Former vice president Joe Biden on Monday praised a woman at his Iowa campaign event for her "profound" question comparing President Donald Trump's immigration policies to the Holocaust.
The questioner, who identified herself as Kathy, used the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz to ask how Biden plans to deal with the ways "we are living in the 1930s again."
"What can we do, given what Donald Trump is doing at the border with those children who are incarcerated, so that they don't go out and experience the kind of stigmatization that so many Jewish people and gypsies and Romas did in Europe?" the woman asked. "It's so important, particularly when anti-Semitism in the United States is on the rise again and it's frightening. We are living in the 1930s again in so many ways."
Biden did not push back against the comparison, instead calling it "profound." He went on to address the recent rash of anti-Semitic violence by blaming it on Trump.
"There's a phrase in the Jewish community, which is 'Never again.' Never again, meaning we'll never allow this to ever happen again, but it is happening in other parts of the world, but it's not just in this case—it's not just Jews now," Biden said. "In America, they are being victimized. There have been more attacks on synagogues and on Jewish houses of worship than any time in American history since this man's become president of the United States."
The Democratic Party has faced increased scrutiny over the last year for anti-Semitic scandals, prompting the House of Representatives to pass a resolution last March condemning anti-Semitic and racist rhetoric, understood as a response to Rep. Ilhan Omar's (D., Minn.) comment that supporters of Israel were being paid off.
This isn't the first time the Trump administration's immigration policies have been compared to the Holocaust. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) said the children in detention facilities were actually in "concentration camps."
"I want to talk to the people that are concerned enough with humanity to say that ‘never again' means something, and the fact that concentration camps are now an institutionalized practice in the home of the free is extraordinarily disturbing," Ocasio-Cortez said.