By Daniel H. Magilow
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz recently sparked controversy by comparing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to Nazi Germany’s notorious secret police, the Gestapo.
“Donald Trump’s modern-day Gestapo is scooping folks up off the streets,” Walz said during a May 2025 speech at the University of Minnesota Law School’s commencement ceremony.
“They’re in unmarked vans, wearing masks, being shipped off to foreign torture dungeons, no chance to mount a defense, not even a chance to kiss a loved one goodbye, just grabbed up by masked agents, shoved into those vans, and disappeared,” Walz added.
ICE, tasked with enforcing immigration policies, has dramatically increased the number of nationwide arrests of immigrants since President Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025. ICE’s arrests of immigrants have more than doubled in 38 states since then.
In recent months, other Democratic politicians, including U.S Rep. Dan Goldman of New York, have also compared ICE to the Gestapo, or Adolf Hitler’s “secret police,” as Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts said in April.
But do ICE’s tactics actually resemble those of the Gestapo?
Because I am a scholar of modern Germany and the Holocaust, people regularly ask me if this analogy is accurate. The answer is complicated.
Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Understanding the Gestapo
The Nazi regime established the Gestapo, short for the German phrase Geheime Staatspolizei, meaning secret state police, soon after Hitler became chancellor of Germany in January 1933. Among other responsibilities, the Gestapo was tasked with investigating political crimes and monitoring opposition activity. It later enforced racial laws in Germany and across occupied Europe.
As part of its daily work, the Gestapo identified and monitored the regime’s political enemies. It arrested, interrogated, detained and tortured suspects and sent others to concentration camps. To identify suspects, it often relied on anonymous denunciations that came not only from zealous Nazis, but also from disgruntled neighbors or business competitors who tipped off the Gestapo to Jews and other people.
While the Gestapo was relatively small in terms of personnel, it projected an image of being, as one scholar wrote, “omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent.”
It enforced the regime’s will and suppressed dissent not through sheer manpower but by creating a pervasive sense of fear. This aura of menace and terror has long outlived the Nazi regime itself.
ICE’s operations
ICE, with around 21,000 officers and staff operating in a country of more than 340 million, is smaller both in absolute terms and on a per capita basis. At its height between 1943 and 1945, the Gestapo had between 40,000 and 50,000 personnel in a country of 79 million.
ICE is set to expand its work in the next few years with an additional US$75 billion in funding that Congress appropriated in July as part of Trump’s tax and spending bill.
And while ICE focuses on immigration, the Gestapo had a more expansive role. It was responsible for suppressing all forms of political dissent, not just violations of immigration law.
ICE operates with vastly more advanced technologies that did not exist in the 1940s, including facial recognition and social media monitoring.
There is technically more transparency around ICE’s work than the Gestapo’s, since ICE is a federal agency that is subject to its work and information being reviewed by politicians and the public alike. But in June 2020, the first Trump administration reclassified ICE, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, as a “security/sensitive agency.” This designation makes it harder for people to request and receive information about ICE’s work through Freedom of Information Act records requests.
Like the Gestapo, ICE can seem performative in its work, like when it carried out a dramatic July raid of a cannabis farm in California in which balaclava-wearing officers used tear gas against protesters.
The Gestapo in today’s world
Since World War II and the fall of the Nazi regime, the term Gestapo has become shorthand in the United States to describe police repression.
Using the word Gestapo to describe the worst possible authoritarian oppression has been popularized in popular movies in everything from the 1943 film “Casablanca” and “The Black Gestapo” in 1975 to “Inglourious Basterds” in 2009 and “Jojo Rabbit” in 2019.
Walz’s remarks in May, though provocative, were also far from isolated in politics. Politicians from both sides of the aisle, as well as political observers, regularly use Gestapo and Nazi metaphors to attack their opponents.
In 2022, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia famously confused the term Gestapo with gazpacho soup in a gaffe that went viral. “Now we have Nancy Pelosi’s gazpacho police spying on members of Congress,” she said.
In 2024, Trump accused President Joe Biden of running a “Gestapo administration” as the Justice Department prosecuted Trump for attempting to overturn the 2020 election.
Overall, mentions of the word Gestapo in social media increased by 184% between 2017 and 2024, according to the nonprofit group Foundation to Combat Antisemitism.
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is among the organizations that have condemned making comparisons to the Holocaust and the Nazis for many reasons, including their historical inaccuracy and because they are insulting to people whose families remain scarred by the Holocaust.
Spencer Platt/Getty Images
What historical comparisons really say
Analogies can be useful for clarifying complex ideas. But especially when they stretch across decades and vastly different political contexts, they risk oversimplifying and trivializing history.
