Massachusetts Senate President Stanley Rosenberg on Monday had some harsh words to say about the seven-nation travel ban that President Donald Trump enacted Friday, comparing it to Nazi Germany.
“It is distressing that President Trump would do this at all, but to do it on January 27, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, is unconscionable,” the Amherst Democrat said in a prepared statement, referring to the executive order Trump signed on Friday temporarily halting the entry of citizens from seven nations in the Middle East and in Africa onto American soil. “Incremental actions such as these, undermining human rights and civil liberties, started Germany down a long road that led to one of the darkest periods in human history.
“This is about the erosion, over time, of people’s basic rights and human dignity.”
Trump’s 90-day order affects Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen — countries overwhelmingly populated by Muslims.
Rosenberg’s comments echoed those of others like U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York), who stated over the weekend that “tears are running down the cheeks of the Statue of Liberty” and labeled Trump’s move as “one of the most backwards and nastiest executive orders that the president has issued.” U.S. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-California) also used the Statue of Liberty tears metaphor in her statement.
On Saturday, Massachusetts House Speaker Robert DeLeo took to Twitter to voice his disapproval with the new White House policy:
You can’t paint an entire group w/ a broad brush. Its not the American way! We’ll do everything we can to protect people and preserve values
Rosenberg added on Monday, during a brief interview with the State House News Service, that he thinks Trump is “dead wrong on this.”
“When you have a situation where you have people who are legally in this country and they show up at the airport returning from an overseas visit and they get detained at the airport, that is not the American way,” Rosenberg said. “I’m just really very shocked that they would go so far as to profile just based on that without regard to the fact that they actually have legal documentation — they have visas and all of the proper paperwork to be in this country and they’re detained at the airport?
“That is really unconscionable — and I think it is also unconscionable that they signed that executive order on January 27, literally a week after he was sworn into office but more importantly on Holocaust Memorial Day.”
Rosenberg then expounded on his theory of how the order relates to Nazi Germany.
“If you study the history of what happened in Germany, it was one incremental policy change after another, after another and after another,” Rosenberg noted. “And before you know it, you turned around, and you saw what happened as a result of that and I’m just really very upset that he did it at all – but that he did it on that day, is just to forget history and to not understand the pain that they’re causing and the path they’re taking us down.”
Nazi rally, 1937. 
