House

Ocasio-Cortez votes against bill to reopen government over ICE funding

Greg Nash

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) was the lone Democrat to vote against a short-term bill to reopen the federal government on Wednesday because of concerns over the bill’s funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

The freshman New York Democrat explained on an Instagram Live video that the bill’s funding for ICE prevented her from supporting the measure.

{mosads}”Most of our votes are pretty straightforward, but today was a tough/nuanced call,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote in an Instagram story. “We didn’t vote with the party because one of the spending bills included ICE funding and our community felt strongly about not funding that.”

A request for comment to her congressional office on the vote was not immediately returned.

Her vote against the funding bill comes after the 29-year-old self-described democratic socialist faced criticism from left-wing activists in her party for a previous vote earlier this month to fund the Department of Homeland Security — including ICE — through September.

In a response to the president’s prime-time address to the nation on border security, she questioned why the federal government would fund the agency at all after a 7-year-old girl from Guatemala died in Border Patrol custody last month.

“The president should be really defending why we are funding [ICE] at all,” she said at the time. “Right now, what we are seeing is death. Right now we are seeing the violations of human rights.”

Tags Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Copyright 2023 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

See all Hill.TV See all Video

Most Popular

Load more

Video

See all Video