Ice Facism platform of ending immigration entirely.

“Britain for the British” was its motto.

It Depends on What You Mean by “Fascism”
Comparisons to the Nazi regime, one of which
ICE is not the SS or the Gestapo. But it has Ms. Ocasio-Cortez made last month when she
concerning similarities. called American detention facilities
“concentration camps,” are also routinely met
By Jason Stanley, July 4, 2019 with outrage. But Hitler, too, was obsessed
with immigration. In “Mein Kampf” he praised
the “national State,” and he saw foreign
immigration as the obstacle. He wrote of
America’s anti-immigration policies as a model
for a nationalistic Germany:

I know that this is unwelcome to hear; but

anything crazier and less thought-out than our
present laws of State citizenship is hardly
possible to conceive. But there is at least one
State in which feeble attempts to achieve a
better arrangement are apparent … the United
States of America, where they … refuse to allow
An undocumented immigrant being arrested by immigration of elements which are bad from
an ICE agent in California. Credit John Moore/ the health point of view, and absolutely forbid
Getty Images naturalization of certain defined races, and
thus are making a modest start in the direction
On July 2, Representative Alexandria Ocasio- of something not unlike a national State.
Cortez, after a visit to migrant detention
facilities run by Customs and Border Protection The current American administration clearly
in Texas, claimed that the United States is does not share the toxic and murderous
“headed toward fascism.” Much of the response ideology of Nazism, nor its anti-Semitism, but
that followed was expected, but little or none of when the president of the United States derides
it examined the statement closely or detailed to immigrants from “shithole countries” while
what degree the United States’ immigration pleading for more immigrants from Northern
policy justifies such comparisons. So how apt is Europe, he echoes the very aspects of American
this analogy between the current situation and history that Hitler praised.
early years of fascist regimes?
When we consider the character of a ruling
Liberal democracy organizes society around government, we should think about the
respect for the dignity, equality and freedom of ideology that motivates it, as well as the
all human beings. Fascism, by contrast, institutions and tactics it employs to transform
organizes society around the vilification of society. It is clear that this administration
outsiders. In this administration’s rhetoric draws on fascist ideology in its rhetoric. But
toward undocumented immigrants from what about its institutions and tactics?
Central America and religious minorities, we
have been subject to classic fascist tropes for On June 17, President Trump tweeted that
some time. The obsessive focus on immigration Immigration and Customs Enforcement would
and the representation of immigrants as deport millions of “illegal aliens.” He’s not the
invaders is particularly indicative of this first president to focus on undocumented
ideology. In the 1930s, Oswald Mosley, the immigrants for removal. Every president since
head of the British Union of Fascists, ran on a the Sept. 11 attacks, including Barack Obama,
has, too. But the Obama administration general as intrinsically prone to crime to justify
explicitly prioritized terrorists and serious mass arrests by highlighting “three egregious
criminal offenders. The Trump administration cases” to use in the media. This tactic of
is the first in recent memory to target identifying whole groups as criminal has a
undocumented families for removal in planned shameful history. In my grandmother’s 1957
mass deportation raids. Trump’s memoir of 1930s Berlin, she reports similar
announcement about mass deportations tactics by the Gestapo in 1937, who spoke of
conveyed the kind of cruelty toward outsiders “criminal” Jews while arresting Jewish citizens
that he often uses to excite his base. It was only who had committed minor traffic violations.
a matter of time before such rhetoric would
begin to transform our institutions. To be sure, no organizations precisely like the
Nazi SS or the SA or Italy’s fascist Blackshirts
ICE is a novel American institution — it was operate in the United States today. There is no
created in 2003 by the Homeland Security Act organization empowered to make arrests that
in the wake of Sept. 11, at a time when rights originated as a paramilitary force, or that has
and liberties took a back seat to concerns about an official racist ideology, or that is used to
safety. The same act created the Bureau of overtly target political opponents. ICE is not
Customs and Border Protection, tasked with the SS or the Gestapo. But it has concerning
policing the border and staffing migrant similarities, including its symbiotic relationship
detention centers. In ICE, we have a special with an increasingly authoritarian president.