I believe that comparing ICE to the Gestapo is less a historical judgment than a reflection of modern anxiety – a fear that the U.S. is veering toward authoritarianism reminiscent of 1930s Germany.
If politicians and other public figures are looking for historical comparisons to modern law enforcement agencies that use severe tactics, there is, unfortunately, no shortage of options: the Soviet Union’s secret police agencies NKVD and KGB, Iran’s former secret police and intelligence agency SAVAK or East Germany’s Stasi, to name just a few.
All of those organizations denied suspects due process and grossly violated human rights in order to protect political regimes – but they don’t necessarily easily compare to ICE, either.
Still, politicians and political observers alike most often turn to the Gestapo and other Nazi references instead.
Ultimately, the Gestapo, Nazi Germany and the Holocaust serve as a powerful, shared cultural reference point. The catastrophes of World War II epitomize the worst possible outcomes of evil left unchecked.
They have become the master moral paradigm and an ethical compass for the world today. In an age of polarization, World War II and the Holocaust remain the mirror in which Americans examine their present.
Daniel H. Magilow is a Professor of German at the University of Tennessee.
Deborah Coffey says
“The catastrophes of World War II epitomize the worst possible outcomes of evil left unchecked.” We simply cannot allow the cruel and lawless Trump administration to carry on unchecked. Fight back, America…or, the worst possible outcome lies ahead…for all of us.
Dennis C Rathsam says
POPPYCOCK!!!!!!All you liberals CRY ME A RIVER! 77+ million Americans voted for the deportation of Bidens Invaders!
They all wanted a change from bungling Biden. From his lies, that he didn’t have the power to close the border, to his $10.00 a doz eggs! TRUMP,S doing what we elected him to do. The Jackass party is polling at a dismal 19% APPRUVAL RATING! There pointing the finger at each other, the communist socialist members, are tearing the party apart. They have no plan{ except to bash TRUMP} No leader to take them to the promise land….A BALL OF CONFUSION! Mean time TRUMP keeps making deals. The experts say that it wont work…TRUMPS all wet, he is wrong…… So wrong that TRUMP,S 1st 6 months in office he ranks # 2 in getting this done ASAP!!!! #2 of every president in history….#1 was FDR! The American people were right! God bless America! & God bless President TRUMP!
Laurel says
It is my belief that Trump is one, sick puppy, and his sickness is contagious. He is frolicking in the power of spreading hatred. He is delighting in the fact that his supporters are ignoring his constant lies, and making excuses for him. The unformed, incomplete man. The supposed eternal victim, doing the victimizing. Amazing!
Really sad that many in this country are so vulnerable.
Pogo says
And?
Sherry says
Chauvinism on Steroids. . . This from the AP, quite an interesting read:
https://apnews.com/article/bathrooms-women-statehouse-capitol-26ecb9b2d7ea6d66883b902f89da1fcd
R.S. says
There are human rights; there are due process laws. Both are ignored by the current administration. It seems that Trump’s practices ignored laws and operated in a legal vacuum with the assumption that if challenged by court cases, the Trump organization may make changes as far as the law and the cases will force compliance. If done to poor folks, the challenge may not be forthcoming because one must buy justice by paying legal eagles in this country. Poor folk rely on a government’s insistence on their being treated rightly. What we see at the concentration camp in the middle of the Florida swamp is abuse done to defenseless people. The current administration is simply NOT living up to its ethical obligations. In other words, Trump runs government as he did his businesses; in fact, this adminstration’s main wrongdoing is to have become oblivious to the border between business–where unethical conduct may be tolerated until challenged–and government–which must be exemplary in the observation of justice.
Skibum says
Whether today’s really wacko federal law enforcement’s tactics and marching orders accurately mimic Nazi Germany’s gestapo is completely irrelevant to me. I agree with those who define what’s been going on in America since drumph’s election earlier this year as gestapo tactics, and have used the same description myself. No, I wasn’t in Germany to have seen that kind of behavior personally, but I do know that if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck… it MUST be a duck.
Okay, let’s get right into the nitty gritty, from the perspective of a career law enforcement officer. Nope, I was NEVER told to put a mask over my face to hide my identity on duty. Nope, I was NEVER allowed to remove my name tag or badge so those I was arresting could not see or know my name or what agency I worked for. Nope, in my long history working in law enforcement, I never participated in mass arrests while driving around in plain, unmarked vehicles – those unmarked vehicles were routinely for detectives and mass round-ups would always be accompanied by plenty of uniformed law enforcement in clearly marked vechicles. Nope, unlike what has been going on lately and represented as authorized for federal agents, I would have been disciplined had I refused to tell someone my name, my ID or badge number, and what law enforcement agency I represented if asked.
