Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says the Border Patrol has gone "rogue."
Escalating a feud with the immigration control agency, the New York Democrat blasted officers for treating members of Congress in what she called an "openly disrespectful" manner during their tour of an overcrowded border detention center.
"The agency has lost all control of their own officers," she wrote on Twitter.
The outspoken critic of President Donald Trump's hard-line immigration crackdown also slammed fellow Democrats for caving to Republicans on a border emergency appropriations bill. The $4.5 billion measure that passed eliminated proposed requirements that Border Patrol meets minimum standards and oversight for conditions in detention centers.
"They just wrote a multi-billion dollar blank check for misconduct," she wrote.
White House spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway fired back at Ocasio-Cortez, calling her visit a "photo op" and denying claims that migrants are forced to drink out of toilets.
"Everybody who has control over that facility, or control for the border patrol has said that's not true," Conway told Fox News. "They've not heard of this."
AOC was already engaged in a war of words with the Border Patrol over shocking reports that some 9,500 officers _ nearly half the total _ belong to a private Facebook group on which members shared sexually explicit memes of her and joked about killing migrants.
The union representing Border Patrol agents hit back at AOC by claiming that she called them "Nazis," an apparent reference to her controversial claim that the detention camps are "concentration camps" for immigrants.
AOC and other members of the Hispanic Congressional Caucus say they were met with open hostility by officers during an official visit to a jail for migrants in Clint, Texas, on Tuesday.
Officers accused the congresswoman of bullying them. She and Rep. Madeleine Dean, D-Pa., countered that Border Patrol officers displayed a stunning lack of concern for their conduct.