force, created in an anti-democratic moment in And it is not the only institution with
American history, authorized with police-like disturbing fascist elements; evidence of
power and directed at political outsiders inside extreme racism and sexism has emerged
our borders. The institution itself is tied among members of its sister organization,
politically to the country’s leader. Trump is the Customs and Border Protection. The special
first president endorsed by a major union circumstances under which ICE was created
representing ICE’s employees, and Trump has and now operates also lends credence to the
repeatedly represented himself as its chief argument that ICE is expendable, a
defender. nonessential and arguably harmful arm of
government that could be eliminated.
ICE is an organization that is like the police but
is not the police. The job of the police in a What about the private detention centers for
democratic society is to keep communities safe. undocumented immigrants, which Ms. Ocasio-
In practice, ICE collaborates with conventional Cortez described last month as concentration
American criminal justice institutions, camps? After the comparison, the United States
including local police departments, but often Holocaust Memorial Museum issued a news
end up working at cross-purposes with them release denouncing comparisons to the
by creating fear in immigrant communities, Holocaust. In response, hundreds of historians
whose members become less likely to report and other academics working on the Holocaust
crime. As a result, some police chiefs have and genocide responded with a letter
aligned themselves recently against ICE raids. defending the importance of these analogies.
The goal of ICE is not to make communities
safer. ICE’s mission is to reinforce a distinction As Kica Matos at the Vera Institute of Justice
between “us” and “them.” explained to me, journalists are barred from
visiting these centers; they are open only to
The Trump administration has advanced its legal representatives and members of
more aggressive policies of enforcement by Congress. In early June, the Trump
characterizing undocumented immigrants as a administration canceled educational,
group of criminals, rather than as individuals. recreational and legal aid for migrant children
In 2017, Secretary of Homeland Security John in detention centers, sealing them off further
Kelly ordered ICE to portray immigrants in from public view. Reports of the extreme
conditions in these centers have flooded the Northern European countries — the United
news in recent weeks. These reports have been States has always had aspects of both. With the
provided by legal representatives empowered development of a police-like force directed
to visit them. What happens now, as Ms. Matos specifically to force outsiders into hiding,
asked, that funding is cut off for such visits? detention centers sealed off from public view
in which to detain them and an economy set up
Even as we are shut off from facts, immigrants to profit from it all, we move in the wrong
will hear the stories from one another. The direction.
strategy here is to encourage them to self-
deport. This, too, is familiar from history. In the Jason Stanley is a philosophy professor at Yale
November 1938 pogrom of German Jews, more and author, most recently, of How Fascism
than 30,000 of them were rounded up and sent Works.
to concentration camps, where they were
subjected to brutal and inhumane conditions
and soon released. In “KL: A History of the Nazi
Concentration Camps,” Nikolaus Wachsmann, a
professor of European history at the University
of London, explains that the release of these
prisoners made sense from the regime’s
perspective, because “the camps had served
their function — forcing many Jews out of
Germany.” The regime’s harsh anti-Semitic
rhetoric, followed by exposure of its Jewish
citizens to the brutality of its camps, led to a
large exodus of Jews from Germany (including
my grandmother and my father in July 1939).
The tactic worked. Should we therefore employ
it?

There is an economic reality to this situation as

well. We increasingly see connections between
powerful business interests and the
institutions of state terror. Wall Street gives
billions in loans to facilitate the profits of
companies who run detention centers; large
companies make profits by selling their wares
to them, and former high ranking
administration officials serve on their boards.
On the local level, county jails enjoy newfound
profits by housing those detained by ICE’s
massively broadened mandate.

A refusal to discuss fascism in the current

political context in the United States obscures
both the nature of fascism, representing it as an
all-or-nothing matter, as well as our own
troubling past. The extent to which a society is
liberal democratic or fascist can be measured
on a continuum. In the struggles with our racist
history — against black Americans, Native
Americans and immigration from non-