The Trump administration recently released the first of its weekly compilations that are intended to highlight immigrant perpetrators of crime within America’s sanctuary series. This legislation has been seen by many as identical to the political tactics of Nazi Germany; the subtle distinction being that the Nazis focused on the criminality of Jewish Germans as it slowly amassed power in the years preceding WW II.
ICE’s “Declined Detained Outcome Report” is one of the many results of Trump’s executive orders. The document includes offenses like domestic violence, drug possession and DUIs, while also including a notation of the criminal offender’s original country. Notably, many of the immigrants listed in this first DDOR have yet to be convicted.
While “Nazi” has often been the go-to term for unpopular political figures, releasing a regular periodical of criminal foreigners is an exact mirror of Hitler’s methodology. “Der Sturmer,” a Nazi newspaper, whose name translates as “The Striker” and may have inspired the nationalist website Stormfront.org, featured a regular segment known as the “Letter Box.” Much like the DDOR, the Letter Box was used to list crimes perpetrated by the Jewish people. The Letter Box section was started by Hitler’s minions in response to the lacking headcount of Germans who participated in an anti-Semitic boycott of Jewish goods and services in April of 1933.
Comparisons to Hitler and Trump don’t stop at just his list of immigrant criminals; hatred against Mexicans and Muslims was a notable element of his presidential campaigning. Trump started his campaign by remarking that most Mexican immigrants were murderers and rapists, spitting in the face of statistics indicating how an undocumented immigrants is far less likely to commit a crime than an American citizen.
The DDOR releases are mostly seen as a way for Trump to punish sanctuary cities for failing to kowtow to his anti-immigrant ideology. Since being sworn in as President of the United States, Trump has had nothing but hatred and vitriol for sanctuary cities, regarding them as defiant of everything he stands for. Within one week of serving as president, Trump signed an executive order to enable the withholding of federal funding to sanctuary cities even when those cities tend to work with federal law enforcement; they just do not ask about a person’s immigration status upon being arrested for a crime nor do they seek to deport at the local level.
Barry Friedman, a scholar of Constitutional law, has remarked that Tenth Amendment means that the federal level of government cannot demand state and local governments do their jobs. Beyond the tenets of the Tenth Amendment, Friedman also cited the precedent set by Printz v. United States.
Thomas Homan, current director of ICE, remarked that their efforts become undermined when law enforcement fails to honor immigration agents or to release offenders of serious crimes.
Critics of President Trump, like Illinois’ Representative Luis V. Gutiérrez have said that this will only bring more difficulty to law enforcement. Gutiérrez has stated that Trump’s power is built on a foundation of lies, including the one that all immigrants are killers and/or rapists. He added that the reality of the situation is that most cities’ police forces have a far more difficult keeping the peace when they also work toward the deportation of illegal immigrants.