When discussing state policies toward unwanted or marginalised groups, history provides sobering lessons about how governments define, target and remove communities deemed “alien” or “undesirable”. While Donald Trump’s immigration policies in the United States and Adolf Hitler’s early anti-Jewish measures in Germany emerged from vastly different historical, cultural and moral contexts, there are significant structural parallels in the emphasis on surveillance, policing and forced removal—before more radical “solutions” were considered.
In Trump-era America, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) has become the symbol of a hard-line immigration policy. It is tasked with locating, detaining and deporting millions of undocumented immigrants, often in high-profile raids that carry heavy symbolic weight.
In 1930s Germany, long before the machinery of extermination was set in motion, Hitler’s government sought to isolate Jews from the rest of society through registration, surveillance and restrictive laws. The Gestapo, along with local police, became the enforcement arms, identifying and monitoring Jews in preparation for removal from German life.
Both cases reveal the state’s use of bureaucratic enforcement tools to target populations based on identity rather than criminal acts.
Trump frequently speaks of deportation as the central mechanism of immigration policy; an effort to purge the country of those defined as outsiders. Under his administration, deportations have been ramped up and family separations at the border have created an atmosphere of fear and dehumanisation.
In Nazi Germany during the pre-concentration camp years (roughly 1933–1939), deportation was also the central strategy. The government sought to pressure Jews into leaving the country voluntarily through harassment, boycotts, job restrictions and violence (most notoriously, Kristallnacht in 1938). For those who did not leave, forced deportations soon followed, sending Jewish populations to neighboring countries already straining under refugee crises. Deportation, not mass murder, was initially envisioned as the “final” solution to the so-called Jewish Question.
Trump consistently frames undocumented immigrants as threats (criminals, rapists or invaders) whose presence weakens the United States. This narrative justifies the mobilisation of ICE and the spectacle of raids and deportations.
Hitler’s rhetoric against Jews was even more virulent, but structurally similar: Jews were depicted as parasites, criminals and corrupting influences undermining Germany’s purity and strength. This language of threat transformed entire communities into legitimate targets of state power, removing the distinction between individuals and groups.
Here lies the most important historical lesson. Hitler’s policies of exclusion and deportation created the bureaucratic and psychological groundwork for the later leap into genocide. Once a state apparatus is built to monitor, round up and expel groups of people defined by ethnicity, religion or nationality, the escalation from deportation to harsher measures becomes frighteningly possible.
While Trump’s immigration policies stop firmly at deportation, the resonance with Nazi Germany’s earlier stages should not be dismissed. Both show how a government can normalise the identification, policing and removal of entire populations under the banner of law and order.
The comparison does not seek to equate Trump with Hitler or America with Nazi Germany, but it underlines how states build incremental systems of exclusion. Deportation, in both cases, was presented as a rational, administrative solution to a problem framed as existential. History demonstrates how quickly such solutions can evolve into something darker when fear, prejudice and power converge unchecked.
