2020 presidential candidate Michael Bennet compared his mother’s experience as a Polish immigrant during World War II to the border crisis Thursday on MSNBC during the second night of Democratic debates.
The Colorado senator was answering a question about China before backtracking to a question several other candidates had the opportunity to answer regarding the crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border.
“I’d like to answer the other question before this, as well,” Bennet said. “When I see these kids at the border, I see my mom because I know she sees herself.” (RELATED: Holocaust Research Center Yad Vashem Fires Back At Ocasio-Cortez’s ‘Concentration Camp’ Comparison)
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“She was separated from her parents for years during the Holocaust in Poland,” the candidate continued.
“For [President] Donald Trump to be doing what he’s doing to children and their families at the border,” Bennet said. I say this as somebody who wrote the immigration bill in 2013 that created a pathway to citizenship for 11 million people in this country that had the most progressive DREAM Act … that had $46 billion of border security that was sophisticated 21st-century border security, not a Medieval wall.”
“The president has turned the border of the United States into a symbol of native hostility that the whole world is looking at when what we should be represented by is the Statue of Liberty, which has brought my parents to this country to begin with. We need to make a change,” he concluded.
The Colorado senator’s Jewish mother survived the Holocaust and moved to the United States in 1950 with her family. Her parents survived being imprisoned at the Warsaw Ghetto.
Comparing the border crisis to the Holocaust and detention centers to concentration camps has been a popular topic of conversation for many big-name politicians. (RELATED: Mazie Hirono Says Outrage Over Ocasio-Cortez Comment Is ‘Manufactured’ To Protect Trump)
New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sparked the debate when she wrote on Twitter, “That is exactly what [holding facilities] are. They are concentration camps. 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.”
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