Ocasio Cortez Orange
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez celebrartes with supporters at a victory party in the Bronx after upsetting incumbent Democratic Representative Joseph Crowley. Photo: Getty Images
Who is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? After the primary elections in New York Tuesday night, the internet is abuzz with talk of this one particular New Yorker. Here’s what you need to know.
Who is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?
Ocasio-Cortez is a 28-year-old New Yorker who was born in the Bronx to Puerto Rican parents — her mother was born in Puerto Rico and her father in the Bronx. She grew up in a working-class household, she notes on her website, where her father was a small business owner, her mother cleaned homes and everyone pitched in.
Ocasio-Cortez attended public school 40 minutes north of the Bronx in Yorktown. That 40-minute commute opened her eyes to the effects of income inequality. To her, the commute represented “a vastly different quality of available schooling, economic opportunity, and health outcomes.”
In 2008, her father died of cancer and her family was thrown into a financial crisis. To support her mother, Ocasio-Cortez worked “two jobs and 18-hour shifts in restaurants to help her family keep their home.”
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez primary election win
WASHINGTON - A Texas man faces federal charges after this month's Capitol Riot and subsequent death threats to a police officer and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). Garret Miller of Dallas. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Donald Trump might both be from New York City, but she doesn't think he knows to deal with a girl from the Bronx.Subscribe To 'T. Ocasio-Cortez, who has become a firebrand on the left after unseating powerful Democratic Rep. Joe Crowley this year, is an outspoken defender of the Palestinian people and has advocated for a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s fans and enemies are inventing a new kind of politics: fandoms and anti-fandoms that drive how we bond over candidates online. Today’s Instagram sticker is the new campaign button.
A misleading meme states that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez received “about 16,000 votes” while running for office in 2018. She won her seat with 110,318 votes in the general election.
Here’s why everyone is talking about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: On Tuesday, she defeated incumbent Joseph Crowley in the New York congressional primary election.
Rep. Crowley, 56, is the fourth-highest ranking Democrat in the House, chair of the House Democratic Caucus and the Queens Democratic Party and was thought by many to be the next speaker of the House. He’s served in Congress since 1999 and hasn’t had a primary challenger in 14 years.
Enter Ocasio-Cortez: she beat out Crowley in the primary for New York’s 14th District, which covers the eastern Bronx and north-central Queens. Ocasio-Cortez won with 57.5 percent of the vote. If she wins in November, she’ll be the youngest person in Congress.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez political views
Ocasio-Cortez is a Democratic Socialist, and she campaigned on several progressive issues. She wants Medicare for all, a federal jobs guarantee program which would provide a baseline of $15-an-hour minimum wage and a benefits package, and tuition-free public college and trade schools.
She wants to abolish ICE, calling for immigration justice that provides a path to citizenship, she advocates for criminal justice reform and the end to for-profit prisons, an assault-weapons ban and more action against climate change.
Ocasio-Cortez also wants more solidarity with Puerto Rico. She laid out a plan on her website for actions like the cancellation of the island Wall Street debt, community-led recovery initiatives and a Marshall Plan to help Puerto Rico not just recover from Hurricane Maria but improve with modern infrastructure.
And, of course, she’s fighting for women’s rights — she’s called out news articles that refused to put her name in headlines and ran a campaign video in which she says, “Women like me aren’t supposed to run for office.”
It’s time for a New York that works for all of us.
On June 26th, we can make it happen – but only if we have the #CourageToChange.
It’s time to get to work. Please retweet this video and sign up to knock doors + more at https://t.co/kacKFI9RtI to bring our movement to Congress. pic.twitter.com/aqKMjovEjZ
Ocasio Cortez Orange
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@Ocasio2018) May 30, 2018
What did Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez do before her run for Congress?
Though a political newcomer, Ocasio-Cortez does have some experience in the political world. She organized for Sen. Bernie Sanders during his run for the 2016 presidential primary. She worked with high school students as an Educational Director with National Hispanic Institute and spearheaded projects to improve childhood literacy and writing in the Bronx.
