The Trump campaign blasted socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) on Thursday over her hypocrisy for calling out President Donald Trump over a chant that broke out at his rally in North Carolina after she had refused to denounce a recent terrorist attack against an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility where the attacker left behind a manifesto that seemed to echo her deeply misleading rhetoric that immigrant detention facilities are akin to “concentration camps.”
The “send her back” chant, which Trump did not participate in and denounced on Thursday, broke out after Trump read off a list of Rep. Ilhan Omar’s (D-MN) most controversial actions and statements.
Ocasio-Cortez responded by saying: “The president put millions of Americans in danger last night. His rhetoric is endangering lots of people. This is not just about threats to individual members of Congress, but it is about creating a volatile environment in this country through violent rhetoric that puts anyone, like Ilhan, anyone who believes in the rights of all people in danger and I think that he has a responsibility for that environment.”
WATCH:
The Trump campaign responded in a tweet, writing: “Rep. @AOC spent weeks comparing Americans in ICE uniforms to Nazi concentration camp guards, and then Antifa carried out a terrorist attack against ICE. She refuses to condemn the attack.”
Ocasio-Cortez was pressed on Monday about whether she thinks her rhetoric could potentially have contributed to the terrorist attack on the ICE facility — where the attacker was heavily armed and threw bombs at the building — and she refused to respond.
WATCH:
Ocasio-Cortez interjected the term “concentration camps” into the political discussion on immigration last month during an Instagram live video, falsely claiming: “The United States is running concentration camps on our southern border and that is exactly what they are. They are concentration camps. And, um, if that doesn’t bother you, I don’t, I don’t know, I like, we can have, okay whatever.”
Ocasio-Cortez made it clear that she was referencing Nazi concentration camps when she invoked the term “Never Again,” which is an explicit reference to the Holocaust, saying: “I want to talk to the people that are concerned enough with humanity to say that we should not that ‘Never Again’ means something and that the fact that concentration camps are now an institutionalized practice in the home of the free is extraordinarily disturbing and we need to do something about it.”