‘Surge’ gets canceled: AOC condemns its use to describe arrival of young migrants at the border

A progressive Democratic lawmaker is not happy with use of the word “surge” to describe the thousands of migrants massed at the southern U.S. border in response to President Biden’s open-door immigration policies. Many underage children are part of the throng.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York has a problem with the use of the term “surge” to describe this phenomenon.

“Anyone who’s using the term ’surge’ around you consciously is trying to invoke a militaristic frame,” she said in an Instagram live video on Tuesday night.

“And that’s a problem, because this is not a surge. These are children. They are not insurgents and we are not being invaded — which by the way is a White supremacist idea, a philosophy — that if an ’other’ is coming into the population, that this is an invasion of who we are,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said in her commentary, which was first noted on Twitter by @JewishDeplorable and picked up by the Daily Caller.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the noun “surge” as “a swelling, rolling, or sweeping forward like that of a wave or series of waves.” The first known usage of the word in that sense occurred in 1520, according to the dictionary.