Actress and liberal activist Alyssa Milano implied in a Saturday tweet that Vice President Mike Pence was on the same moral plane as the leading Nazi who orchestrated the Holocaust.
Milano juxtaposed a 1941 photo of Heinrich Himmler surveying a Soviet POW camp with a Friday photo of Pence inspecting the conditions of a U.S. migrant detention facility in McAllen, Texas. Milano offered no commentary other than a photo credit for the second picture.
Photo by @RachelMckibbens. pic.twitter.com/Yzw5RWb44O
— Alyssa Milano (@Alyssa_Milano) July 13, 2019
Acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan and several Republican senators accompanied Pence to the Donna Processing Facility and McAllen Border Patrol Station in the Rio Grande Valley earlier in the week. Pence described the situation on the border as a “crisis,” and called on Congress to “reform our laws to end this unsustainable crisis of illegal immigration at the border.”
Toured the Donna Processing Center with @SecondLady and saw firsthand how even in the face of our overwhelmed facilities, @CBP is providing humane and compassionate care. Congress MUST reform our laws to end this unsustainable crisis of illegal immigration at the border. pic.twitter.com/zQZkJKRGU4
— Vice President Mike Pence (@VP) July 12, 2019
Milano has continued to weigh in on political issues since she featured so prominently in the confirmation hearings of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, during which she sat behind the judge and live-tweeted the event to her millions of followers.
Milano’s tweet continues the escalating rhetoric that Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez began last month, in which she compared the U.S. detention facilities to concentration camps. Her comparison drew bipartisan denunciation, as well as condemnation from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, which issued a statement critical of such comparisons in June.
“The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum unequivocally rejects efforts to create analogies between the Holocaust and other events, whether historical or contemporary. That position has repeatedly and unambiguously been made clear in the Museum’s official statement on the matter – a statement that is reiterated and reaffirmed now,” the museum said.
“The Museum further reiterates that a statement ascribed to a Museum staff historian regarding recent attempts to analogize the situation on the United States southern border to concentration camps in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s does not reflect the position of the Museum.”
