Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) blasted Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) for comments comparing detention centers holding undocumented immigrats to concentration camps, saying the freshman progressive lawmaker’s remarks “disgrace” her.
“Please @AOC do us all a favor and spend just a few minutes learning some actual history,” Cheney wrote on Twitter. “6 million Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust. You demean their memory and disgrace yourself with comments like this.”
Cheney was responding to remarks Ocasio-Cortez made in an Instagram Live video on Monday night while discussing the Trump administration housing migrants on the southern border.
“The U.S. is running concentration camps on our southern border, and that is exactly what they are,” the New York Democrat said. “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.”{mosads}
“The fact that concentration camps are now an institutionalized practice in the ‘Home of the Free’ is extraordinarily disturbing, and we need to do something about it,” she added.
Ocasio-Cortez said in the video that she wasn’t trying to throw “bombs” by comparing the detention centers to concentration camps, which were historically used by the Nazis to hold Jews and other political prisoners and groups deemed by the government to be undesirable without trial under harsh conditions.
She responded to Cheney’s tweet by asking “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 children at the border from their parents?” Ocasio-Cortez added.