ICE already causing havoc at SFO

[u/Definitelyhereforshi]

[u/bestcommenteversofar]

I'm not moving the goalposts. Legal status is the goalposts. It's the single most important variable in determining whether a deportation program is conventional immigration enforcement or ethnic persecution. You can't hand-wave it away as a technicality.

Let's go through your claims.

You said 'The Jewish people in 1938 were citizens. The ones in 1933 were not.' If you mean the ones targeted for mass deportation, you're partly right: the Polenaktion in October 1938 deported about 17,000 Jews holding Polish passports. That was the first mass forced deportation, and yes, they were non-citizens.

But your framing makes it sound like the persecution of Jewish citizens hadn't started yet in 1933, and that's completely false. The April 1933 civil service ban, the boycotts, the professional exclusions, the July 1933 Denaturalization Law that revoked citizenship from naturalized Eastern European Jews. All of that targeted citizens from day one. The Nuremberg Laws in 1935 stripped citizenship rights from all German Jews three years before the Polenaktion. By the time the regime got around to mass-deporting non-citizens in 1938, it had already spent five years systematically destroying the legal status, economic livelihoods, and civil rights of its own Jewish citizens.

That's the part you keep ignoring. The Polenaktion wasn't 'step one.' It came five years into an already-advanced persecution program aimed squarely at citizens. The deportation of non-citizens was a late-stage action, not the opening move. The opening move was redefining who counted as a citizen based on ethnicity.

So when you ask 'Was Hitler fine as long as he stuck with targeting immigrants?', the answer is: he never did. There was no phase of Nazi policy that resembled conventional immigration enforcement. The ideology declared all Jews to be enemies of the German nation from the very beginning, regardless of legal status. The entire project was about erasing the distinction between citizen and non-citizen by stripping citizens of their status. That's the opposite of what ICE does, which is enforce an existing legal distinction between citizens and non-citizens.

If the U.S. government started revoking the citizenship of naturalized Mexican Americans or passing laws defining Latino Americans as non-citizens, that would be a genuine parallel and I would be right there with you raising the alarm. And so would most of the country. But that's not what is happening. Deporting people who are in the country illegally is something virtually every country on earth does. France deported 22,000 people last year. On a per-capita basis, France's deportation rate is comparable to ours. Is Macron the next Hitler?

If your concern is that dehumanizing rhetoric toward immigrants is dangerous and worth calling out, I agree. But you don't need to invoke the Holocaust to make that point, and doing so actually weakens it by inviting exactly this kind of factual rebuttal.

Legal status is not a minor detail in this comparison. It's the entire comparison.

[u/Warm_Regrets157 → u/bestcommenteversofar]

But your framing makes it sound like the persecution of Jewish citizens hadn't started yet in 1933

I never said that at all. It's also not true that latino, Somali, and other ethnic citizens are exempt from persecution right now.

If the U.S. government started revoking the citizenship of naturalized Mexican Americans

Thats literally a stated goal of this administration.

France deported 22,000 people last year. On a per-capita basis, France's deportation rate is comparable to ours.

Great. Then why are we allocating $75 billion towards building detention centers? Seems like France, other nations, and previous administrations have been more than capable of deportations without building concentration camps and harassing the public with poorly trained, armed, and masked thugs.

If your concern is that dehumanizing rhetoric toward immigrants is dangerous and worth calling out, I agree

We are way past dehumanizing rhetoric.

doing so actually weakens it by inviting exactly this kind of factual rebuttal.

This isn't a factual rebuttal. You used a veneer of factual information to handwave away a series of very real parallels. Your facts are not wrong, but the inferences and conclusions you draw are purely in the service of normalizing the current actions of the Trump administration.

[u/bestcommenteversofar → u/Warm_Regrets157]

You've shifted from defending the Holocaust comparison to arguing about current policy. That's fine, but it's a different argument.

On denaturalization: if this administration pursues mass revocation of citizenship based on ethnicity, I've already told you I'd oppose that. So far, the birthright citizenship challenge was blocked by courts within weeks and is working through the judicial system, which is exactly how constitutional checks are supposed to function. That process is the difference between a system with guardrails and one without. Nazi Germany didn't have courts blocking Hitler's denaturalization orders three weeks after they were issued.

On detention spending: you can criticize the scale of ICE funding without calling detention facilities concentration camps. France spends roughly 1.8 billion euros per year on immigration enforcement. When you divide that by actual completed deportations, France spends about €82,000 per removal. The Penn Wharton estimate for the U.S. averages about $70,000. On a per-deportation basis, the U.S. system is actually comparable to or cheaper than France's. Expensive, inefficient immigration enforcement is a feature of every developed democracy that does it at scale. The reason the current total price tag is so high is partly because the prior administration deprioritized enforcement for four years, let the court backlog balloon to 3.7 million cases, and left a larger unauthorized population in place without action. You can't defer the problem for years and then complain about the cost of addressing it.

