Molly Prince on June 18, 2019
The vice president of the National Border Patrol Council extended Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a personal invitation to tour a detention facility after she claimed that the U.S. government is “running concentration camps on our southern border” to hold illegal immigrants.
“She needs to come down here, I’ll offer to show her myself the area,” Art Del Cueto, vice president of the National Border Patrol Council and a Border Patrol agent, told Bill Hemmer Tuesday while appearing on “America’s Newsroom.”
Del Cueto was responding to comments Ocasio-Cortez made during a live-stream on her Instagram the previous evening.
“That is exactly what [holding facilities] are. They are concentration camps,” Ocasio-Cortez said at the time. “I want to talk to the people that are concerned enough with humanity to say that ‘Never Again’ means something. The fact that concentrations camps are now an institutionalized practice in the home of the free is extraordinarily disturbing and we need to do something about it.”
“When any individual makes that reference, it loses all interest in me,” Del Cueto replied. “It’s disgusting to compare concentration camps to what the men and women doing here protecting our country.”
“She used the extermination of six million people. She used the phrase ‘who are concerned enough with humanity to say that ‘Never Again’ means something,’” Hemmer said. “Has she ever been to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem? Or Auschwitz-Birkenau in southern Poland? Or Dachau in Germany?”
“‘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 continued. “Does she not owe every Jew on this planet an apology?”
“It’s definitely a slap in the face to a lot of these individuals that actually have family members that went through concentration camps,” Del Cueto replied.