I was in New York when the Twin Towers came down on 9/11. I was working on the grounds of the United States Tennis Center in Queens. Two days earlier, the U.S. Open finals had been played, and Arthur Ashe Stadium was packed, along with another 5,000 people on the grounds. When reports came in of similar attacks at the Pentagon and a thwarted attempt to hit the White House, passengers helped bring down a plane in a Pennsylvania field.

The nation was in fear; no one knew if their city would be next. Rumors abounded in New York about bombs on the bridges and possible follow-up attacks. The airports were shut down, and cell phone towers were overloaded. I had my car in New York and was able to drive home two days later, holding my breath as I crossed from New York to New Jersey on the George Washington Bridge.

Two things were clear:

1. America had been caught off guard
2. There would be a significant response.

The September 11 attacks created a level of national trauma not seen since Pearl Harbor. Nearly 3,000 people were killed in a single morning. Americans feared additional attacks — especially biological, chemical, or infrastructure‑targeted ones. The government faced intense public pressure to “fix” intelligence failures and prevent another catastrophe. This fear shaped policy. Security became the overriding national priority.

Before DHS existed, homeland security functions were scattered across more than 40 federal agencies and roughly 2,000 separate Congressional appropriations accounts. This included: Customs, Immigration and Naturalization Service, Border Patrol, FEMA the Coast Guard, TSA (created separately in 2001) and various infrastructure and cybersecurity offices. The lack of coordination was widely seen as a major vulnerability.

DHS was conceived as a super‑agency — the largest federal reorganization since the creation of the Department of Defense in 1947. It officially opened its doors on March 1, 2003.

Its mission reflected the anxieties of the era:

1. Prevent terrorism
2. Secure borders
3. Manage immigration
4. Protect critical infrastructure
5. Coordinate emergency response

The department’s identity was shaped by the belief that the U.S. was entering a new era of permanent threat.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, public trust in government surged. Americans overwhelmingly supported stronger security, even at the cost of civil liberties. Immigration became increasingly framed as a national security issue. This environment made it politically feasible to merge 22 agencies and create a department with sweeping authority.

ICE did not exist before 2003. It was established when the federal government dismantled the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and merged its enforcement functions with components of the U.S. Customs Service. All of this happened during the massive post‑9/11 reorganization that also created the Department of Homeland Security.

Comparing modern U.S. immigration enforcement to the SS or the Gestapo is not about claiming equivalence. The SS and Gestapo were instruments of a genocidal dictatorship, responsible for industrialized mass murder on a scale that has no parallel in U.S. history. That distinction must remain clear.

But refusing to examine patterns of state power because the historical examples are uncomfortable is its own form of denial. States need not be identical to share structural logics. They do not need to commit genocide to create systems that dehumanize, terrorize, or disappear people through bureaucratic machinery. They do not need to be totalitarian to build agencies that operate with impunity, shielded from oversight, and empowered to define entire populations as threats.

The SS (Schutzstaffel) was a vast ideological and paramilitary organization. Under Heinrich Himmler, it became a state within a state. It enforced racial policy. ran concentration and extermination camps, conducted intelligence operations, and fielded its own military divisions.

The Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei) was the secret state police. Its mission was to detect and eliminate political enemies. It operated outside the law, empowered to arrest without warrant, detain without trial, and extract confessions through torture. It relied heavily on denunciations — ordinary citizens reporting neighbors, coworkers, and family members.

Both institutions were built on a racial ideology that defined entire populations as existential threats. Both used fear as a governance tool. Both operated with near-total impunity.

The Department of Homeland Security was created in the aftermath of 9/11, during a moment of national trauma and fear. Its mandate was broad, its powers expansive, and its oversight fragmented. Within DHS, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) emerged as a hybrid agency: part police force, part intelligence service, part detention bureaucracy.

The logic was clear: immigrants — especially those from Muslim-majority countries and the Global South — were recast as potential threats.

This shift was not merely rhetorical. It reshaped the lived experience of millions of people. Communities that had long existed in the shadows suddenly found themselves under a new kind of scrutiny, including workplace raids, home raids, surveillance partnerships with local police, data-sharing with federal agencies, and detention centers expanding across the country. Immigrants and some American citizens were no longer neighbors, workers, or families. They were potential risks.

The SS and Gestapo

The machinery of Nazi repression was not only violent — it was bureaucratic.

1. Arrests were documented.
2. Files were kept.
3. Orders were typed.
4. Deportations were scheduled.
5. Camps were administered through paperwork.

The banality of the process masked the brutality of the outcome.

ICE and DHS

ICE operates through a similar bureaucratic logic, though without the genocidal intent.

