This headline is not clickbait. It’s not hyperbole. It’s a statement of FACT. 

We are invoking the utter horror of Hitler’s monstrous assault on Jewish people under his regime (1933-1945) because, while the particulars may be different, THAT IS THE TRAJECTORY WE ARE ON RIGHT NOW with respect to immigrants. And either we recognize it and act in a way that is commensurate with the stakes and the urgency, or millions and millions of people may well pay a price which will go far beyond even the massive suffering already inflicted by Trump.

Starting Point: Both Trump and Hitler Believed Racial Purity Was/Is Central to National Power and Wealth (“Greatness”)

Emerging as a fascist political leader in a period of deep crisis for German imperialism, in the wake of its devastating defeat in World War 1, Hitler held to an extremely racist nationalism which blamed the Jews for Germany’s loss in the war, for poverty, for crime… everything. The motto of the official paper of Hitler’s Nazi Party was “The Jews are our misfortune.” 

Hitler’s “theory” imagined Germans as a “pure” and “superior” race brought down by the “impure” and “sinister” Jews. And so the restoration of German power on a world scale depended on expelling, or reducing to slave-like conditions, or murdering Jews, as well as Slavs and other peoples who were viewed as “inferior” by these demented Nazis. Thus from early on, Hitler spoke about finding “a Final Solution” to “the Jewish problem,” and simultaneously forging national unity among those of “pure German blood.”

At the start, Nazi policy was to either expel Jews, or terrorize them into “self-deporting,” by cutting away the legal, economic and social ground that Jews stood on. (They also aimed to wipe out the cultural influence and imprint, the history, language, art and communities of Jewish people.) 

Hitler’s first year as chancellor (1933) was mostly devoted to laying the foundations for what was to come: consolidating his undisputed power over the Nazi Party and the government, and passing a law to legalize “de-naturalizing” nationalized Jewish citizens who had emigrated from Eastern Europe. Jews began to be barred from certain jobs and professions. Nazi Stormtroopers organized a boycott of Jewish businesses and whipped up anti-Semitism in the population. Anti-Jewish riots were unleashed. The first concentration camp was opened at Dachau, though this was mainly for communists and other political enemies of the Nazis.

There was a slow tightening of the noose choking Jewish life over the next few years—including some violence and detentions—and some people were expelled or fled “voluntarily.” But it was not until 1938 that state-organized violence was unleashed on a mass scale, starting with the Storm Trooper-led Kristallnacht pogrom on November 9-10 in which 91 Jews were killed, many more beaten or abused, and thousands of homes, businesses, schools and synagogues vandalized or set on fire. Only then did a broad sense of alarm take hold in the Jewish population, and large numbers sought to leave.

But for various reasons, including the refusal of the Western “democracies” to admit significant numbers of Jewish refugees, most found themselves trapped. In that sense, this was a "failure" of the Nazi’s policy to “solve the Jewish problem” through expulsions and “self-migration.” 

But here is a crucial point: this “failure” did not lead to an abandonment of the war on Jews, but an escalation. Especially with the start of World War 2 in 1939, the Nazis adopted a policy of containment: forcing the entire Jewish population of Germany—and then of the countries Germany conquered in the first years of the war—into miserable overcrowded and locked-down ghettos, or into even worse concentration camps. The single concentration camp at Dacau had mushroomed into a network of 44,000 camps, ghettos and other detention sites holding millions of Jews under the most barbaric conditions. Large numbers died of disease and hunger, or on the whim of Nazi guards. 

Finally, in 1941, the Nazis set out to literally murder all the Jews within their reach, through massacres and in gas chambers, and succeeded in killing six million, as well as many millions of other nationalities. Note that this decision was eight years after Hitler took power.

Trump’s Nazi-like White Nationalism and Hatred of Immigrants

The Trump regime is on a similar path, guided by a similar outlook. 

Trump truly rivals Hitler in his dehumanization of immigrants, repeatedly describing them as subhuman “animals” and monstrous criminals that revel in tormenting “our people.” He falsely and repeatedly claimed that Haitian immigrants were stealing and eating the pets of their neighbors and that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” This past week he went even further—seizing the spotlight of a televised meeting with his cabinet to call all Somalis in the U.S. “garbage,” who should get out of the U.S. and fix “their own” country. (A high percentage of people of Somali heritage within the U.S. are U.S. citizens—in Minnesota, which has the highest concentration of people of Somali descent in the U.S., 95 percent are citizens. But in the past two weeks the fascist administration has increasingly talked of “denaturalizing” citizens.)

