Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) wants to know if she’s in legal hot water.
In a highly unusual letter to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, Ocasio-Cortez noted that she’s been a target of repeated criticism from Tom Homan, President Trump’s border czar, after she hosted a webinar designed to inform immigrants of their legal rights in potential confrontations with deportation agents.
Ocasio-Cortez has fiercely defended her actions, saying they were well within her First Amendment rights to free speech — an assertion she amplified to Bondi. But she still wants “clarity on whether the Department of Justice (DOJ) has yielded to political pressure and attempts to weaponize the agency against elected officials whose speech they disagree with.”
“It has been 14 days since Mr. Homan first threatened to weaponize your agency, but I have not yet heard any referral from the federal government,” she wrote. “Homan’s actions undercut core Constitutional rights and further transparency is necessary.”
Trump, on the campaign trail, had vowed to make the deportation of millions of people living in the country illegally a top priority of his second term. And Homan, who served as a top immigration enforcer under President Obama and in Trump’s first term, is leading the charge.
In a series of news interviews this month, Homan suggested Ocasio-Cortez had violated federal laws by hosting the Feb. 12 “Know Your Rights” seminar, which she’s characterized as offering “practical guidance on how to interact with” deportation officials.
Homan saw something more sinister. A day after the event, he said Ocasio-Cortez might be “impeding” the government’s efforts to enforce immigration laws. Homan said he’d sent an email to the deputy attorney general asking him to examine the episode.
“Maybe AOC is going to be in trouble now,” Homan said in a Feb. 13 interview with Fox News pundit Laura Ingraham.
Since then, he’s amplified the threat repeatedly, taking to more cable news programs to suggest that Ocasio-Cortez was trying “to educate people how they evade law enforcement.”
In her letter to Bondi, Ocasio-Cortez quotes the First Amendment, which prohibits “abridging the freedom of speech … or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
She then accuses Homan of using the DOJ “to politically intimidate duly elected officials” — something she deemed “a textbook threat to the right to free speech in the United States.”
“Threatening criminal proceedings for exercising the First Amendment is itself a violation of the First Amendment,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote.
“Educating the public about their rights, especially in a time of rising uncertainty, is a key part of our responsibility as elected officials,” she continued. “A government that uses threats of DOJ investigations to suppress free speech is a threat to all, regardless of political ideology.”