On election day, she retweeted a photo that showed her working as a bartender — from one year ago, Nov. 2017.
Ocasio Cortez Orange County
This photo is from Nov. 14, 2017. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 28, was then working as a bartender.
Less than a year later, she defeated the likely next Speaker of the House, and will almost certainly be the youngest woman ever elected to Congress pic.twitter.com/JgHjdQWAF6
— Jeff Stein (@JStein_WaPo) June 27, 2018
2020 hopeful Michael Bloomberg slams Trump for immigration policies
Reaction and analysis from Young Americans for Liberty analyst Kristin Tate.
Progressives unleashed on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Wednesday over reports that the agency arrested 90 foreign-born students who had enrolled in a fake university, but someone forgot to tell them that the sting operation predates their favorite target, President Trump.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and others reacted to news of the arrests by accusing ICE of entrapping students and implying that the tactic was new under the Trump administration. As it turns out, former President Obama's administration not only founded the fake university, it engaged in a similar operation in New Jersey in 2016.
'Earlier this year, Congress rushed to approve BILLIONS more $ for ICE + CBP,' Ocasio-Cortez tweeted. 'I saw members voting YES w/o even a summary of the bill. Nobody cared then how we’d pay for it. Now ICE is setting up fake universities to trap students. Yet were [sic] called radical for opposing it.'
'This is cruel and appalling,' Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., tweeted. Actress and activist Alyssa Milano similarly seemed shocked by the news.
In total, 250 students have been arrested in connection to the fake University of Farmington. When the university and associated arrests were reported on in January of 2019, federal prosecutors alleged the students had knowingly enrolled in the fake school in order to maintain their student visa status.
“Each of the foreign citizens who ‘enrolled’ and made ‘tuition’ payments to the University knew that they would not attend any actual classes, earn credits, or make academic progress toward an actual degree in a particular field of study,” the indictments read, according to The New York Times.
The Detroit News reported that Homeland Security agents started posing as university officials in 2017, but the university initially opened in 2015 as part of 'Paper Chase' -- an undercover operation geared toward exposing recruiters engaging in immigration fraud.
Federal officials reportedly also arrested 21 people on visa fraud, using the fraudulent University of Northern New Jersey in 2016.
The vast majority (80 percent) of the arrests in Michigan resulted in 'voluntary departure' from the United States, according to the Detroit Free Press. The remaining students either received an order for removal, contested their removal, or filed for relief.
While many progressive complaints didn't specifically blame the Trump administration, the incident highlighted how Trump has repeatedly been attacked for tactics used or supported by his predecessor. Ocasio-Cortez has also clarified that she opposed Obama's immigration policies.
One of Democrats' primary complaints about Trump is that he put 'kids in cages' — a reference to the detention of undocumented minors attempting to cross the border.
Jeh Johnson, a former Homeland Security secretary under Obama, said the Trump administration hadn't invented the detention tactic.
Ocasio Cortez In Bathing Suit
Johnson said that chain-link fences or 'cages' weren't ideal but were one of the ways authorities dealt with a mass immigrants that had to be transferred to Health and Human Services (HHS) within 72 hours. 'During that 72 hour period, when you have something that is a multiple -- like four times of what you're accustomed to in the existing infrastructure, you've got to find places quickly to put kids,' he said before suggesting the alternative was putting them on 'the streets.'
And when House Democrats held a hearing on migrant detention, they brandished an Obama-era photo of fenced-in migrants.
Most recently, several media organizations were forced to make retractions after falsely attributing an Obama-era migrant child-detention statistic to President Trump.
Manfred Nowak, an expert from the U.N. Global Study on Children Deprived of Liberty, claimed that 100,000 migrant children were detained by the Trump administration and indicated that it was the 'world's highest rate' of detained children. The following day, however, Nowak acknowledged that the cited number was from 2015, under President Obama.
Ocasio Cortez Twitter
Fox News' Brian Flood contributed to this report.