To compare ICE to the SS or the Gestapo is not hyperbole but a moral analogy. No one serious is claiming historical equivalence in scale, ideology, or outcome. The Holocaust was singular. Nazi Germany was distinct. But history does not warn by replication alone; it warns by pattern. The value of the comparison lies not in matching body counts or uniforms, but in recognizing function. Authoritarian systems rely on institutions that operate in the shadows, target a demonized population, and are insulated from accountability. That is the common thread, and it is the thread that should alarm us.
Secret police never announce themselves as monsters. They are always introduced as solutions. They are framed as guardians of order, defenders of security, instruments of necessity. Their mandates are described as limited, their powers as temporary, their abuses as isolated. Language is carefully chosen to dull moral resistance: raids become “operations,” cages become “detention centers,” disappearances become “administrative processing.” Bureaucracy does what naked violence cannot as it makes cruelty feel procedural, routine, forgettable.
This is how brutality becomes normalized. Paperwork replaces chains. Job titles replace ideology. Individuals within the system are encouraged to see themselves not as moral agents, but as cogs just following policy, just enforcing the law, just doing their jobs. Responsibility diffuses upward and outward until no one feels accountable for the harm being done. Atrocities do not require sadism; they require compliance.
And this is how neighbors learn to look away. When repression is legalized and routinized, outrage is replaced by resignation. People tell themselves it does not concern them, that the targets must have done something wrong, that questioning the system would be naïve or dangerous. Fear and convenience conspire to produce silence. The disappearance of others becomes background noise, until disappearance itself feels normal.
Trumpism has thrived on the systematic dehumanization of the vulnerable and the open glorification of force. It has taught its followers that empathy is weakness and domination is strength. Refugees become vermin. Protesters become enemies. The poor, the sick, the marginalized are framed not as people, but as burdens or threats. This rhetorical stripping of humanity is not incidental; it is essential. Once a group is reduced to an abstraction, cruelty against it can be celebrated without guilt.