This has been a steady drumbeat that goes back over a decade, aimed at whipping up and weaponizing fear and hatred among tens of millions of followers. And it comes with a heavy dose of Hitler-ite extreme nationalism. Over and over, Trump says if you don’t seal the border, and if you don’t bar immigrants from “shithole countries” like Haiti or Black African countries, then “you won’t have a country.” In his recent Thanksgiving rant (that the White House labeled “one of the most important messages ever released by President Trump”), Trump painted a terrifying image of “Americans” (meaning white people) under threat from “Somalian gangs… roving the streets looking for ‘prey’ as our wonderful people stay locked in their apartments and houses hoping against hope that they will be left alone.”

Trump and his defenders have tried to pretend that this is all about going after “the worst of the worst,” while leaving the law-abiding immigrant majority alone. This would be unjust enough, but here is a basic fact: of the roughly 700,000 immigrants booked into ICE custody this year (as of October 1), five percent had convictions for violent crimes, and 73 percent had no criminal record of any kind. Most criminal charges were for immigration or traffic violations! So it is overwhelmingly “regular people” trying to live their lives and feed their families who are being driven out.

Trump spewed forth his actual thinking in his Thanksgiving screed. He complained: “The official United States Foreign population stands at 53 million people (Census), most of which are on welfare, from failed nations, or from prisons, mental institutions, gangs, or drug cartels… This refugee burden is the leading cause of social dysfunction in America.” [Our emphasis] 

In other words, Trump is plainly identifying the vast majority of immigrants as enemies to be driven out. And if current methods don’t do the job, Trump—if he remains in power—will almost certainly escalate to more brutal, terroristic and murderous means.

The Regime’s Brutal Attacks on Immigrants Are in the Service of Racist Fascist Ideology

The demonization of immigrants is not a "distraction" but the heart of the comprehensive fascist program. The Trump/MAGA forces ache for an America in which there are millions fewer foreign-born, non-English speaking, nonwhite, and non-Christian people in the country and on the streets, and where white Christian men are openly setting the terms and in charge. This nightmarish “vision” runs through everything MAGA does, but it is most openly on display in the anti-immigrant campaign. 

The regime has said it aims to deport 3,000 people a day, or about a million a year. That’s a huge amount of suffering for families ripped apart, but still a small percentage of the U.S. immigrant population that is being targeted. And even according to the Department of Homeland Security (which is overseeing this all, and which is notoriously dishonest), they have only reached about half that number.¹

But the bigger picture is that the way in which they do this is meant to drive immigrants out of the country—including legal permanent residents and even citizens—by making life in the U.S. impossible, and increasingly terrifying, for people who were not born here. 

This speaks to the shocking and seemingly needless brutality of the immigration Nazis. The situation right now is one marked by the pervasive presence of heavily armed and masked men, shattering car windows with axes and dragging parents out right in front of their kids. Regular cops, sheriffs and highway patrol demanding that brown-skinned people “show me your papers.” People being abducted off the street and then “disappeared” into ICE’s network of hundreds of detention centers, many in remote locations, without any contact with their families, lawyers, and sometimes medical care—that’s if they are not whisked off to a torture prison in El Salvador, or forcibly deported to a country that they have no ties to.

Sixty thousand people are in ICE custody now, often in what are straight up concentration camp conditions. The American Immigration Council reports:

a Massachusetts ICE field office used a windowless room as a holding area packed with “35 to 40 men” who had to share one toilet without privacy and sleep “head-by-toe” on the concrete floors. Similarly, at Krome Service Processing Center in Florida, people were forced to sleep on the floor and only given “a cup of rice and a glass of water a day.” ICE is refusing to give people enough food in some facilities and provides rotten food at other facilities.

At least 23 detainees have died in ICE custody this year—that’s higher than ICE’s death toll during the first year of the COVID epidemic!

How can you read this and not think about conditions in Nazi concentration camps?

They Are Not Stopping with “Illegals”

And at the same time, the regime is stripping away one category after another of legal status short of citizenship. So, yesterday you had legal status and were building a life on that basis, but today you are “illegal” and wide open for detention or deportation. 

