Democratic socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) has doubled down on her claim that Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers housing illegal immigrants are "exactly" like concentration camps, and now says "not one dime" should go to the Department of Homeland Security for building the facilities.

What are the details?

The freshman congresswoman sparked outrage Monday night when she posted a video on Instagram wherein she equated the detention centers to concentration camps and accused President Donald Trump of being a "fascist." She defended herself on Twitter the next day, accusing "shrieking Republicans" of not understanding the difference between concentration camps and death camps.

On Wednesday morning, Ocasio-Cortez carried her narrative further, by first saying "the U.S. ran concentration camps before, when we rounded up Japanese people during WWII."



The New York democratic socialist went on to reiterate that ICE detention centers were the same a concentration camps, and reasoned that "not one dime should go to DHS for building these camps as they detain children & families." She added, "We should not fund the caging of kids & families. Pretty simple."

Anything else?

Ocasio-Cortez further defended her use of the term "concentration camps" to describe immigrant detention centers in an interview with an NBC News Wednesday morning. Speaking in front of her Capitol Hill office, she explained, "First of all, I'm absolutely comfortable using that term because it is rooted in our academic definition."



"Oftentimes when people — you know when the term concentration camp is evoked — what people think of are extermination camps," she continued. "They think of Auschwitz, and I think what we need to realize is that one of the biggest lessons that we learned from both Holocaust historians, civil rights academics and experts is that it takes a process, a slow, gradual process of increasingly dehumanizing steps."

