Vice-President Mike Pence went to Texas Friday to check on the situation at the southern border for himself and the inevitable happened. It’s 2019 and that means it is completely predictable that Pence was compared to a Nazi visiting a concentration camp. Not just any old Nazi, mind you, but the architect of the Holocaust, Heinrich Himmler.
Alyssa Milano posted a tweet of a photo from Pence’s visit to a detention center in Donna, Texas alongside of a photo of Himmler at a German concentration camp. It’s all about shocking her followers, regardless of the historical factual basis. There is no historical basis for her comparison.
Photo by @RachelMckibbens. pic.twitter.com/Yzw5RWb44O
— Alyssa Milano (@Alyssa_Milano) July 13, 2019
Milano’s ignorance is breath-taking, to be sure. Even worse, she probably really isn’t as ignorant as she presents herself but she makes these outrageous claims for show. It’s all about attention on social media. She fancies herself a political activist in Trump’s America and actual facts don’t always matter. Maybe her school tutor on the set of Who’s The Boss failed to educate the child actress about the Holocaust. Milano knows exactly what she is doing at the expense of actual victims of the Holocaust and their families.
Mike Pence and Second Lady Karen Pence traveled with seven Republican senators and some members of the Trump administration. Democrats were invited on the codel organized by Sen. Lindsay Graham but they declined to go. Pence specifically asked that his visit be a true depiction of the situation.
Pence’s office claimed he was not given a sugar-coated version of the facilities.
“The VP’s office specifically instructed CBP to not clean up or sanitize the facility beyond what is routine so the American people could see how serious the crisis at our border is (overcrowding, lack of resources, beds).”
Pence said at a press conference later Friday, “I knew we’d see a system that was overwhelmed,” and added, “this is tough stuff.” He also called on Democrats to fund more beds at the facilities.
They toured a facility holding single men in McAllen and one in Donna that houses families with children.
The scene in McAllen (single adults) stands in stark contrast to what we saw at a processing facility in Donna (families with children) – space for cots, tv with cartoons, supply rooms stocked with snacks pic.twitter.com/DNSSeRJAK7
— Betsy Klein (@betsy_klein) July 13, 2019
At the Donna facility, the one for families with children, 800 people were detained. The facility has the capacity to house 1,000 people. It is set up for them to spend up to 72 hours there though most are in and out in 48 hours. Pence spoke to children being held there.
Reporters were guided through one room in the facility where they saw small children and their parents lying on the floor. Children told Pence they traveled by foot from Central American countries over a two or three-month-long journey. Some small children, all under the age of 8, were on a bench in front of a television watching a Spanish cartoon and eating snacks. An agent watched the room from a guard tower-like structure above.
Pence tweeted his own photos showing him with a group of children sitting at a white table with snacks. Behind him and second lady Karen Pence is a young child sitting on a metal bleacher as well as mats covered in Mylar blankets.
Milano’s absurd tweet uses a photo from Pence’s visit to the McAllen center, the men’s facility. To state the obvious, which apparently people like Alyssa Milano need to hear, these men were detained for crossing the southern border illegally. They are detained due to their own actions. In Nazi Germany, Jews were rounded up and put into concentration camps because of their religion, not because of their own actions. Nazis killed 6 million Jews. The United States is not killing illegal aliens. The overcrowding and poor conditions in some detention centers is not solely the fault of the Trump administration. The border is being overrun and resources are overwhelmed. It is unprecedented. President Trump, First Lady Melania Trump, the vice-president, and his wife, and others in the Trump administration have all visited the border. They have called for additional resources to relieve the chaos and humanitarian crisis. Democrats have ignored the problems and called it a manufactured crisis until only a matter of days ago.
Pence objected to CNN’s coverage of the trip. He said that CNN only showed footage from the men’s facility in McAllen and not the one holding families and children in Donna. He posted a thread on Twitter about it.
CNN is so dishonest. Today we took reporters to a detention facility on the border for families and children and all told us they were being treated well.
— Vice President Mike Pence Archived (@VP45) July 13, 2019
The Democrats have no solution in sight – only that we should decriminalize illegally crossing the border. They call for abolishing ICE and dehumanize the men and women working at the border. When asked about the proposal of a new Marshall Plan for Central American countries, Senator Ron Johnson told Meet the Press host Chuck Todd Sunday morning that a Marshall Plan is a long-term solution that will take time to do. It does nothing to end the suffering at the border now. Johnson’s right. The humanitarian crisis is only growing and Democrats have to accept the fact that burying their heads in the sand and finger-pointing against President Trump is no solution at all.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member