Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says Trump is running immigrant concentration camps and Twitter is outraged

Elise Solé
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says President Trump is running "concentration camps" for immigrants. (Photo: Getty Images)
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says President Trump is running "concentration camps" for immigrants. (Photo: Getty Images)

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says President Trump is running concentration camps in America using the slogan, “Never Again,” which is associated with the Holocaust.

On Monday night, the U.S. Representative for New York spoke on Instagram Live to the “people who are concerned enough with humanity” about detention centers used to hold undocumented immigrant families, associating them with WWII concentration camps.

“The United States is running concentration camps on our Southern border and that is exactly what they are,” said the 29-year-old in her video. “They are concentration camps. And if that doesn’t bother you, I don’t… whatever… I want to talk to the people that are concerned enough with humanity to say that we should not… that ‘Never Again’ means something.”

The phrase “Never Again” is used as a collective promise to always remember the murder of six million Jewish people by Hitler’s army during WWII. Ocasio-Cortez continued, “The fact that concentration facts are now an institutionalized practice in the ‘Home of the Free,’ is extraordinarily disturbing. And we need to do something about it.”

“This week, immigrant children were moved to the same internment camps the Japanese were held in the earlier 20th century,” she said of the Fort Sill, Okla., Army base used to house Japanese-American people after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Last week, the Trump administration shared plans to use that base to house unclaimed immigrant children.

“This is a crisis for ourselves,” said Ocasio-Cortez. “This is a crisis of if America will remain America in its actual principals and values. Or if we are losing to an authoritarian and fascist presidency.”

The Democrat warned, “I don’t use those words lightly. I don’t use those words to just throw bombs. I use that word because that is what an administration that creates concentration camps is. And a presidency that creates concentration camps is fascist.”

Her observations set Twitter afire. Liz Cheny, the daughter of once-Vice President Dick Cheney responded, “Please, AOC, do us all a favor and spend just a few minutes learning some actual history. 6 million Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust. You demean their memory and disgrace yourself with comments like this.”

Ocasio-Cortez tweeted back, “What do YOU call building mass camps of people being detained without a trial? How would you dress up DHS’s mass separation of thousands of children at the border from their parents?”

AOC tweeted again, “This administration has established concentration camps on the southern border of the United States for immigrants, where they are being brutalized with dehumanizing conditions and dying. This is not hyperbole. It is the conclusion of expert analysis.”

Other figures condemned the House member, including former talk show host Geraldo Rivera, who called AOC “smart” and “savvy” but her rhetoric “shameful.”

Later, Ocasio-Cortez wrote, “And for the shrieking Republicans who don’t know the difference: concentration camps are not the same as death camps. Concentration camps are considered by experts as ‘the mass detention of civilians without trial.’ And that’s exactly what this administration is doing.”

But AOC’s allies stood firm on Twitter.

On Monday, President Trump tweeted that ICE will begin “removing the millions of illegal aliens who have illicitly found their way into the United States. They will be removed as fast as they come in...”

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