article was first tweeted out at 7:58 AM EDT.  The Hispanic Caucus, which organized the CBP visits, tweeted its denunciation of the CBP at 11:52 AM EDT.)

Ocasio-Cortez, presumably alerted by her staff, knew about the Pro Publica article in less than an hour and a half, and belabored its allegations while she was heading for the CBP facility in Texas.

Note: the article states that Pro Publica had identified three members of the Facebook group as CBP employees (not 9,500).  CBP is taking it seriously and will conduct an investigation.

In any case, AOC’s staff and PAC supporters were having their own field day on Twitter.

This is like high school, only dumber.  Not a syllable of it is believable.  The CBP has been operating (under evolving nomenclature) for decades, and we’re supposed to simply believe a pile of extreme allegations, suddenly sprung from nowhere, that in a twist entirely unsuspected and unforeseen, its personnel are the saddest sack of lice-ridden, snaggle-toothed pig plop the world has ever seen, making women drink from toilets and leering menacingly at a U.S. congresswoman during an official visit.

Meanwhile, what we do have on video is evidence of a dramatic lifesaving effort by these moral degenerates on behalf of a migrant rescued from the Rio Grande.

Fortunately, we also have Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-NY) to bring things back in focus.  I doubt Blumenthal thought that’s what he was doing, to be frank.  But in spite of his own wording, it’s the effect he has in this tweet.

Well, yes.  Trump’s deal with Mexico is working.  The Mexicans are stopping more of the migrants and preventing them from rushing the U.S. border.  Blumenthal says that like it’s a bad thing.

J.E. Dyer

J.E. Dyer

J.E. Dyer is a retired Naval Intelligence officer who lives in Southern California, blogging as The Optimistic Conservative for domestic tranquility and world peace. Her articles have appeared at Hot Air, Commentary’s Contentions, Patheos, The Daily Caller, The Jewish Press, and The Weekly Standard.

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