The Indian Express (Delhi Edition)
Auschwitz survivor blasts Trump official: History is not on your side
DONALD TRUMP’S senior-most immigration enforcer on Tuesday was confronted at a public meeting by a Holocaust survivor who had been imprisoned at both the Auschwitz and Dachau concentration camps. During the heated public meeting, the 87year-old survivor told the United States federal official that “history is not on your side.”
Bernard Marks, the Holocaust survivor, was speaking as supporters and critics of Trump’s deportation policy packed a gymnasium in Sacramento, California, on Tuesday, trading jeers and ridicule during a raucous town hall meeting attended by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Director Thomas Homan.
“I spent 5 1/2 years in a concentration camp because we picked up people. Mr Jones, history is not on your side,” Marks told Homan.
“When I was a little boy in Poland, for no other reason but for being Jewish, I was hauled off by the Nazis,” Marks added. “And for no other reason I was picked up and separated from my family, who was exterminated in Auschwitz. And I am a survivor of Auschwitz and Dachau.”
Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones, a pro-trump Republican, invited acting Homan to address the public forum in the state capital.
The gathering got off to a boisterous start, with Jones’ opening remarks interrupted by shouts and heckling as he warned that spectators who continued to disrupt the meeting, attended by about 400 people, would be ejected. About a dozen people were eventually escorted out of the hall.
Homan, whose agency has drawn fire for heavy-handed tactics in rounding up and deporting illegal immigrants, insisted ICE was acting in a targeted fashion against those with criminal records.
“We don’t conduct neighbourhood sweeps,” Homan said over cat-calls. “I don’t want children to be afraid to go to school. I don’t want people to be afraid to go to the doctor.”