Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) echoed Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) by comparing the situation at the U.S. southern border to the Holocaust.
When asked what he would do to stand up to China, Bennet said he would mobilize the world against China before quickly pivoting to an earlier question about the border, where he compared it to the Holocaust.
“When I see these kids at the border, I see my mom because I know she sees herself,” he began. “Because she was separated from her parents for years during the Holocaust in Poland.”
Ocasio-Cortez received criticism from both the right and the left after accusing the Trump administration of “running concentration camps on our southern border.”
The Holocaust Museum denounced her remarks in a statement that said, “The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum unequivocally rejects efforts to create analogies between the Holocaust and other events, whether historical or contemporary.”
Bennet then accused Trump of turning the U.S. border into a “symbol of nativist hostility.”
“And for Donald Trump to be doing what he’s doing to children and their families at the borders, I say his as somebody who wrote the immigration bill in 2013 that created a pathway to citizenship for 11 million people in this country that had the most progressive DREAM Act that’s ever been conceived, much less passed — it got 68 votes in the Senate, that had $46 billion dollars of border security in it,” he said.
“That was sophisticated 21st Century border security, not a medieval wall, and the president has turned the border of the United States into a symbol of nativist hostility that the whole world is looking at when what we should be represented by is the Statue of Liberty which has brought my parents to this country to begin with, we need to make a change,” he said.