More than a year after Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) visited a Texas city housing migrant children, a photographer shared “previously unpublished” photos from the trip.
“Before @AOC hit the national stage & was just a fairly unknown House candidate frm NYC,she took time awy frm her campaign & came dwn to #Tornillo to protest the #tentcity housing migrant children,” Ivan Pierre Aguirre tweeted Monday.
In one of the four photos made public, Ocasio-Cortez looks toward the camera as she stands near a chain-link fence. In another, her hands cover her face as she bends over, appearing visibly upset.
Ocasio-Cortez shared the photos on her on Twitter page, saying, “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.”{mosads}
“More kids died after this,” she tweeted. “To date, no one has been held accountable.”
Many social media users criticized Ocasio-Cortez for the photos, with some accusing her of staging the pictures.
One user even called her “a good actress.”
“I cannot control what kind of right-wing garbage shows up on the bottom of the posts,” a spokesman from Ocasio-Cortez’s office told The Hill, adding that comments alleging the photos were fake or staged are “in no way related to reality or truth.”
The freshman lawmaker has come under fire for referring to migrant detention centers as concentration camps.
In an Instagram Live video last Monday, she said: “The U.S. is running concentration camps on our southern border, and that is exactly what they are.”
Despite criticism from Republican and some Democratic lawmakers, Ocasio-Cortez refused to walk back her comments, tweeting, “I will never apologize for calling these camps what they are. If that makes you uncomfortable, fight the camps – not the nomenclature.”