1. Detainers
2. Notices to appear
3. Administrative warrants
4. Deportation orders
5. Case files
6. Data-sharing agreements

Each document is mundane. Each step is procedural. But for the people caught in the system, the paperwork becomes a weapon. The chaos can only be seen as intentional. Detainees are immediately moved to another location and quickly deported. Family members aren’t notified; those who are scooped up cannot be found. Even having documentation can be meaningless if they choose not to believe you.

Bureaucracy creates distance. It allows individuals within the system to say, “I’m just doing my job,” even as families are separated, children detained, and lives upended.

This is not equivalence. It is a recognition that bureaucracy can normalize cruelty, regardless of ideology.

The Gestapo was feared not because it was large — it wasn’t — but because it turned society into an extension of the state.

1. Neighbors reported neighbors.
2. Coworkers reported coworkers.
3. Family members reported family members.

Denunciations were the lifeblood of the system.

ICE relies on a similar dynamic, though within a democratic framework:

1. Tip lines
2. Workplace informants
3. Data-sharing with local police
4. Community members reporting “suspicious” people
5. Landlords calling ICE on tenants
6. Employers calling ICE on workers who demand fair wages

Survivors describe living in a state of constant vigilance. Any knock on the door could be a raid. Any traffic stop may result in detention. Any argument with a neighbor could result in a call to ICE.

Fear becomes self-policing. Communities shrink their own movements to avoid detection. Parents avoid hospitals. Workers avoid reporting wage theft. Victims avoid reporting crimes. The logic is not identical to the Gestapo’s, but the effect — fear as a tool of governance — is hauntingly familiar.

Nazi enforcement was explicitly racial. Jews, Roma, disabled people, and others were targeted not for what they did, but for who they were.

ICE enforcement is officially race-neutral, but in practice deeply racialized.

1. Black immigrants are disproportionately detained and deported.
2. Hispanic communities are targeted through workplace raids and neighborhood sweeps.
3. Muslim immigrants face heightened surveillance.
4. Immigration detention centers disproportionately hold people from the Global South.

The SS ran a system of concentration and extermination camps designed for forced labor, torture, and genocide. Nothing in modern U.S. policy approaches this scale or intent.

In America, immigration detention centers are not concentration camps in the historical sense. But they do share certain structural features with early forms of mass detention:

1. Indefinite confinement
2. Overcrowding
3. Inadequate medical care
4. Family separation
5. Psychological trauma
6. Deaths in custody
7. Lack of due process

Survivors describe conditions that are dehumanizing:

1. The lights are on 24 hours a day
2. Freezing temperatures
3. Spoiled food
4. Lack of medical attention
5. Verbal abuse
6. Isolation

Mass detention systems, regardless of ideology, rely on dehumanization to function. With the SS and Gestapo, fear was an explicit policy. Terror was the point. For ICE and DHS, fear is not the stated goal but the predictable outcome. Both utilized

1. Raids at dawn
2. Children taken from parents
3. Detention without trial
4. Deportations without warning
5. Surveillance partnerships with local police

Many people describe living in a state of chronic anxiety. They plan their days around avoiding risk. They avoid public spaces. They avoid reporting crimes. They avoid hospitals, schools, and government buildings. Fear becomes a form of social control. It shapes behavior. It limits freedom. It isolates communities. The state need not intend terror for terror to result.

The SS and Gestapo operated outside the law. There was no oversight, no accountability, no recourse. ICE operates within a legal framework, but one with significant gaps:

Internal investigations, when they exist, rarely lead to discipline. The ICE officer who shot Renee Good won’t even be investigated by the department typically tasked with such investigations. The federal government is blocking the State of Minnesota agencies from thoroughly investigating Good’s death.

Complaints are ignored or dismissed; private contractors run detention centers with minimal oversight; local jurisdictions have limited power to intervene; courts defer to executive authority in immigration matters; and complaints disappear into the void. Officers act with impunity because they know the system protects them. Vice President J.D. Vance stated that ICE officers have “absolute immunity,” which isn’t the law but true in practice.

The SS and Gestapo represent the extreme end of what state power can become when fused with racial ideology and unchecked authority. ICE and DHS are not equivalent. But they operate within a lineage of state practices that deserve scrutiny, especially when they disproportionately harm marginalized communities.

The question is whether we are willing to examine how democratic societies, too, can build systems that dehumanize, detain, and disappear people through the quiet machinery of bureaucracy. They say history repeats itself. ICE and DHS aren’t the SS and Gestapo, but they might be cousins.

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This post was previously published on William Spivey’s blog.

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