When President Trump was elected for a second term in November 2024, he pledged to be tougher on immigration, promising mass deportations and travel bans. Two months into 2026, Americans are not only increasingly aware of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) presence in their towns, they are also choosing historical language to describe it. As fatal encounters with ICE become more common, so do the comparisons to Nazi Germany. This instinct isn’t wrong, but it is historically inaccurate and damaging to many communities.
On Jan. 7 of this year, an ICE officer shot and killed an unarmed 37-year-old woman, Renee Good, in her car in Minneapolis. Good’s case is now under federal investigation, and her family spoke to Congress this week to plead for government action and justice for her death. Also in Minneapolis, less than three weeks later, ICE officers assaulted and fatally shot ICU nurse Alex Pretti after disarming him during a conflict in the street. Public outcry online and protests in Minneapolis have called for justice for these deaths and for the Department of Homeland Security to hold the officers involved accountable.
The crisis in Minneapolis is part of Operation Metro Surge, an ongoing operation carried out by the DHS, deploying ICE en masse in cities in Minnesota to target migrants. After weeks of conflict and protest, White House border czar Tom Homan said that hundreds of ICE agents will be pulled out of Minneapolis, though thousands still remain deployed throughout the state.
Also this month, the story of five-year-old Liam Ramos sparked national attention after the boy and his father were detained by ICE. According to CNN, Ramos’ family has entered the United States legally and was waiting to be granted asylum. A federal judge has since ordered their release, but the images spread online of Liam’s detention by ICE have shocked and angered Americans.
These stories are not standalone, and they reflect how much unchecked power the Department of Homeland Security has. If a government agency is allowed to kill citizens in the streets and detain non-criminal asylum seekers, what does that say about the general safety in America? Checks and balances and due process have been thrown out the window, and we as citizens have learned that the First and Second amendments have less protective power than we thought. Alex Pretti’s death has even caused alarm in pro-Second Amendment groups like the NRA, as Pretti was legally carrying a gun before he was shot and killed. These deaths are so alarming because they shift the question from who is more vulnerable to state-sanctioned violence to whether anyone is truly protected. When this fear of violence stops feeling targeted and becomes universal, that historical panic sets in. Nazism functions in the American psyche as a symbol of unchecked power. I believe this is where Nazi invocations come into play.
When people see ICE raids rip families apart in the streets, that is extremely reminiscent of how the Nazis operated in Jewish communities during the Holocaust. People’s brains are triggered to think: This is Nazism. I’ve seen many people reach for this comparison because of the general sense of fear spreading in the American public. I understand the emotional logic because Nazism is the most recognizable template for state terror in modern history. However, comparing ICE to the Nazis is not just historically inaccurate; it is counterproductive. Yes, the Nazis scapegoated Jews in Europe as we see with immigrants today, but a shared tactic is not a shared project.ICE’s behavior may be reminiscent of Nazism, but the manner in which immigrants are being targeted does not sufficiently resemble the manner in which Nazis targeted Jews across Europe. Understand that the weight of Nazi comparison is not politically meaningful, but it is an invocation of deep generational trauma. Invoking Nazism does not clarify what is happening; it escalates language to its most extreme form.
Comparing ICE to Nazis seeks to distort history and make inaccurate claims at the expense of Jewish suffering. Nazism is a distinct ideology, fueled by antisemitic prejudice, one in which the end goal is to complete a genocide of the Jewish people. The Nazis carried out their extermination relatively swiftly, one of the only industrialized genocides in history. The Jewish death toll of the Holocaust was approximately 6 million, but the total death toll, including Romanis, disabled people, and prisoners of war, comes to around 13 million. From a standpoint of a raw death toll, the two situations are incomparable.
To compare US policy with that history without a careful rhetorical argument is to undermine one of the greatest moral crimes of the twentieth century. Nazism focused on a systematic targeting of Jews, attempting to completely erase entire bloodlines from Europe. Trump’s motives with ICE, while cruel in their own right, are not to genocide Latin Americans or other foreign immigrants. This comparison also completely collapses any pragmatic conversations we could have about immigration. Instead of drawing weak comparisons and leaving it to online debate, we should be discussing the standards of justice, due process, and human rights that we want to govern our national institutions. Drawing weak comparisons diverts needed energy away from real work being done to heal America from this moment. We must earnestly engage with our country’s legal codes, our shared history with our bordering nations, and the experiences of immigrant communities in this country today. The crimes of ICE deserve their own scrutiny and justice without hyperbole.
There’s an uncomfortable irony in these comparisons in the voices we hear them from. Certainly, someone who believes in the cruelty and evil of the Nazi regime, enough to compare them to modern-day actors, understands the plight of the Jewish people. However, a significant number of people screaming “Nazi” seem to have little interest in Jewish safety or history. Instead, “Nazi” is a shortcut for “fascist” that completely erases its specific and unique manifestation of antisemitism. In many of the same political spaces where this language is most common, Jews are seen as a white-adjacent, globally protected majority. These actors use one of the most effective ways to marginalize a group: Distort its history, take its trauma, and use it for unrelated political aims.
