And pretend nothing’s happening? Do you think these statements are anti-Semitic and a denial of the reality of the Holocaust?
Ocasio-Cortez presses case that U.S. is running ‘concentration camps’ at border amid Republican outcry
By John Wagner, WashingtonPost
June 18, 2019
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) pressed her case Tuesday that the Trump administration is running “concentration camps” at the U.S.-Mexico border amid criticism from Republicans who said she was demeaning Jews exterminated in the Holocaust.
During a live stream Monday night, the freshman lawmaker decried the conditions of migrant detention facilities the administration is using to cope with a surge of border crossings and highlighted a decision to hold some children at an Oklahoma Army base that was used as an internment camp for Japanese Americans during World War II.
“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,” Ocasio-Cortez told her viewers on Instagram. She later accused Trump of conducting “an authoritarian and fascist presidency.”
“I don’t use those words lightly,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “I don’t use those words to just throw bombs. I use that word because that is what an administration that creates concentration camps is. A presidency that creates concentration camps is fascist, and it’s very difficult to say that.”
Ocasio-Cortez continued making her argument Tuesday morning, sharing on Twitter an Esquire article that raised questions about the conditions at U.S. detention facilities.
The piece by Jack Holmes, the magazine’s politics editor, quoted historians who said the facilities meet the definition of a “concentration camp” and said that not every concentration camp is intended as a death camp, as in the Holocaust.
Evidently some do.
Ocasio-Cortez also drew heavy criticism Tuesday from several commentators on Fox News, including anchor Bill Hemmer.
Hemmer seized on the fact that Ocasio-Cortez used the phrase “never again” during her live stream on Instagram.
“‘Never Again’ is the phrase that Jews all over the world use to make sure that the extermination between 1939 and 1945 never happens again, and she’s using concentration camps to describe what’s happening on the southern border,” Hemmer said on air. “How in the world is that acceptable? Does she not owe every Jew on this planet an apology?”
I mean, it’s not like we’re announcing Pogroms,
Trump vows mass immigration arrests, removals of ‘millions of illegal aliens’ starting next week
By Nick Miroff and Maria Sacchetti, Washington Post
June 17, 2019
President Trump said in a tweet Monday night that U.S. immigration agents are planning to make mass arrests starting “next week,” an apparent reference to a plan in preparation for months that aims to round up thousands of migrant parents and children in a blitz operation across major U.S. cities.
“Next week ICE will begin the process of removing the millions of illegal aliens who have illicitly found their way into the United States,” Trump wrote, referring to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “They will be removed as fast as they come in.”
Large-scale ICE enforcement operations are typically kept secret to avoid tipping off targets. In 2018, Trump and other senior officials threatened the mayor of Oakland, Calif., with criminal prosecution for alerting city residents that immigration raids were in the works.
Trump and his senior immigration adviser, Stephen Miller, have been prodding Homeland Security officials to arrest and remove thousands of family members whose deportation orders were expedited by the Justice Department this year as part of a plan known as the “rocket docket.”
…
In his first two weeks on the job at ICE, Morgan has said publicly that he plans to beef up interior enforcement and go after families with deportation orders, insisting that the rulings must be carried out to uphold the integrity of the country’s legal system.“Our next challenge is going to be interior enforcement,” Morgan told reporters June 4 in Washington. “We will be going after individuals who have gone through due process and who have received final orders of deportation.
“That will include families,” he said, adding that ICE agents will treat the parents and children they arrest “with compassion and humanity.”
We have over 13,000 unaccompanied minors in the system right now according to many independent estimates.
Executing a large-scale operation of the type under discussion requires hundreds — and perhaps thousands — of U.S. agents and supporting law enforcement personnel, as well as weeks of intelligence gathering and planning to verify addresses and locations of individuals targeted for arrest.
The president’s claim that ICE would be deporting “millions” also was at odds with the reality of the agency’s staffing and budgetary challenges. ICE arrests in the U.S. interior have been declining in recent months because so many agents are busy managing the record surge of migrant families across the southern border with Mexico.
The family arrest plan has been considered even more sensitive than a typical operation because children are involved, and Homeland Security officials retain significant concerns that families will be inadvertently separated by the operation, especially because parents in some households have deportation orders but their children — some of whom are U.S. citizens — might not. Should adults be arrested without their children because they are at school, day care, summer camp or a friend’s house, it is possible parents could be deported while their children are left behind.
…
According to Homeland Security officials, nearly all unauthorized migrants who came to the United States in 2017 in family groups remain present in the country. Some of those families are awaiting adjudication of asylum claims, but administration officials say a growing number are skipping out on court hearings while hoping to live and work in the United States as long as possible.
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