ICE Is No Gestapo

National Review Online

Wednesday, August 06, 2025

 

In the summer of 1934, the Gestapo carried out a murderous purge against Chancellor Adolf Hitler’s internal party enemies known as the Night of the Long Knives. In the summer of 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained illegal immigrants and ensured they weren’t evading lawful immigration proceedings. Can you spot the difference?

 

Democrats apparently can’t.

 

“Donald Trump’s modern-day Gestapo is scooping folks up off the streets,” said Tim Walz at a May commencement address. He’s not alone. Congressman Stephen Lynch, of Massachusetts, said, “When you compare the old films of the Gestapo grabbing people off the streets of Poland and you compare them to those nondescript thugs who grabbed that graduate student, [it] does look like a Gestapo operation.” Rachel Maddow invokes ICE in making the case that “we have a consolidating dictatorship in our country.” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said the agency should not exist. Representative Dan Goldman said that they were like “secret police” who need to be unmasked.

 

This inflamed rhetoric is firmly in the American tradition. It is also totally cracked and part of a febrile atmosphere around ICE’s operations. Some anti-ICE activists have been taking matters into their own hands. Eleven left-wing agitators ambushed an ICE facility in Alvarado, Texas, opening fire on agents and shooting one in the neck. In Portland, Ore., an incendiary device was thrown at officers. Another attacker in McAllen, Texas, shot a police officer and injured two Border Patrol employees. On Tuesday, a rioter threw a rock into and set fire to an ICE building in Washington State. There is a movement to “unmask” ICE agents, dox them, and encourage their harassment at their homes. The White House claims that ICE agents are facing a 700 percent surge in assaults.

 

These attackers evidently take the idea that ICE is an American Gestapo all too seriously.

 

ICE agents are simply doing their job, which is a function of the legitimate power of the federal government to regulate immigration and to expel those with no legal right to live or work in this country. ICE officers only take steps to protect their identity because they are facing violent resistance. They, obviously, are nothing like the Gestapo. The Gestapo arrested people for political crimes without any judicial process, they attacked partisan enemies of the Nazi party, and they secretly monitored religious organizations, among other crimes and hideous acts.

 

ICE enforces the laws that are on our books, which say that illegal immigrants shall be detained until their immigration proceedings reach a conclusion. If anything, those proceedings tend to provide overly generous due process to illegal immigrants. Even with the stepped-up ICE enforcement, by the way, mass defiance of our immigration laws — with millions of illegal immigrants working and living here — is still the norm.

 

If Democrats don’t like immigration laws, they can run campaigns to change them. But, not too long ago, Democrats wanted to expand ICE. None other than Tim Walz supported the Lankford bill late in the Biden administration that would have brought a threefold increase in ICE’s annual budget. So did all but five Democratic senators.

 

There are questions about the legality and wisdom of some of Trump’s immigration actions, especially the deportation of alleged MS-13 members to an El Salvador prison earlier this year. In the big picture, though, what we’ve seen at the border and in ICE’s enforcement actions is an administration that, finally, is taking our immigration laws seriously. That Democrats view this as incipient Nazism is another indication of their opposition to immigration enforcement as such and is an indictment of them, not the ICE agents doing their duty.