Mayor Bill de Blasio criticized Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for saying the Trump administration is housing immigrants in “concentration camps” at the Mexican border on MSNBC Wednesday.
“I respect her greatly and I feel very close to her in terms of philosophy, but of course she was wrong. You cannot compare what the Nazis did in the concentration camps,” de Blasio told TV host Chuck Todd.
Todd had asked if the mayor was “uncomfortable with the way Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez compared what’s going on down at the border with concentration camps.”
“100%,” the mayor answered.
Earlier Wednesday de Blasio slammed fellow presidential contender Joe Biden for saying he’d been able to get along with the notoriously racist Southern senator James Eastland.
“It’s 2019 & @JoeBiden is longing for the good old days of ‘civility’ typified by James Eastland. Eastland thought my multiracial family should be illegal & that whites were entitled to ‘the pursuit of dead n—-rs,’” de Blasio tweeted alongside with an image of his African-American wife and their mixed-race children.
“This gets at language, this goes to the same thing,” Todd said about Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks.
De Blasio agreed, noting that the detention centers at the border and Nazi-era concentration camps “are entirely different realities.”
Other Democratic leaders like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tried to duck questions about the controversy.
Meanwhile, an Israeli Holocaust museum said the freshman congresswoman could use a history lesson.