As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) signaled on Thursday that Democrats are willing to offer President Donald Trump funding for border “technology” and “Normandy fencing”—but nothing for his wall—Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and three of her progressive colleagues sent a letter urging Democratic negotiators to take a harder line by slashing funding for the agencies at the center of Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda.
“These agencies have promulgated an agenda driven by hate—not strategy. We call on our colleagues at the negotiating table to adhere to the following guidelines critical to protecting families and children.”
—Letter
Condemning the Trump administration for putting “profits before people and rhetoric before the lives of immigrant children,” Ocasio-Cortez joined Reps. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) in demanding that Democrats cut funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
“These agencies have promulgated an agenda driven by hate—not strategy,” reads the letter, which was first published on Thursday by The Daily Beast. “With the world watching and the lives of families at stake, we should not compromise our values at the negotiating table.”
The letter from House progressives, which is expected to be read on the House floor next week, went public as Trump told reporters on Thursday that he “won’t waste [his] time reading” any funding agreement that doesn’t include wall money—an indication that he may be willing to shut down the government again when the current stopgap spending measure expires Feb. 15.
The president also suggested that he is still considering a national emergency declaration to build the wall without congressional funding.
But even as he repeatedly demanded wall money from Congress, Trump also bizarrely stated, “We have money, just so you understand. We have money, we’re building the wall right now. A lot of it. People don’t know that, and nobody reports it, but that’s ok.”
Bipartisan conference committee negotiations on a spending plan that would keep the government open beyond Feb. 15 kicked off this week, but no concrete proposals have yet emerged from the talks.
According to The Daily Beast, “Democratic lawmakers on the conference committee indicated that plenty of options were on the table in talks with Republican counterparts. But decreasing funding for DHS was not one of them. The Democrats’ opening bid offers a $589 million increase in the agency’s budget from the year before.”
With Trump standing firm in his demand for wall money and Democrats continuing to offer fencing and technology that rights groups have denounced as ineffective, immoral, and unconstitutional, progressives celebrated Tlaib, Ocasio-Cortez, Pressley, and Omar for taking a “principled position” beyond merely rejecting the president’s outlandish proposal.
“This is exactly the type of leadership we need in Congress,” said Gregory Cendana of United We Dream.
Read the House progressives’ full letter: