AOC slams 'shrieking Republicans' after comparing migrant detention centers to concentration camps

Sign up for the daily Inside Washington email for exclusive US coverage and analysis sent to your inbox

Get our free Inside Washington email

Please enter a valid email address

Please enter a valid email address

SIGN UP

I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has slammed Liz Cheney in an escalation of tension between the two congresswomen over calling migrant detention camps at the US-Mexico border “concentration camps”.

Ms Ocasio-Cortez, who had first described the detention facilities as concentration camps during an Instagram Live appearance last week, claimed that Ms Cheney had actually invoked the Holocaust.

“Reminder: the member who directly + explicitly compared concentration camps on our border to the Holocaust was *Liz Cheney*. The horrors of the Holocaust went beyond the use of concentration camps, yet camps were part of the process,’ Ms Ocasio-Cortez tweeted. “They have also been used before and after.”

Ms Ocasio-Cortez said last week during her Instagram Live that the US was running the “concentration camps” on the US-Mexico border, and suggested that anyone who is not bothered by that idea is not particularly concerned with humanity.

“The US is running concentration camps on our southern border, and that is exactly what they are,” Ms Ocasio-Cortez said last week. “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.”

Ms Cheney, a Republican who represents Wyoming, responded by taking offence to her colleague’s classification.

“Please @AOC do us all a favour 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,” she wrote on Twitter.

Ms Ocasio-Cortez later pushed back at the sentiment, saying that “shrieking Republicans” were equating “concentration camps” with “death camps”.

“And for the shrieking Republicans who don’t know the difference: concentration camps are not the same as death camps,” she wrote on Twitter. “Concentration camps are considered by experts as ‘the mass detention of civilians without trial.’ And that’s exactly what this administration is doing.”