De Blasio calls Florida migrant detention center a ‘prison camp’
HOMESTEAD, Fla. — Mayor Bill de Blasio described the Homestead detention center that’s housing 2,300 unaccompanied migrant children as a “prison camp” during a visit Thursday.
The longshot presidential hopeful was the latest 2020 candidate to drop by the facility, located south of the debate venue in Miami where he and nine others took the stage Wednesday night.
“It looks like a prison,” de Blasio said after using a ladder to peer over a fence and seeing a stream of migrant teens walking in single file outside. “You’ve got a bunch of kids being marched around. I’m looking at that and immediately I thought, that’s a prison camp.”
First lady Chirlane McCray, who was also on hand for the brief visit, chimed in, “No one was smiling.”
Asked whether he’d go so far as to call the facility a “concentration camp” — as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did when describing detention centers at the southern border — de Blasio pointed to his constituency back in New York.
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“I think we have to be very careful. I represent a lot of Holocaust survivors. And I have constituents who still have the numbers on their arm from Auschwitz and other camps,” he said. “No, this is not that. Those were death camps. Those are places unprecedented in human history. This is a prison camp … We have to be very careful to state accurately what’s really going on.”
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders stopped by after de Blasio — but was not allowed into the center.
“We had a good discussion,” Sanders said as he emerged from the building.
Democratic candidates Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar were also at the site but were not let in ahead of the first night of debates on Wednesday.