Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) slammed President Donald Trump for reversing course on plans to end U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement traffic stops after agents killed two immigrants in the past week.
Trump made the announcement Wednesday morning that ICE would not end the stops after many MAGA figures pushed back on changing the policy. The president said mass deportations remained a priority.
“In order to do this, we must be strong, tough, and smart, and we CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP! Once we do, we are playing right into the criminal’s hands,” he said on Truth Social.
The comments come after ICE came under fire for the killing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston, Texas, and Joan Sebastian Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine, in front of his three-year-old daughter.
“This is the guy that said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, and people would still support him,” Ocasio-Cortez told The Independent. “And now he has an agency shooting people out in the street. And at this point, it's practically a campaign promise from this guy.”
The killings come after a protracted fight earlier this year about funding for the Department of Homeland Security. Democrats opposed funding the department after an ICE official killed Renee Good and Customs and Border Protection officials shot and killed another protester, Alex Pretti, in Minneapolis.
Following the firing of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in March, her replacement Markwayne Mullin said at his confirmation hearing that his goal was to ensure that the department would no longer be the source of controversy in the way it had been under his predecessor.
Ocasio-Cortez said the chaos that had arisen was to be expected because Trump had campaigned explicitly on mass deportations.
“I think oftentimes when we see an institution, the outcome of that institution when it's repeated and sustained and reproduced, oftentimes ends up being either overtly or subvertly the purpose of it,” she told The Independent. “And this administration campaigned on cruelty and violence against immigrants, and that's what they're doing.”
Ocasio-Cortez isn’t alone. Rep. Seth Magaziner (D-R.I.) delivered a floor speech excoriating ICE on Tuesday.
“When he took his position Secretary Mullin said that his goal was to get the department off the front page of the news,” Magaziner said. “Well, you're back on the goddamn front page now with two innocent people gunned down in broad daylight.”
Magaziner said that he believed that if Democrats win back the House of Representatives, they should claw back the beefed up money Republicans gave ICE in the “One Big, Beauitful Bill” legislation Trump signed last year.
“Congress has given ICE billions and billions of dollars that the administration has used to invade American cities, to kill American citizens and others,” he said. “They are hiring people with inadequate training, inadequate oversight, they're not using their body cameras. They're not enforcing any sort of discipline.”
Some Republicans like Sen. Susan Collins have said they reined in federal agents by adding oversight like body cameras, but Democrats called that insufficient.
Magaziner said: “I think that a lot of that money would be better spent on things that will actually improve the lives of the American people and make the American people safer.”
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