WASHINGTON — Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the liberal freshman Democrat from New York who has made fighting for immigrants’ rights a signature issue, on Tuesday described the Trump administration’s border detention facilities as “concentration camps,” provoking backlash from Republicans who said she was minimizing the Holocaust.
“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,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Twitter, amplifying comments she had made on her Instagram feed on Monday night.
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“This is not hyperbole. It is the conclusion of expert analysis,” she added, citing an article in Esquire magazine that quoted a historian of the Holocaust who lectures at the University of Virginia. In the article, the historian, Waitman Wade Beorn, said, “Things can be concentration camps without being Dachau or Auschwitz.”
But the invocation of Nazi imagery to describe the administration’s handling of immigrants and refugees set off a furor in Washington. Although not all Nazi concentration camps were death camps — some were forced labor camps — Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s use of the phrase, which she said was intentional, opened the door for attacks from Republicans, led by Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the sharp-tongued chairwoman of the House Republican Conference.
Source: Ocasio-Cortez Calls Migrant Detention Centers ‘Concentration Camps,’ Eliciting Backlash
