WATCH: ‘I don’t really know if I have an answer’: Top DSA member on what it means to be an American 

What does it mean to be American? Andrew Thompson, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America’s National Political Committee, said he sees himself as “more of an internationalist.”

Thompson, speaking on his own behalf, discussed the group’s recent growth, its relationship to communism and questions about checks and balances under its proposed government structure in an exclusive interview with Heartlander News.

“I don’t really know if I have an answer to this question because I don’t – I kind of see myself more as an internationalist,” he said after a pause.

Thompson described an American in legal terms as someone who is naturalized or born in America, but argued that “creating an arbitrary framework of who is and isn’t an American serves the people that want to otherize people.”

He said such distinctions could be used to justify putting people in “concentration camps, so we can get them out of the country, so we can kill them and otherwise point to them as being disposable people.”

Thompson, who made his remarks seated in front of an anti-ICE poster, said others in the DSA might not share his perspective. “We’re an organization. You can ask five different people and get six different opinions,” he said. 

The DSA, America’s largest socialist organization, says its membership has grown from roughly 5,000 to nearly 126,000 in just over a decade, according to its own figures. The organization says seven DSA-backed House candidates are likely to win seats in Congress in the November midterms.

(This is part of a series on the rise of the DSA, Democratic Socialists of America)