Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) declared that she would never apologize for comparing detention facilities at the U.S. border with “concentration camps” in Nazi-occupied Europe.
Ocasio-Cortez made the comparison on a live Instagram video stream on Monday night: “That is exactly what they are. They are concentration camps,” she said, adding that the phrase “never again” — popularly associated with the memory of the Holocaust — “means something.”
Ocasio-Cortez drew criticism all day Tuesday. But she kept doubling down and digging in, first insisting the detention camps met the definition of “concentration camps”; then trying to draw a distinction between “concentration camps” and “death camps”; then arguing that the U.S. had also used “concentration camps” when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (a Democrat) interned Japanese-Americans during the Second World War. She also spent hours retweeting supportive messages from those on the left who attempted to defend her use of the “concentration camp” analogy. And she resumed her fight Wednesday morning, arguing that the U.S. had “run concentration camps before.” – READ MORE