The government clearly wishes to treat migrants with decency, but the sheer number of them has led to certain shortages that the government is trying to rectify. Cots with mattresses are provided most migrants, but some have had to sleep on cement floors until new supplies of cots arrive; sometimes the cots are available, but there are not enough mattresses for the cots. This is not a deliberate attempt to make their lives difficult, but a temporary problem that a bill sponsored by Texas Senator John Cornyn may rectify, by providing more money for facilities to house migrants. As we have seen, many of the migrants sleep in clean large airy buildings, have access to showers, are given medical examinations and where appropriate given care by nurses and doctors, are supplied with medicines, given blankets, appropriate clothes and footwear, are further supplied with nutritious food, hygienic supplies, toiletries, diapers and baby-changing stations. Can Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tell us in what ways the treatment of these migrants is akin to the treatment of Jews in concentration camps, enduring life as slave laborers, being beaten, sometimes to death, fed starvation-level diets, tormented and often killed in medical experiments, and murdered, too, for sport? Or does she still think they are roughly the same? No migrants in Texas are being physically abused. They are not being treated as prisoners in a penal system; they being held for their own benefit, so that they will be present to claim — through the interpreters the government supplies — refugee status before an immigration judge.
What would Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez have the American immigration authorities do? Simply let in every single person who arrives at the border, forgetting about hearings and the immigration judges, deeming everyone suitable for entry? Is unvetted and uncontrollable immigration what she wants? Or will Ocasio-Cortez concede that it makes sense to have a judge hear the immigrants present their cases, and then to winnow the truly deserving from the rest?
Ocasio-Cortez paints quite a disturbing picture of these migrant shelters or detention centers:
“This administration has established concentration camps on the southern border of the United States for immigrants, where they are being brutalized with dehumanizing conditions and dying,” she wrote. “This is not hyperbole. It is the conclusion of expert analysis.” What experts are those? No ICE officer has “brutalized” immigrants with “dehumanizing conditions.” Even where, because of overcrowding, some migrants have had to temporarily sleep on a concrete floor until the arrival of more cots and mattresses, this reflects not an attempt at “brutalizing” anyone, but merely a lack of supplies because of the recent huge increase in numbers of those trying to cross into America, migrants who walked all the way to the American border from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. No official is killing these migrants. Of the hundreds of thousands of migrants, a handful of those trying to make it to Texas have lost their way in the desert, and die of thirst, or illness; ICE officers are the ones who are trying to locate and rescue such people. There has been no “brutalizing” nor “dehumanizing conditions.”
Before becoming a Democratic Congresswoman, Ocasio-Cortez worked as a bartender. That’s still no excuse for her astonishing ignorance of what went on in the Nazi death and concentration camps. If she wants to make analogies to “concentration camps,” she had better learn what atrocities went on in both the “death camps,” where the mass-murdering was immediate, and on an industrial scale, and the “concentration camps,” where death was the result of beatings, starvations, slave labor, and systematic torture, rather than from the mass gassing of inmates. That’s the past she needs to learn about. If she has any decency, she will be properly ashamed that she ever made such a grotesque comparison of the detention centers with Nazi concentration camps.
If AOC needs to learn more about Nazi atrocities, she also needs to learn more about what’s going on today near the Texas-Mexico border, where those detention centers and refugee shelters have been set up. Let her see all the goods (food, clothing, bedding, medicine, toiletries, diapers) and services (doctors, nurses, interpreters) that are provided to the migrants. Then let her realize for herself how horrifying was her likening what our government is doing with these migrants with what the Nazis did to the Jews. Perhaps she will even feel some remorse about cheapening the experience of the Holocaust to make a political point. She might even decide to apologize to the families of those who died in these camps, but given her aggressive never-apologize temperament, her wide-eyed self assurance, I suspect such an apology is beyond her.
Perhaps Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will decide to study in depth what went on in the Nazi camps. And she might even take the occasion to visit those camps. Had she studied the Holocaust, had she visited the camps, she might never have compared those immigrant shelters where the migrants await their hearings before a judge, to those camps where fiendishly cruel murders were carried out in a dozen different ways.
As for Ocasio-Cortez’s appropriation of “Never Again” — the phrase used by Jews and non-Jews in referring to the Holocaust, and meaning that “Never Again” will we allow such things to happen — and then applying that phrase to the migrants in the detention centers, likening their treatment to that of inmates of Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, and Auschwitz, she is again likening the greatest crime in human history to the discomfort some migrants may experience at having to remain for a few months in a detention center, perhaps one with an insufficiency of showers, or laundry facilities, or mattresses for cots. To show she has learned something, a chastened AOC should demand of herself, to make amends, that “Never Again will I make such an ill-informed analogy between a Nazi camp and a refugee shelter, never again will I invoke the Holocaust in this way, so false, so stupid, and so cruel.” Right you are, Alexandria — for all our sakes, don’t do it ever again.