For example, Temporary Protected Status (TPS)—covering situations where conditions in people’s home country are simply too dangerous to return—has been eliminated for people from nine countries since Trump took office. This has stripped at least 675,000 people of legal residence, subjecting them to deportation at any time. Many more countries are in line to lose their TPS status soon. And Trump’s Thanksgiving message declared that he plans to:

• “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries”
• “terminate all the millions of Biden’s illegal admissions”
• “remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States”
• “end all Federal benefits and subsidies to noncitizens of our Country”
• “denaturalize migrants who undermine domestic tranquility”
• “deport any Foreign National who is a public charge, security risk, or non-compatible with Western Civilization.” [Emphasis ours]

This could be shorthanded to “find a way to deport every non-white immigrant, even naturalized citizens, and make sure that those who remain are denied the most basis elements of the social safety net!”

All of this is taking a huge toll on immigrants, regardless of their legal status. DHS claims that 1.6 million immigrants have “voluntarily” self-deported this year—that’s three times as many as ICE claims it was able to legally deport.

A National Wave of Terror That Is Driving Millions into the Shadows—or Out of the Country

Earlier we referenced Trump’s outrageous screed about good white Christians “locked in their apartments and houses hoping against hope that they will be left alone” by rampaging immigrant gangs. But who really is “locked in their apartments and houses hoping against hope that they will be left alone”?

Listen to the voice of Maria Hinohosa, a Mexican-American journalist who grew up in Chicago, posting on X in early September, right after ICE thugs began their months-long terroristic assault on the Latino people there:

[I am] witnessing a community under siege. And I think about people going to see the Anne Frank exhibit in New York City.² And my brain explodes. She is right here in Chicago. Her name is Anita. Her name is ANITA. And she is invisible. And she is Mexican.

Again, this is not hype, and it is in fact happening around the U.S., in an ongoing way, and we have all seen the evidence. And children are not exempted—in fact they are often targeted.

• Pro Publica reports that ICE is holding at least 600 children in custody, separated from their parents who sometimes don’t even know where they are, held for an average of almost six months. Think about the overwhelming fear and anxiety this inflicts on children and their families—but more than that, on the whole community who now realize that it could be them, their kid, no matter what their status is, no matter how much they “follow the rules” and try to be “good citizens.” Think what it means to know in your gut that the society you live in would even allow this to be done to children, because of where they were born, the color of their skin, the language they speak.
• neaToday (publication of National Education Association) quotes a Texas Special Ed teacher: “They have abducted our students, separated our families, and terrorized communities.” They cite a child psychologist who notes that what children are seeing is “their classmates, their family members, their neighbors often being apprehended in violent and confusing ways while… doing things like picking up their children from the bus stop or going to their jobs, and this, for children, creates a sense that nowhere and no one is safe.” [Our emphasis.]
• The Los Angeles Times reports that about 7,000 students have left the L.A. school system since ICE raids intensified there last summer. The district superintendent said, “These declines reflect a climate of fear and instability created by ongoing immigration crackdowns, which disrupt family stability, housing and mobility. When families are afraid to be seen, or when they cannot afford to remain in their communities, they are less likely to enroll, reenroll, or stay in public schools.” An L.A. teacher said, “We're not too sure if some students are sheltering in place, if they're working, or if they got deported or self-deported. We've done our best to help them with resources but with a lot of the kiddos, we just don't know what happened to them.”

“Fascism is not a looming threat. It is upon us now.”

Left untouched, there is a trajectory here. And while the exact destination of this horror cannot be predicted, the objective of “racial purification” is and will be at the heart of that trajectory. And like Hitler, Trump has and will double-down on that, even in the face of opposition, rather than retreat from this core principle. Trump and his fascist movement cannot be constrained, they cannot be “waited out,” they must be nonviolently removed from power. 

A final and more immediate note, especially for those waiting on the mid-terms: despite the truly heroic and inspiring resistance that has arisen to these deportations, they have in fact been steadily increasing—and the tens of billions of dollars in extra money given by the fascist-controlled Congress to ICE has not yet really begun to stream. And instead of moderating, the rhetoric and plans from the administration have become more fanatical and more unabashedly racist. 

They could be defeated by millions pouring into the streets and that political earthquake from below, in the words of Bob Avakian, compelling and enabling those on the top who do in fact strongly oppose Trump for their own reasons to move in ways that could result in the end of the regime. But the clock on that possibility is ticking. To wait at this point for the elections, or to pin your hopes on “the regime is melting down,” amounts to accommodation—and, as Bob Avakian has put it,  “accommodation means collaboration with its monstrous and mounting tyranny and ongoing atrocities.” (from social media message @BobAvakianOfficial REVOLUTION #124: Donald Trump’s whole fascist regime is caught in a contradiction of its own making: his continual Big Lies.)

BE IN DC, DECEMBER 11-13—SURROUND THE WHITE HOUSE! TRUMP MUST GO NOW!