Maybe, just for argument’s sake, what drumph and his unhinged, unqualified and unethical federal law enforcement agency heads have instructed ICE and other federal law enforcement agents to do while making mass arrests doesn’t specifically resemble the jack booted Nazi behavior. It could be more in line with other countries’ dictators who routinely send their thugs out to yank citizens off of the streets and put them in prisons without a trial or even formal charges to languish for long periods or even disappear for good. Maybe what we are seeing here in our nation’s streets is more like what happens in Putin’s Russia. Or in Venezuela. Or in Iran. Or N. Korea. Or any number of third world countries where the law means only what the dictator in charge wants it to mean for those who he wants punished.
The point is, what is happening here in America now, with federal law enforcement, has NEVER happened before, has NEVER been allowed before, and should NEVER be seen as normal or okay by ANY law enforcement officer or agency anywhere in this country… because we are better than that, or should be! When American law enforcement officers are sworn in, they take an oath and are expected to do their job ethically. They are supposed to have a moral compass and know right from wrong.
The scenes displayed across TV in recent weeks gives me great concern. It is not a good look for America. I can only imagine what people who live in other countries across the world are saying about this country when watching their TVs. Their visions of his shining example of democracy, with the Statue of Liberty standing high along the water in NY, compared to the reality of all that is going on in America’s cities today. Due process thrown aside. Our nation’s law enforcement officers being transformed into unidentified, unaccountable and unhinged attack mobs who storm into neighborhoods in unmarked vehicles and yank employees and customers out of restaurants. Yank them out of churches while services are going on. And even yank them out of court buildings where these people have gone to show up, as scheduled and required, for their immigration hearings! That is NOT law enforcement… it is thuggery. It should not be allowed in this nation of ours.
So whether it is akin to Nazi Germany’s gestapo or what other dictators like Putin or Hugo Chavez in Venezuela do with their thugs in uniform to control and intimidate people, it is WRONG. And any description to help people see exactly what is going on, to help explain the unexplainable, to hopefully wake people the hell up and stop what is going on is okay with me.
Free America from the Cartels says
Crime rates are going down. What about the removal of the violent gangs that are killing and raping daughters and sons? What about all the drugs coming in from the cartels? Trump is a God send. He is saving America from the socialist in the democratic party that align themselves with terrorist group.
c says
“Risk and Resonance of Comparing ICE to the Gestapo”
Risk???
If it looks like a duck …
Quacks like a duck …
Swims like a duck …
Sounds like a duck …
Then it probably IS a duck.
And, BTW, ICE still has a ways to go till they can correspondingly compare to the Nazi gestapo ….. but they’re trying and catching up fast.
Jake from state farm says
Calling everyone you disagree with a “Nazi,” Trump “Hitler,” ICE the “Gestapo,” or detention centers “concentration camps” isn’t activism—it’s hysteria.
The Left’s constant name-calling and historical ignorance have made serious conversation impossible. And that’s exactly why they’re losing relevance.
When outrage replaces argument, and slander replaces debate, people tune out. America sees through the drama—and they’re walking away.
I’ll even say this: When folks on the right call Obama’s promotion of the Russia collusion hoax, the media’s cover-up of Biden’s mental decline, and the coordinated effort to label Hunter’s laptop as “Russian disinformation” treason—they’re using the wrong word.
Make no mistake, these acts are deeply dishonest, dangerous, and a betrayal of public trust. But labeling them “treason” dilutes the true meaning of the word.
We can—and should—call out corruption, lies, and abuse of power without resorting to the same rhetorical overreach we criticize on the left.
It’s time to stop the nonsense and get back to real conversation.
Laurel says
And…
I mentioned, I think last year, that we will be seeing huge posters of Trump, like Chairman Mao, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un. Well, prepare yourselves, because it’s happening. Trump placed a huge, banner portrait of himself, next to a huge banner portrait of Lincoln, on the exterior of the Department of Agriculture (USDA) in Washington D.C., so there you go.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-banner-portrait-department-agriculture-b2751192.html
Laurel says
Did I mention that Trump will never, ever come close to filling Lincoln’s shoes? Lincoln was not a felon. Lincoln did not steal boxes of top secret documents and store them in a club bathroom. Lincoln never bragged about sexually assaulting women. Lincoln did not hang out with a child sex trafficker. Lincoln was not a habitual liar. Lincoln was not a grifter. Lincoln did not sell merch. Lincoln never threatened, or lied about previous I.S. Presidents. Lincoln did not try to overthrow an election. Lincoln never talked about half of U.S. citizens as if they were “vermin”.
No, Trump has no business comparing himself to President Abraham Lincoln. He continues to make a fool of himself.
Laurel says
Lincoln never lied about previous U.S. Presidents.
Our observations of Trump is just “hysteria” according to Jake fsf. Trump’s a regular peach.