It's long, but I've copied in full an essay by a German documentarian named Neal McQueen, as Robert Reich says, "on the chilling parallels between ICE and Hitler’s Brownshirts":
When History Starts to Rhyme
Neal McQueen
Ninety-two
years apart, two documents authorized rapid expansion of forces
empowered to use coercion against designated populations. The contexts
differ. The mechanisms — hiring surges, compressed training, weakened
oversight — follow a recognizable pattern.
On
February 22, 1933, Prussian Interior Minister Hermann Göring signed an
order deputizing 50,000 stormtroopers as auxiliary police. On January
20, 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order entitled
“Protecting the American People Against Invasion.”
Both
documents expanded the authority of organizations tasked with
confronting what their political sponsors called “enemies within.”
The comparison that follows is not about moral equivalence. The Sturmabteilung
was a party militia that murdered political opponents and helped lay
the groundwork for genocide. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is a
federal law enforcement agency operating under statutory authority. They
represent different legal systems, different eras, and different
constraints.
What
the comparison examines is structural. It asks: what happens when a
state rapidly expands a force authorized to use coercion against a
designated population? The mechanisms — recruitment surges, relaxed
vetting, compressed training, weakened oversight — produce similarly
recognizable patterns. Do those patterns have predictive value for the
present?
By
January 1931, the SA numbered roughly 77,000 members. Under Ernst
Röhm’s leadership, recruitment surged. Within twelve months, membership
reached 400,000. By the time Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933,
the rolls showed approximately two million. The force had grown
twenty-five-fold in two years. A sample from 1929-1933 found that over
77 percent of SA members were under thirty; nearly 59 percent were under
twenty-five. Many were unemployed. The Great Depression had thrown
millions out of work, and the SA offered what the labor market did not: a
uniform, a purpose, a promise of action. Ideology mattered less than
belonging.
ICE’s
expansion followed a different path but a similar tempo. At Trump’s
second inauguration, the agency employed approximately 10,000 officers
and agents. The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (Big Ugly), signed into law
in July 2025, devoted $150 billion over four years to border and
deportation efforts — boosting ICE’s annual funding from roughly $10
billion toward $100 billion by 2029. A tenfold increase. By December
2025, the agency had onboarded 11,751 new employees. More than 56
percent of ICE’s workforce by New Year 2026 had less than one year on
the job. The majority were rookies.
The
recruitment campaigns differed in medium but shared a targeting logic.
The SA charged no dues and asked for no credentials beyond a willingness
to fight. ICE’s 2025 expansion lowered the minimum age to eighteen,
eliminated the maximum age, dropped college degree requirements, and
waived polygraph examinations under Direct Hire Authority. The Washington Post reported
ICE spending over $100 million on a “wartime recruitment strategy” that
placed ads on conservative podcasts, at NASCAR races, near military
bases, and at gun shows. One poster asked: “Which Way, American Man?”—a
phrase echoing nativist slogans about cultural decline.
Both
organizations attracted a mixture of true believers and opportunists.
According to Rudolf Diels, the first head of the Gestapo, roughly 70
percent of new SA recruits in Berlin during 1933 had been Communists —
men who sensed which way the wind was blowing. ICE leadership in 2025
stated they sought people “inspired by MAGA ideology rather than by the
typical perks of a federal badge.” One veteran ICE officer cautioned:
“You’re gonna get a lot of people who are just power hungry and want
authority.” Rapid hiring selects for zeal over judgment.
The
SA spent twelve years in a legal gray zone before its February 1933
transformation. Weimar authorities viewed it as a private militia
subverting the constitution. The organization operated quasi-legally as a
“sports and gymnastics” club, with men armed with clubs, rubber
truncheons, and brass knuckles rather than firearms. The Reichstag Fire
Decree, issued six days after Göring’s deputization order, suspended
civil liberties and shielded SA actions from legal consequences. The
shift required no new legislation—only the will to use existing
emergency powers without restraint.
ICE
needed no such workaround. It inherited existing statutory authority
under the Immigration and Nationality Act. What changed in January 2025
was how the executive branch chose to use that authority. Trump revoked
Biden-era orders that had set enforcement priorities and limited certain
ICE actions. DHS rescinded guidance that had barred enforcement at
schools, hospitals, churches, and protests. An ICE memo required
supervisory approval before action in formerly protected areas— but set
no penalty for skipping approval. The restraint was nominal.
By
September 2025, DHS announced over 1,000 agreements with local law
enforcement— a 641 percent increase from approximately 150 such
agreements before 2025. The Laken Riley Act mandated detention without
bond for any non-citizen charged merely with a theft-related offense.
A crucial judicial development came in September 2025. In Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo,
a lower federal court had enjoined ICE from making stops based solely
on factors like race, language, location, or type of work. The Supreme
Court stayed the injunction. Justice Kavanaugh’s concurrence reasoned
that while ethnicity alone cannot create suspicion, the “totality of
circumstances”— many undocumented residents in the vicinity, common work
patterns, language — meant agents could use those factors collectively.
Justice Sotomayor’s dissent condemned the ruling as declaring “all
Latinos… who work low-wage jobs are fair game to be seized at any time.”
The
outcome was similar across these two eras: a force authorized to use
coercion against a designated population, operating with diminished
oversight. The SA gained police powers in weeks. The change was visible
and dramatic. ICE’s expansion was incremental and bureaucratic. Both
ended in the same place: expanded latitude, weakened checks.
The
SA’s training was paramilitary but ad hoc. There was no formal academy.
Manuals circulated with instructions on hand-to-hand combat and crowd
control. The uniform’s psychological effect — intimidation through mass
display — was integral to tactics. The SA’s strength lay in numbers and
willingness to use force, not tactical competence.
