The Left’s Reductio ad Hitlerum Obsession with ICE Raids

American  Thinker 

Whenever the Trump administration ramps up immigration enforcement, it is only a matter of time before some lunatic, anti-borders politician decides that the U.S. has suddenly found itself an oompah band and is three beer steins away from becoming Nazi Germany.

Just in the last few months, Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker accused the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) of engaging in “Nazi” tactics and “Gestapo-style abductions;” and former Minnesota governor Tim Walz referred to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as “Donald Trump’s modern Gestapo.”

Meanwhile, during President Trump’s first term, Congressional Representative  Alexandria Ocasio Cortez regularly compared ICE detention centers to “concentration camps.”

This tactic is fairly common among historically illiterate buffoons like Pritzker, Walz and Ocasio Cortez.

In fact, it’s so common it actually has a name: the reductio ad Hitlerum – a term coined by Leo Strauss, a German-Jewish professor of political science at the University of Chicago.

The reductio ad Hitlerum is a species of logical fallacy, known as a “fallacy of irrelevance” wherein the horrors of the Nazi genocide are invoked in an attempt to establish guilt by association and foreclose reasonable debate.

It works something like this: The Gestapo arrested innocent Jews in targeted raids. Therefore, because ICE uses targeted raids to apprehend immigration law breakers, ICE’s motives must be the same as those of the Gestapo.

Needless to say, the mere fact that Subject A appears to share one or more superficial attributes with the indisputably wicked Subject B does not, ipso facto, mean that Subject A is also indubitably vile.

And, according to Suffolk University School of Law professor Gabriel H. Teninbaum, drawing such an inference makes about as much sense as concluding that, “Hitler was a vegetarian, as was Gandhi. Therefore, Gandhi, like Hitler, was evil.”

But the so-called “Nazi card” relies on political partisans to abandon logic in favor of emotion. The party invoking the Nazi label is asking his supporters to abandon reasoned analysis and to instead focus on their personal disagreement with whatever is being condemned.

In essence, it is a way of saying, “It doesn’t matter whether X is objectively good, bad or indifferent. It upsets us, therefore we have deemed it evil.”

Inevitably, however, the party playing the Nazi card fails to understand how the Third Reich actually worked.

The security organs of the Nazi party, the Gestapo, the Schupo, the SS and the SD existed solely to inflict terror upon the enemies of the Third Reich, including dissidents, Jews, the Roma, homosexuals and the physically and mentally disabled.

Rather than engaging in anything modern observers would recognize as law enforcement, the Gestapo and its counterparts ruthlessly set about exterminating their targets.

At the conclusion of World War II, 13 million entirely innocent Jews, Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, people with disabilities, Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and homosexuals lay dead at the hands of the Gestapo and other units like it.

The operations in which ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) are currently engaged bear absolutely no resemblance to the actions of the Gestapo and its counterpart agencies.

Far from being engaged in “Gestapo-style abductions” predicated upon dictatorial fiat, DHS is enforcing longstanding laws that were duly enacted by a popularly elected legislature. And those laws are being enforced under the supervision of an independent judiciary and a free press that has the unfettered ability to criticize any actions taken by DHS.

Moreover, unless one is a clinical idiot, there is a distinct and obvious difference between a Jew condemned to death in Dachau and a Honduran illegal alien who is returned to his life as a taxi driver or grocer in Tegucigalpa.

In the Third Reich, the German government rounded up its own citizens and, without due process, condemned them to death.

In the United States today, foreign nationals, whose very presence here is a violation of the law, are temporarily detained in humane conditions, while they are given a hearing before an immigration judge, prior to being returned home at the expense of U.S. taxpayers.

Annihilation at Auschwitz and repatriation to Rio de Janeiro are not, in any way, comparable actions.

And that brings us to the fundamental problem with the playing the Nazi card. It is a scoundrel’s last refuge. A party to an argument typically resorts to the reductio ad Hitlerum when that party is unable to support its arguments with facts and logic.

Anti-borders immigration policies that prioritize the interests of illegal aliens over American citizens are becoming increasingly unpopular on their own merits. Such policies, and those who advocate for them, are even less popular when the best argument for them is to accuse anyone who thinks differently of being a Nazi.

The last presidential election showed that Americans want practical, fair solutions that respect national sovereignty and the rule of law. Continuing to dismiss these concerns with inflammatory rhetoric only deepens division and further undermines the case for less immigration enforcement.