New York City mayor and presidential candidate Bill de Blasio on Wednesday slammed Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) for comparing the crisis at the southern border to the Holocaust.
De Blasio appeared on MSNBC's Meet the Press Daily, where host Chuck Todd asked him if he was "uncomfortable" by Ocasio-Cortez's Holocaust comparison.
"They are entirely different realities," de Blasio said.
Todd followed up by asking de Blasio whether he believes she was wrong and would be critical of her.
"I respect her greatly and I feel very close to her in terms of philosophy, but of course she was wrong," de Blasio said. "You cannot compare what the Nazis did in concentration camps ... There is no way to compare."
During an Instagram live session on Monday night, the freshman Democrat told viewers Trump was running an "authoritarian and fascist presidency" and the administration was running "concentration camps" on the southern border.
"They are concentration campus," she said. "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."
De Blasio isn't the only Democrat criticizing Ocasio-Cortez's comparison. Rep. Henry Cuellar (D., Texas) said he "would not use the terms that she used."
"Again, with all due respect to her, she has a different usage of words, maybe a different perception," he said. "I live on the border, I've been to those detention centers, I've been to those shelters as you know. If they're adults, they're in detention centers, but if they're children, they are put in shelters that are run by non-profits."
"I would not use the terms that she used and imply anything else after that," he concluded.