ICE
historically required approximately 13 weeks of comprehensive basic
training at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers — covering
immigration law, arrest procedures, firearms, defensive tactics, and
Spanish language. In 2025, these timelines were cut by more than half.
DHS officials confirmed academy training was cut to 47 days — roughly a
60 percent reduction. The number was symbolic: Trump is the 47th
president. Spanish language training was eliminated or minimized; NBC
News found recruits received only one week.
ICE asserted that “no subject matter has been cut.” Three ICE officials told The Atlantic
that the reduction was purely to expedite deployment. Both statements
cannot be true. A House Committee letter expressed concern about “a
potential for an insufficiently trained and vetted force of thousands.”
Over 200 recruits were pulled from training mid-course after belated
background checks revealed disqualifying information.
The structural logic was the same: political leadership demanded immediate results. Training was the variable that could be cut.
Throughout
1933, SA regiments set up hundreds of improvised detention sites —
“wild camps” — in abandoned factories, breweries, and cellars. The
Oranienburg concentration camp near Berlin was established by SA troops
in March 1933 without central permission. Local police acquiesced. By
mid-1933, SA guards there were on the Prussian government payroll. The
state did not shut the camps down. It paid for them. Conditions were
brutal. Records document at least 16 prisoners killed by guards at
Oranienburg alone. The camps were eventually absorbed into the formal
concentration camp system. The state wanted terror, but organized
terror.
ICE
inherited a national detention infrastructure built starting in the
1980s. What changed in 2025 was its scale. The Big Ugly’s $45 billion
detention allocation funded rapid construction. In 2025 alone, ICE
opened 59 new sites and reopened 77 closed centers — 136 facilities in
twelve months. The detained population nearly doubled, from roughly
39,000 to approximately 70,000 by January 2026. Capacity outpaced
staffing, oversight, and medical care.
Communities
learned of proposed facilities through news reports rather than formal
consultation. In Social Circle, Georgia — population 5,000 — local
officials expressed alarm at reports of a proposed 5,000 to 10,000
person detention center. The town, they noted, lacked sufficient water
and sewer capacity. In Kansas City, the City Council enacted a five-year
moratorium on non-municipal detention centers after learning DHS had
scouted a warehouse as a potential 7,500 bed facility. Resistance was
reactive. The scouting had already happened.
Thirty-two
detainees died in ICE custody in 2025 — triple the prior year’s figure
of eleven. The mechanisms differed from the wild camps’ documented
murders. The outcome was the same: state-sanctioned detention that
produces fatalities.
Nazi ideology rested on a founding lie: the Dolchstoßlegende, or stab in-the-back myth, which held that Germany’s army had been betrayed from within by Jews, Marxists, and democrats. In Mein Kampf (1925), Hitler wrote: “Before one defeats external enemies, the enemy within oneself must first be annihilated.”
The
Trump administration reshaped immigration enforcement with a
structurally similar frame. Executive Order 14159, signed on
inauguration day 2025, was titled “Protecting the American People
Against Invasion.” The order framed illegal immigration not as a law
enforcement matter but as a national security emergency.
The
invasion frame transformed undocumented immigrants from lawbreakers
into combatants. But it required an additional element: an explanation
for why the “invasion” had been permitted. Soon before the 2024
election, Trump told Fox News: “I think the bigger problem is the enemy
from within... . We have some very bad people, sick people, radical left
lunatics.” He added: “The enemy from within is more dangerous than
China or Russia.”
A
year later, addressing military commanders at Quantico, Trump said:
“The enemy from within is a bigger threat than any foreign enemy.”
Stephen
Miller, Deputy White House Chief of Staff for Policy, provided the
ideological framework. He depicted a clash between America’s “noble,
virtuous people” rooted in “Judeo-Christian and Western heritage” and
“forces of wickedness.” On Fox News in October 2025, he declared: “To
all ICE officers: You have federal immunity... no city official, no
state official, no illegal alien, no leftist agitator or domestic
insurrectionist can prevent you from fulfilling your duties.”
The
claim of “federal immunity” had no basis in law. DHS amplified the
message as a “REMINDER.” The legal fiction did not matter. The
permission did.
The
parallels are well-documented: rapid expansion, lowered barriers,
compressed training, expanded detention, and ideological framing of
targets as existential threats.
What remains uncertain:
Whether ICE’s expansion exceeds institutional control. The
SA’s trajectory was eventually curtailed not by external accountability
but by Hitler’s purge of its leadership in June 1934, when Röhm’s
ambitions threatened the regime’s alliance with the army. ICE faces no
internal purge, and its political sponsors remain in power.
Whether American oversight mechanisms can constrain the agency. The
DHS Inspector General has opened an investigation into training
adjustments. Federal judges have issued injunctions that were
subsequently stayed. Congressional Democrats have vowed to oppose new
funding but acknowledge they lack votes to defund ICE. Trump’s Big Ugly
bill locked in resources through 2029. Public opinion polling show that
deportation operations have become “deeply unpopular,” but public
opinion operates on different timelines than operational expansion.
Whether the “enemy within” framing will expand in application. The Nazi usage of der Feind im Inneren
evolved from “November criminals” to “Jewish Bolsheviks” to simply
“Jews.” So far, ICE has targeted undocumented immigrants, particularly
Latinos. Yet Trump’s rhetoric embraces a broader category of “enemies
within” including Democrats, federal bureaucrats, and media that
criticize him. Whether operational targeting follows rhetorical
expansion is not yet determined.
The
comparison does not predict outcomes. It identifies mechanisms. The
basic question it asks: once set in motion, can institutions control
these trajectories? The record suggests it depends on whether oversight
constrains domestic armies before they double in size.