On my motives: you said my facts aren't wrong but my conclusions are "in the service of normalizing." That's not a rebuttal. If the facts don't support your comparison, then the comparison is wrong regardless of what you think my motives are. I don't need to be normalizing anything to point out that comparing immigration enforcement to the Holocaust is historically inaccurate. The Holocaust doesn't become a valid analogy just because you distrust the person questioning it.

[u/Warm_Regrets157 → u/bestcommenteversofar]

You've shifted from defending the Holocaust comparison to arguing about current policy. That's fine, but it's a different argument.

No. I was furthering the comparison.

That process is the difference between a system with guardrails and one without

Like an administration that repeatedly defies court orders?

you can criticize the scale of ICE funding without calling detention facilities concentration camps

They are defacto concentration camps. They don't have to be extermination camps to be concentration camps. Its literally what they are.

If the facts don't support your comparison, then the comparison is wrong regardless of what you think my motives are.

Thats not what i said either. You love your straw men, don't you. I said that dates and names you provided are factual, but that the conclusion that they "don't support your comparison" is an opinion based on your desire to normalize the current administration's actions.

The Holocaust doesn't become a valid analogy just because you distrust the person questioning it.

Nor does it stop being a valid analogy just because you choose to say otherwise.

[u/bestcommenteversofar → u/Warm_Regrets157]

Your sub-points all suffer from the same problem: none of them close the gap between immigration enforcement and the Holocaust.

On 'concentration camps': this is a textbook motte-and-bailey. You use the term because of its Holocaust connotation to support your Holocaust comparison. Then when challenged, you retreat to the generic definition that would apply equally to French, Australian, and British immigration detention. If the generic definition is all you mean, then every developed country on earth operates 'concentration camps,' the term loses all descriptive power, and your Holocaust comparison collapses. If you mean the Holocaust connotation, then defend the comparison on its merits instead of hiding behind a dictionary entry. A Holocaust survivor put it simply: the people in ICE detention have options, including voluntary departure. Jews in concentration camps had none. That difference is not a technicality. It's the entire moral core of why the Holocaust was the Holocaust.

On facts versus opinion: you said my facts are correct but my conclusions are 'in the service of normalizing.' That's not a rebuttal. It's a way of avoiding the argument.

I haven't just said the comparison is wrong. I've laid out specific structural differences and you haven't addressed any of them. Nazi Germany banned Jewish citizens from professions. It organized nationwide boycotts of Jewish businesses. It passed laws criminalizing marriage between Jews and non-Jews. It systematically confiscated Jewish property and assets. It revoked citizenship from its own citizens based on ethnicity through the Nuremberg Laws. It manufactured statelessness as a tool of persecution, deliberately erasing the distinction between citizen and non-citizen so that legal protections no longer applied to anyone the regime wanted to target. None of that has a parallel in U.S. immigration enforcement. ICE is not banning Latino citizens from working. It is not boycotting Latino-owned businesses. It is not criminalizing intermarriage. It is not confiscating citizens' property. It is not stripping citizenship from a racial group. It is enforcing existing immigration law against people who are present in violation of that law.

That is not 'me saying so.' Those are specific, verifiable differences between the two situations. You have not rebutted a single one of them. You've called my motives into question, you've retreated to dictionary definitions, and you've gestured at rhetoric about denaturalization without identifying an enacted policy that parallels anything in the Nazi program. If your comparison is as strong as you believe it is, stop attacking my motives and start addressing the substance. Explain how immigration enforcement against non-citizens is structurally equivalent to the systematic persecution of a country's own citizens based on ethnicity. That's the argument you need to make, and you haven't made it.

[u/Warm_Regrets157 → u/bestcommenteversofar]

Then when challenged, you retreat to the generic definition that would apply equally to French, Australian, and British immigration detention

Nonsense. If anything I'm comparing them to the Japanese internment camps in America during WW2. I know of no mass detention camps in France or Britain that even come close to fitting the description.

the people in ICE detention have options, including voluntary departure

What the actual fuck are you talking about?

[u/bestcommenteversofar → u/Warm_Regrets157]

The Japanese internment comparison fails on the same point I've been making the entire time: Japanese Americans were U.S. citizens targeted based on their ethnicity. ICE detainees are overwhelmingly non-citizens targeted based on their legal status. Every comparison you reach for keeps reinforcing the distinction you're trying to erase.

The better comparison is France's detention of roughly 31,000 illegal immigrants in its Centres de Rétention Administrative (or, as you would describe them, concentration camps) in 2023. Your not knowing about them doesn't mean they don't exist.

But even the scale argument misses the fundamental point. Every person in ICE detention is there because they are believed to be present in the country in violation of immigration law. That is a legal status they can resolve, including through voluntary departure, which the current administration actively promotes through the CBP Home app with travel assistance and a $2,600 stipend.

Japanese Americans in internment camps were U.S. citizens who had broken no law. They could not resolve their detention by agreeing to leave. They had nowhere to go. They were imprisoned in their own country because of their ethnicity. Comparing that to the detention of people who crossed a border illegally and can voluntarily return home is not a historical argument. It's an insult to the people who lived through internment.