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Earlier at the House Oversight Committee hearing, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other freshman lawmakers ripped into President Donald Trump over the "manufactured" border crisis.
Ocasio-Cortez said, "This is a manufactured crisis because the cruelty is manufactured".
Fox News reports that she went on to claim that border agents were not to be blamed, and instead, it was the Trump administration's fault. She specifically pointed a finger at senior adviser Stephen Miller.
She said, "It is a policy of dehumanization implemented by this executive administration made at the feet of Stephen Miller that creates a tinderbox of violence and dehumanization where hurt people hurt people".
While Representative Rashida Tlaib was talking about the conditions that she saw at the border, she started to cry.
She also criticized Trump for using the term "illegal immigrants" saying, "No one is illegal. That term is derogatory because it dehumanizes people. You can say any other forms of coming in without regulations or so forth but the use of illegal is disrespectful and I ask my colleagues to try in so many ways not to dehumanize our immigrant neighbors who are trying to come in for a safe haven".
On the other side, Republican representatives pushed back against criticism saying the border crisis was caused by Democratic lawmakers not doing enough about the border for years.
They also claimed that some of the stories told at the border were misleading. For example, the story of immigrants drinking from toilet bowls was misrepresented because they drank from a sink attached to a toilet unit.
Ocasio-Cortez maintained, "When these women tell me they were put into a cell and their sink was not working and we tested the sink ourselves and the sink was not working and they were told to drink out of a toilet bowl, I believe them".