Trying to get purchase on the Nazi Label without doing the hard work

There’s a reason why some have started referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as his “Gestapo.” We have seen parents torn from their children while taking them to school — and more than once. We have seen a 10-year-old girl who had cerebral palsy arrested by ICE right after she had emergency surgery. The examples could be multiplied.

So part of your support for the claim that ICE is like the Gestapo is that ICE arrested two persons who had court orders for deportation — both of which occurred in the Obama administration.

So what exactly is the Gestapo aspect: the fact that ICE carried out court orders issued under the Obama administration? So wouldn’t that make Obama’s courts Gestapo-esque?

Or is it the fact that kids were present during the arrest? To my knowledge it’s not standard practice for police to wait for when it’s most convenient for the person being arrested to arrest them. Do you think kids were ever present when police made arrests under the Obama administration?

(And while I think the third example, of the 10 year old girl, is bad behavior on the part of ICE we can point to similar behavior under Obama. “Yes, but it wasn’t part of this overall pattern” you’ll want to say. But as we look at the details of the pattern you’re trying to paint, as I did above, the pattern starts to fall apart. I could pick apart other parts of your pattern, like when you conflate Trump’s remarks on illegal immigrants with remarks on immigrants simpliciter, but I’m not interested in doing a point-by-point deconstruction right now.)

A broader problem I have with your argument is that the entire point of the Nazi comparison is how it links to some of the most evil acts in human history. It’s the most evil aspects of the Nazi regime that give the label it’s rhetorical “umph” — that does the heavy lifting in a moral condemnation. These are the aspects that distinguish it from any of the other countless instances of bad and sometimes wicked governments. To say “Yeah, it doesn’t link to those aspects but it does to these other more mundane aspects” is like trying to have your cake and eat it too when we could make similar links to, say, Obama. Sure, if you ignore the whole thing about gassing six million Jews, we can start tying the Nazi label to lots of people. But the only ones who will take you seriously at that point are already in your choir.