GOP Rep. Dan Crenshaw (Texas) on Tuesday slammed Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) after she compared the Trump administration’s detention centers to concentration camps, saying the remark represented a “deep ignorance” of the Holocaust.
“Clearly I need to explain that, in concentration camps, people are unjustly sought out and confined. This isn’t what is happening at the border,” Crenshaw said on Twitter. “Migrants are illegally crossing our border. Most are asylum seekers, thus pending trial, so your expert definition doesn’t apply.”
He added that the congresswoman’s comments revealed a “total disregard for our sovereignty & a deep ignorance that belittles the horrors of the Holocaust.”{mosads}
“If you’re worried about conditions at the border, why don’t you do something about it & support @RepMikeRogersAL’s bill securing billions in humanitarian aid?” he asked.
Ocasio-Cortez sparked fierce pushback on the right late Monday after equating migrant detention facilities to concentration camps. The freshman lawmaker first voiced the comparison while speaking about Trump’s housing of immigrants near the souther border on Instagram Live.
She said that President Trump was “running concentration camps on our southern border,” emphasizing that that “is exactly what they are.”
“If that doesn’t bother you … I want to talk to the people that are concerned enough with humanity to say that ‘never again’ means something,” she said, adding that she wasn’t using the phrase “never again” to “just throw bombs.”
Nazi Germany erected concentration camps in the 1930s to hold Jewish people and other political prisoners under harsh conditions, later killing millions.
Ocasio-Cortez has joined other Democrats in slamming Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration, which has led to the expansion of migrant detention centers along the southern border and drawn scrutiny for the overcrowded facilities.
House Conference Chair Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) denounced Ocasio-Cortez’s comments earlier Tuesday, saying that she should spend some time learning “actual history.”
“6 million Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust,” Cheney tweeted. “You demean their memory and disgrace yourself with comments like this.”
In response to criticism, Ocasio-Cortez argued that “shrieking Republicans” didn’t understand the difference between concentration camps and death camps.
“For the shrieking Republicans who don’t know the difference: concentration camps are not the same as death camps,” she said. “Concentration camps are considered by experts as ‘the mass detention of civilians without trial.’ And that’s exactly what this administration is doing.”