Conditions and policies at the U.S. southern border have led many activists to compare what is going on with ICE detention centers with concentration camps built in Germany in the early 1930s. It does not take much understanding of history to realize that the parallels are there. In discussions of the Holocaust, which included the murder of 6 million European Jews, the term “concentration camp” is often used synonymously with the term “extermination camp.” If you believe that a concentration camp and an extermination or death camp are one and the same, then comparing anything to a concentration camp can be taken as a reference to the slaughter of millions of Jews. Comparing detention centers in Texas to extermination camps in Poland, of course, would be inaccurate, and disrespectful to the memory of the people who were murdered in the Holocaust.

It is on this basis, the synonymous use of the two terms, that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is now being attacked for a video she posted in which she says that the United States, under Trump and his DHS forces, is running concentration camps. Very quickly, Rep. Liz Cheney, best known for being proof that demons can have children, responded.