Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) desires to know if she’s in authorized scorching water.
In a extremely uncommon letter to Legal professional Basic Pam Bondi, Ocasio-Cortez famous that she’s been a goal of repeated criticism from Tom Homan, President Trump’s “border czar,” after she hosted a webinar designed to tell immigrants of their authorized rights in potential confrontations with deportation brokers.
Ocasio-Cortez has fiercely defended her actions, saying they had been nicely inside her First Modification rights to free speech — an assertion she amplified to Bondi. However she nonetheless desires “clarity on whether the Department of Justice (DOJ) has yielded to political pressure and attempts to weaponize the agency against elected officials whose speech they disagree with.”
“It has been 14 days since Mr. Homan first threatened to weaponize your agency, but I have not yet heard any referral from the federal government,” she wrote. “Homan’s actions undercut core Constitutional rights and further transparency is necessary.”
Trump, on the marketing campaign path, had vowed to make the deportation of tens of millions of individuals dwelling within the nation illegally a high precedence of his second time period. And Homan, who served as a high immigration enforcer beneath President Obama and in Trump’s first time period, is main the cost.
In a sequence of reports interviews this month, Homan steered Ocasio-Cortez had violated federal legal guidelines by internet hosting the Feb. 12 “Know Your Rights” seminar, which she’s characterised as providing “practical guidance on how to interact with” deportation officers.
Homan noticed one thing extra sinister. A day after the occasion, he stated Ocasio-Cortez is perhaps “impeding” the federal government’s efforts to implement immigration legal guidelines. Homan stated he’d despatched an electronic mail to the deputy legal professional normal asking him to look at the episode.
“Maybe AOC is going to be in trouble now,” Homan stated in a Feb. 13 interview with Fox Information pundit Laura Ingraham, referring to Ocasio-Cortez by her initials.
Since then, he’s amplified the menace repeatedly, taking to extra cable information applications to counsel that Ocasio-Cortez was attempting “to educate people how they evade law enforcement.”
In her letter to Bondi, Ocasio-Cortez quotes the First Modification, which prohibits “abridging the freedom of speech … or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
She then accuses Homan of utilizing the DOJ “to politically intimidate duly elected officials” — one thing she deemed “a textbook threat to the right to free speech in the United States.”
“Threatening criminal proceedings for exercising the First Amendment is itself a violation of the First Amendment,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote.
“Educating the public about their rights, especially in a time of rising uncertainty, is a key part of our responsibility as elected officials,” she continued. “A government that uses threats of DOJ investigations to suppress free speech is a threat to all, regardless of political ideology.”
