Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) chided President Biden on Wednesday over reports about his plans for handling asylum claims at the border, characterizing them as “Trump impressions.”
“Doing Trump impressions isn’t how we beat Trump,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote Wednesday night on X, formerly known as Twitter, in a reaction to a report by CNN that the president is considering blocking those who illegally cross into the country from filling an asylum claim.
“Seeking asylum is a legal right of all people. In the face of authoritarian threat, we should not buckle on our principles – we should commit to them,” she wrote.
She said the suggestions of the executive actions being floated in media reports is “outrageous” and that Biden “should refuse to sign it.”
Ocasio-Cortez’s warning came hours after another prominent progressive, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, fired off similar concerns in an X post.
Biden is facing increasing pressure to take action at the border, and some Democrats have argued the situation at the border is broken.
The CNN report said the move would be “using an authority known as 212f between ports of entry to try to clamp down on unlawful border crossing.”
The article noted no decision yet has been made by the White House.
Republicans earlier this month torpedoed a Senate package that would have raised the threshold for seeking asylum. Biden had backed that package, which was opposed by former President Trump, his likely opponent in the fall election.
White House spokesperson Angelo Fernández Hernández in a response to CNN called for Congress to pass the bipartisan border security legislation. Fernández Hernández did not comment on the actions proposed by Biden.
“The Administration spent months negotiating in good faith to deliver the toughest and fairest bipartisan border security bill in decades because we need Congress to make significant policy reforms and to provide additional funding to secure our border and fix our broken immigration system,” he told CNN.
“We continue to call on Speaker Johnson and House Republicans to pass the bipartisan deal to secure the border.”