The Department of Homeland Security cancelled several planned visits to border facilities by staffers for Democratic members of the House Oversight Committee, after reports that the staffers in question were defying orders and behaving “rudely” on their initial visits, Fox News has reported.
According to the Fox report, staffers for Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) violated the guidelines previously put in place to dictate the circumstances of their successive tours of different locations along the border.
This included staffers trying to “conduct interviews and take photographs” without warning, which constituted “a significant deviation” from the prior agreements. The staffers also “refused to leave the facility after the hour-long tour,” even though they had previously agreed to keep their tours to 45 minutes each. This resulted in agents at the next tour locations being “left in a position where they were waiting on staff to show and they did not show at all.”
The DHS subsequently revoked the staffers’ access for planned future tours, “in which more site visits were to take place at CBP and ICE facilities this week.” The statement from DHS officials to Fox continued by saying that “DHS communicated to the committee that due to their conduct, CBP could not support visits from the committee this week.”
As previously reported, this is the latest example of such disruptive behavior by Democrat officials when visiting border facilities. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) yelled at border agents “in a threatening manner” during a visit in late May, and then proceeded to accuse the agents of misconduct in their treatment of detained illegal aliens, without providing any evidence.