To show their appreciation for the civil rights icon on the federal holiday, ICE tweeted an image of a King statue, with the text: "Today we honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s message of hope, justice and equality."
Without addressing King directly, Ocasio-Cortez retweeted the text and called for the agency to be abolished.
Ocasio-Cortez has called for dismantling the agency for years on-end, even at times when her Democratic colleagues appeared to back away from the idea.
Though Ocasio-Cortez’s Twitter feed on Monday was flooded with references to King and his legacy, King's niece, Alveda King, told Fox News that the congresswoman ought to "take a page out of Martin Luther King Jr.’s book."
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The suggestion came in response to Ocasio-Cortez’s comments during a virtual town hall last week in which she referred to President Donald Trump as the "poison of White supremacy."
"I believe that AOC really should take a page out of Martin Luther King Jr.'s book." King told Fox News host Harris Faulkner.
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Alveda told Faulkner that while her uncle praised the law for keeping bad actors in line, "he also said that the law cannot transform the human heart."
"There are laws on the books now that will severely punish White supremacists, and that should be the case," she elaborated on the issue. "We know that White supremacy is wrong, it must be punished, but every crime against humanity is bad and so we have to protect human dignity, but not only with the law. We have to transform these hearts."
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One the subject of ICE, with the inauguration just days away, we must begin to assess how the new Biden administration will handle immigration enforcement. Fortunately, the former vice president has made his plans clear, both in his public statements and in two documents: his campaign website page "Plan for Securing Our Values as a Nation of Immigrants"; and the "Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force Recommendations". None received much attention during the campaign, but then neither did immigration generally. They are based in part however on misperceptions that immigration enforcement under the outgoing Trump administration was particularly harsh. Respectfully, those misperceptions warp Biden's policies.
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In large part, those misperceptions were grounded in statements made by President Trump himself. Immigration was a key (and winning) issue in his 2016 campaign, and the president has made several major immigration policy announcements in office. There was also a lot of braggadocio, however, with Trump (for example) vowing shortly after his election to deport two to three million criminal aliens.
On his immigration website, Biden asserts that: "Trump has waged an unrelenting assault on our values and our history as a nation of immigrants."
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