Sen. Cory Booker invokes Holocaust in urging Biden to end Title 42

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House and Senate Democrats gathered on Thursday morning to rail against the Title 42 public health order that allows for the expedited removal of migrants, with two high-profile lawmakers referencing the Holocaust as they urged the Biden administration to reverse an extension of the order and to think twice about a policy that limits those who can seek asylum.

Railing against Title 42, Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., said that American values make the United States an example, and compared the effect of turning migrants away at the border to when the U.S. turned away Jews who fled the Nazis in Europe.

"[Y]es we have dark chapters. Like when the St. Louis, during the Holocaust, sailed to our shores and was turned around, where folks were sent back to those horrors and many died," Booker said at a news conference. "It was coming out of that history that we as a nation affirmed that our values, our ideals, our virtue would be made real in law codified by our government. That we would say ‘Never again.'"

Booker then said that despite this, the U.S. is now, through the extension to Title 42, "putting people in crisis and in danger facing persecution and violence back into those situations."

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Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

Right before saying this, Booker used a biblical reference to Jews, saying that American values "distinguish us as a light unto all nations."

The New Jersey senator is not the only Democrat to use imagery of Jews during the Holocaust when discussing U.S. border policies. President Biden himself did this earlier this month when asked by a reporter if he believes asylum is a human right.

"Well, I think it is a human right if your family is being persecuted," Biden responded. "I thought it was a human right for, you know, Jews in Germany to be able to go — to get to escape and get help where they could."

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Booker's Democratic colleague from New Jersey, Sen. Bob Menendez, also made a reference at the beginning of the news conference,  stating that American asylum laws were established after the U.S. "failed to protect Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution.

The two senators spoke alongside House members including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Greg Casar, D-Texas. In addition to speaking out against Title 42, the Democrats spoke out against the Biden administration's announced plans for a policy aimed at limiting migrants entering the U.S. after the end of Title 42.

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The rule, which is similar to a Trump administration policy, says that migrants who fail to apply for asylum in countries they travel through on their way to the U.S. and "circumvent available, established pathways to lawful migration" will have a rebuttable assumption that they are ineligible for asylum. 

Ocasio-Cortez, Booker, Menendez and Casar sent a letter to Biden on Wednesday that they signed along with 73 other members of the House and Senate, in which they slammed the rule, calling it an "asylum transit ban." Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas disputed the idea that there is "a marked difference" between a ban and what the rule calls for, which is an assumption of ineligibility that migrants would be able to appeal.