Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) on Wednesday denounced Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) after King shared a video from a migrant detention center that he claimed proved she had spread “fake news” about the facility’s conditions.
Ocasio-Cortez dismissed King’s video, saying “there is a genre of videos where GOP House members — who clearly didn’t read sworn testimony that detention sinks were broken— filming themselves drinking out of toilet sinks.”
“They’re so anti-immigrant they risk pink eye to show off that they didn’t do the reading,” she wrote on Twitter, adding the hashtag #CloseTheCamps.
{mosads}The video, which King shared Wednesday on Twitter, showed the lawmaker drinking from a water fountain attached to a toilet during his visit to a migrant detention center near the southern border earlier this year.
“No way was @AOC objectively honest in her #FakeNews spin about the border. Click bait for Snowflakes!” he said in the tweet’s caption, an apparent reference to Ocasio-Cortez’s account from when she visited a migrant facility.
Ocasio-Cortez has repeatedly spoken out about the poor conditions in migrant detention centers.
During a visit to the southern border in July, the New York congresswoman said that she was told by detainees that they were specifically told that the water fountains were broken and that personnel suggested they drink from the toilet bowl instead.
King said during a town hall in Eagle Grove, Iowa, on Wednesday that he had “actually went into that cell where it was reported that [migrants] were advised they had to drink out of the toilet.”
I took a drink out of there. And actually pretty good!” King said, later adding, “It’s not drinking out of the toilet, it’s drinking out of the water fountain that’s integral with the back of the toilet.”
He later shared a video of him drinking from the water fountain attached to the toilet after his comments began spreading online.
King’s comments are not the first to draw scorn.
He has faced widespread backlash over inflammatory comments on subjects such as immigration and abortion in the past.
The GOP stripped him of his committee assignments in January after he questioned why the terms “white nationalist” and “white supremacist” had become offensive.
He tweeted in December 2017 that diversity was not America’s strength.