Clutching her face in despair and weeping, photos of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez seemingly show her strong reaction to a horrific scene of US migrant detention. However, new angles reveal she may have played things up a bit.
While quite a few people noted that there was something a bit off about the congresswoman's photo shoot at a border detention policy protest that went viral this week, there was nothing concrete to indicate her insincerity... until one gets a look at the massive empty road and parking lot on the other side.
Originally shot at a protest against tent-cities for migrant children at the US-Mexico border in Texas a year ago, the photos were not published until Monday. They came hot on the heels of the scandal surrounding AOC’s insistence that border detention facilities are “concentration camps.”
The initial shots seem almost carefully selected to avoid showing what was on the other side of the chain-link fence... However, when AOC herself reshared them, she attached a comment that hinted it was something bleak indeed.
I’ll never forget this, because it was the moment I saw with my own eyes that the America I love was becoming a nation that steals refugee children from their parents & caged them.
The rest of the photos from the event show a couple of cars, some trees, and a few street lamps visible on the other side, but not so much in terms of “caged refugee children.”
AOC has been active in her campaign against what she sees as a growing threat at the border. This week, she launched a campaign against the discount furniture company that provides beds for the immigrants.
Editor’s note: For clarification, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) was standing at a fence near a road that led to the tent city housing migrants at the Tornillo-Guadalupe Toll Plaza. The site of the protest where she was standing and the migrant center are located several hundred meters from each other. AOC was shouting at the federal immigration agents from behind the fence and asking them to return migrant children to their parents.
The article said that the pictures were shot during a protest against tent cities for migrant children, at the US-Mexico border in Texas a year ago, and one of the embedded tweets mentioned she had gone to Tornillo. The fact that Tornillo is often used as shorthand for the Tornillo tent city, which was a temporary immigrant detention facility for children, may have not been known to all our readers.
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