In America, antisemitic hate crimes are on the rise. According to the FBI, 69% of religious-based hate crimes targeted Jews in 2025. Many of these activists who liken ICE to Nazis often dismiss Jewish concerns of violence or actively participate in organizations that tolerate antisemitism.
Holocaust imagery is constantly repurposed for public viewing for whatever cause is relevant, while Jewish voices are silenced and told that they’re overreacting. Jewish suffering is consistently weaponized only when it is convenient and Jews are sidelined when society needs to blame them.
These Nazi comparisons don’t stop at America or ICE. Pro-Palestinian protestors have been seen in crowds holding signs calling Zionists Nazis, holding the Nazi flag with the Israeli flag, and further swastika imagery invoking the Holocaust. These instances prove that the intentions were never to include Jewish people in the conversation, but to use Jewish trauma to further political gain.
In posts shared online, activists can be seen confronting ICE agents in protests. Shut Down DC, a local political group, shared videos online screaming “Nazi scum” at ICE agents this past January. Just months before, this organization participated in protests accusing Israel of genocide. They shout “Nazi”, yet it holds no weight; it has no meaning. Their page features no activism for DC’s tens of thousands of Jewish residents, only using them as a token for their ideologies.
It’s not only online commentators and activists making these comparisons, but Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz also likened ICE to Nazis, and invoked the memory of Anne Frank to compare her to immigrant children in America. This sentiment has been shared online as well, one poster claiming, “This is the reason Anne Frank was hiding.”
You might be wondering, well, if ICE employs similar tactics to the Nazis, and the Jewish people are the best at spotting their own oppressors, why haven’t they said anything? – They have, we have. It’s almost impossible nowadays to function in progressive spaces as a pro-Israel Jew. Israel has become the litmus for morality, and Jews are yet again the scapegoats and victims when it’s convenient, and the villains overall. Jewish identity is only tolerated if we follow a script or otherwise stay quiet. When Jews object to the misuse of Holocaust imagery, we are told we are being counterproductive. When we call out antisemitism, we are told we are being distracting. When our own history is told, our voices are markedly absent. Jewish people must be the storytellers of their own history, or else it loses all its meaning.
I also want to discuss just how historically inaccurate it is to say that America is copying the Nazis when, in reality, the Nazis were inspired by America. Hitler loved America’s Confederacy and was inspired by the South’s Jim Crow laws. He wanted to create a white supremacist state just like the American South had in the centuries before. Nazi scholars studied the Jim Crow era when drafting the Nuremberg Laws. America had solidified a legal racial hierarchy long before Nazi Germany and served as the blueprint for the Gestapo.
This does not absolve Nazism as a uniquely evil ideology or excuse American injustices of slavery, but it is historically significant. Nazism isn’t a moral project that developed in a vacuum; it is an extreme ideology that drew inspiration from systems of racial domination, many of which were American. To say that the US is “copying” the Nazis erases how authoritarianism actually develops.
The way ICE is operating is less analogous to Nazi death machinery and more reminiscent of the slave catchers of the Antebellum South, a uniquely American evil. In these times, slaves were not considered citizens; they were property of their owners, and leaving or escaping meant that slaves were breaking the law. Slave catchers were armed agents of the Confederacy who hunted, detained, and forcibly returned human beings to captivity. This was codified into law by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which mandated the return of slaves to their masters and forced citizens to assist in capture or else they’d face jail time. Jasmine Crockett, a black lawmaker from Texas, stated “What I see from ICE right now looks like slave patrols.” From a legal perspective, this is a more accurate comparison to immigrants in America today. Legal status is undermined for the purpose of mass deportation, just as the legal status of slaves was used to capture them, even in free states.
That being said, it’s not my place as a Jewish person to take the trauma of Black Americans for internet clout or moral positioning. I can say that ICE is similar to both the Nazis and slave catchers in tactics, while not dangerously and insensitively positioning them as identical ideologies.
This habit of calling ICE agents Nazis reveals the American public’s failure to grapple with our own dark history. The United States doesn’t need to become Nazi Germany to commit injustices; it already has a well-documented history of state-sanctioned violence and racialized policing. At the same time, stripping the word “Nazi” of its specificity does not strengthen the critiques of the state; it weakens historical memory.
Precision matters because history has earned it. Historical comparisons should highlight and honor the past with precision, not collapse distinct experiences into interchangeable buzzwords. If we want justice and reform, we must accurately name abuses. History is not a costume to be worn for emotional effect; it is something we learn from, a tool that demands responsibility and truth.
