America’s ICE practices echo the SA’s early tactics — and Jews should recognize the warning signs

By now, “Nazi” comparisons have become so cheap in American life that many readers understandably recoil the moment one appears. Jews, in particular, have good reason to guard against rhetorical inflation that trivializes the Shoah.

But there is another danger: refusing to see patterns in the name of avoiding exaggeration. History does not repeat in carbon copies. It rhymes through methods, incentives, and the steady normalization of state power against disfavored groups. And that is where today’s immigration enforcement — especially some practices associated with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — bears an unsettling resemblance to the early role played by the SA (Sturmabteilung) in 1930s Germany.

Let me be precise about the claim.

This is not an argument that ICE agents are Nazis, or that the United States is Nazi Germany, or that immigration enforcement is a prelude to genocide. Intent and outcome matter, and they differ profoundly. The point is narrower and, in some ways, more practical: some ICE practices resemble early-stage authoritarian policing tactics used by groups like the SA — not in ideology, but in how state power is normalized against marginalized populations.

For Jews who are heirs to a history of state-sponsored scapegoating, that distinction should not be a comfort. It should be a prompt to pay attention.

The SA was a mass paramilitary organization. It thrived on visibility and fear. It made a political project feel inevitable by enforcing “order” in public — through intimidation, sudden arrests, street-level violence, and the steady message that certain people did not truly belong.

The key mechanism was not a single atrocity. It........

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