Democratic New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker compared President Donald Trump’s border policies to U.S. policies of the 1930s when the country rejected a boat carrying Jewish Holocaust refugees.
The 2020 presidential candidate made the comment during a campaign event in Iowa Saturday. Booker also compared Trump’s platform to the nativist Know Nothing party of the 19th century, which was seeking to restrict Irish and Italian immigrants from coming to the U.S. (RELATED: Booker Says The Hyde Amendment Is An ‘Assault On African-American Woman’)
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“This is why knowing history is so important,” Booker said, saying that Trump “was trying to make us afraid of people coming to the southern border with brown skin.”
” … [Trump] wants to make us afraid of people wanting to come here, escaping terror, not remembering when we turned away other immigrants trying to escape terror,” Booker said. “There was a ship that came here during World War II with a bunch of folks trying to escape the Holocaust, and we turned it around where they got killed in the Holocaust.”
“The shame of that, you think we would learn our lesson about people coming here to seek asylum escaping terror.”
Booker was presumably referring to the M.S. St. Louis, which was carried over 900 Jewish passengers looking to escape the Holocaust but was turned away by the U.S. and Canada. Booker’s home state of New Jersey was one of the earliest states to mandate the teaching of the Holocaust in public schools.
Booker also claimed that most terrorist attacks since 9/11 have been the result of “right-wing extremists”: “Since 9/11, the majority of our terrorist attacks have not been foreign terrorists, they’ve been right-wing extremist groups.”
Booker is considered a long-shot to win the Democratic presidential nomination and has consistently polled in the low single-digits.
The crisis at the southern border has reached a breaking point in recent months, with overwhelmed ICE facilities being forced to release over 100,000 migrant family members into the general population. The Democratic-controlled House of Representatives passed a massive amnesty bill last week, which would grant a special pathway to citizenship for over two million illegal immigrants.
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum has not responded to a request for comment from The Daily Caller.