Alyssa Milano
Alyssa MilanoReuters

Actress Alyssa Milano drew criticism over the weekend after she compared Vice President Mike Pence to one of the primary architects of the Holocaust.

On Saturday, the 46-year-old actress and progressive activist tweeted an image juxtaposing a recent photo of Pence during a recent visit to a detention center for illegal immigrants in Texas, with a photograph of Heinrich Himmler, the chief of the Nazi SS and an architect of the Holocaust, as he visited a prisoner camp holding Allied soldiers.

The picture of Pence visiting the detention facility in McAllen, Texas on Friday was changed to black and white to better fit the side-by-side comparison with the World War II-era photograph of Himmler.

Milano’s tweet drew support from some followers, but also sparked criticism from users who called the comparison with a key Holocaust figure offensive.

“You’re an idiot,” Fox News contributor David Webb responded.

“How many Jews walked hundreds of miles to break into a concentration camp? It’s an idiotic analogy and I’d say the same thing to her face.”

Another Twitter user called Milano’s tweet “absolutely insane”. “Go educate yourself on the Holocaust and the American immigration laws.”

Last month, New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also drew criticism when she compared federal detention facilities for illegal immigrants to Nazi concentration camps.

"The United States is running concentration camps on our southern border, and that is exactly what they are," said Ocasio-Cortez.

"The fact that concentration camps are now an institutionalized practice in the home of the free is extraordinarily disturbing, and we need to do something about it," she added, denouncing what she called the "authoritarian and fascist presidency" of Donald Trump.

"I don't use those words lightly," she added. "I use that word because that is what an administration that creates concentration camps is."

The US Holocaust Memorial Museum later blasted the congresswoman’s comments in a statement which read in part: "The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum unequivocally rejects efforts to create analogies between the Holocaust and other events, whether historical or contemporary. That position has repeatedly and unambiguously been made clear in the Museum’s official statement on the matter – a statement that is reiterated and reaffirmed now.”

"The Museum further reiterates that a statement ascribed to a Museum staff historian regarding recent attempts to analogize the situation on the United States southern border to concentration camps in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s does not reflect the position of the Museum."