Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, leader of the gang of six deranged congresswomen (with Betty McCollum, Ilhan Abdullahi Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley and Pramila Jayapal) is moving up the ranks of crazy in what has to be a calculated attempt to take over the Democratic party.
Her latest stunt: a video she taped in what looks like her pajamas (with the slogan “Rematriate The Land” on the front), with an unabashed accusation: “The United States is running concentration camps on our southern border and that is exactly what they are.”
“I want to talk to the people that are concerned enough with humanity to say that ‘never again’ means something,” said the fiery young woman from the Bronx (and a little bit of Queens) Ocasio-Cortez, who last year accused Israel of a “massacre” in Gaza, only to take it back a few days later admitting she was “not the expert” on foreign affairs.
“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 said matter-of-factly.
CNN’s Angela Rye says America is headed toward implementing the same “death camps” that Nazi Germany used during the Holocaust pic.twitter.com/kkWEa0eZgo
— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra)
Let’s all agree there is a humanitarian crisis along the US southern border, with alarming overcrowding. So much so that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky) wants to infuse $4.5 billion in funding to help relieve the crisis.
There are detention centers on the US border with Mexico, and they have been engulfed in scandal over the past two years, as the Trump administration revved up already existing anti-immigration policies, and in the process jumped the shark with separation of several thousand children from their parents and the much publicized jailing of these children in cages.
AOC could have used the term “detention centers” and would have had plenty to say about the administration’s politicizing of an issue that involves both the terrorizing of central American families which is driving them to seek shelter and livelihood north of the border, as well as America’s own self-image as a nation of immigrants.
She chose the very charged term “concentration camps” instead, coupled with the very specific slogan, “never again,” proving that lefty Democrats can also politicize the suffering of central American peasants, and then some.
Congresswoman Liz Cheney tweeted a hurried response: “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.”
Good call.
Webster’s dictionary reported this week: “Trending: lookups spike for ‘Concentration Camp.'” The term has been in the top 1% of searches since May 2019.
Webster’s defines concentration camp as “a place where large numbers of people (such as prisoners of war, political prisoners, refugees, or the members of an ethnic or religious minority) are detained or confined under armed guard — used especially in reference to camps created by the Nazis in World War II for the internment and persecution of Jews and other prisoners.”
Here’s one good clue on distinguishing between US detention centers for immigrants and Nazi concentration camps: in the US the worst that can happen to you is to be expelled to Mexico.
AOC shot back at the Congresswoman from Wyoming: “Hey Rep. Cheney, since you’re so eager to ‘educate me,’ I’m curious: 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?”
Let me help:
Answer to Q1: Detention camp.
Answer to Q2: Kindly look up a Guardian report from April 23, headlined “Immigration detention centers nearly empty as Trump claims border crisis,” which suggests that US detention centers “have been nearly empty for months.” In fact, “There were nearly 2,000 empty beds in two detention centers last week, with a facility in Dilley, Texas, at 26% capacity and a facility in Berks county, Pennsylvania, at 19% capacity.”
The Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law said the reason for all these empty beds is the US “catch and release” policy regarding incarcerating asylum seekers.
Here’s another distinction between the “concentration camps” on the southern border and, say, Dachau: as best we know, no “catch and release” in Dachau.
Again, the US detention centers are no fun at all, and this disturbs me personally, as an immigrant to the United States. But seriously, how out of touch can the Congresswoman from the Bronx (and some of Queens) be?
AOC referenced a report in The Hill that the Trump administration plans to send migrant children to a former Japanese internment camp. The report has since been debunked. But there’s another good, historically accurate term she could have used: “Internment Camps.”