Florida Republicans' only Jewish lawmaker, Rep. Randy Fine, wants to strike state funding for the Jacksonville Mayor's administration after she suggested Donald Trump would create "concentration camps" to handle illegal immigration.
A staunch pro-Israel advocate and leading Trump ally, Rep. Fine blasted Mayor Donna Deegan, a Democrat, for her "disgusting" and "antisemitic" comments that he believes "disqualify" her from any more state funding if she doesn't apologize.
"Jacksonville Mayor [Donna Deegan's] antisemitic comments comparing the deportation of illegal immigrants to the Holocaust are disgusting and disqualifying," Fine, who is running for state Senate with an esteemed Trump endorsement, posted to his social media Wednesday afternoon. "Jews in Jacksonville are owed an apology; if they don’t get it, I will work next session to withhold state funding from her administration."
During an interview in London amid a UK trade mission, Mayor Deegan claimed Trump would put illegal immigrants "in what would really amount to a concentration camp-type situation to round them out of the country."
She continued, adding that it "doesn't seem to me to be a very American thing to do," Florida Politics reported. “What would we call those? It’s a concentration of people that are in a camp. I’m not suggesting anything beyond that, but I just think it seems rather inhumane to me," she said when pressed further.
She appeared to have been echoing a common accusation from the left that Trump "put kids in cages," in reference to his policies that accelerated migrant family separations. While President Barack Obama in 2014 built cages at the border, the Washington Post reported, Trump is responsible for up to 1,500 children separated from their parents.
Fine, meanwhile, not only took on Deegan but also swiped at her Chief of Diversity and Inclusion for once heading up a group with ties to the militant terrorist group Hamas.
"We shouldn’t be surprised—Deegan is an ardent supporter of #MuslimTerror as her chief diversity officer Parvez Ahmed is the former head of Muslim terror front group CAIR [the Council on American-Israel Relations]," said Fine.
Though Ahmed, who spent three years as the volunteer CAIR Chairman, has advocated for "peace and justice" for all in the Middle East, the CAIR organization has faced years-long speculation and backlash over alleged Hamas ties and sympathies, which the organization denies. However, months after Hamas murdered, raped, and kidnapped scores of Israelis on Oct. 7, CAIR director Nihad Awad was condemned by the White House after he said he was "happy to see" Palestinians break out of Gaza, the New York Times reported.
In September, CAIR called for the Florida Legislature to censure Fine for posting that "one less Muslim terrorist" was around after a Palestinian activist was shot and killed for throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers.
