Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison, the vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee, evoked the Holocaust on Monday, comparing illegal immigrants in the U.S. to Jews in Nazi Germany.
“I’m going to tell you right now, I’m one of them people who believes you should give your neighbors sanctuary,” Ellison said at an event in Minneapolis, where he was rallying support for the DREAM Act, a law which provides legal status to people brought illegally to the U.S. as children.
An opposition research group affiliated with the Republican party captured footage of Ellison’s remarks.
Ellison argued that most Americans know illegal immigrants who currently live in the U.S. and therefore have an obligation to stand up for them in the face of President Trump’s tough immigration policies. The Trump administration recently announced that it will be ending Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the amnesty program that President Obama enacted by executive action in 2012.
“If you ask yourself, ‘What would I do if I was a Gentile in 1941 if my Jewish neighbors were under attack by the Nazis? Would I give them sanctuary?’ — you might be about to find out what you would do,” Ellison said.
“Will you pass that moral test, or will you fail it? This is the time for people who truly have faith and belief in their hearts to step up and demonstrate.”
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