Enter the Hestafo and language resistance

                                   ICE and Hestafo arrest tracker here [updated regularly]

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Donald Trump and Republicans have an uncanny ability to weaponize language. 

In his inaugural address, Trump declared he would change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, and the Alaskan mountain peak Denali to Mount McKinley. When he’d pledged it on the campaign trail, the response was to find it ludicrous; hubris run amok. 

Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/
The Daily Beast/Getty/Reuters [Click on photo to read story]

Within hours of taking office, Trump issued an executive action, officially doing what he proclaimed. The Interior Department followed suit. Still seemed ludicrous. Government overreaching by an imperialist tyrant stumbling to get his footing. 

The same week, the Associated Press, the leading international wire service, updated its stylebook standards to use Mount McKinley (Denali is gone). It is keeping Gulf of Mexico while acknowledging Trump’s designation of Gulf of America. [A few weeks later, the White House retaliated against the AP by barring its reporters from the Oval Office and demanding it do better with the name.]

Language matters and Trump and Republicans know how to throw a boomerang. If you pay closer attention, you’ll notice that the Democratic Party is often called the Democrat Party, and not just by

Republicans. The title, used pejoratively since the 1940s, avoids implying that the Democrats are the only true adherents of democracy, as the New York Times pointed out in 1984. 

 “Woke,” “Equity,” “even “Black Lives Matter” all started as positive references that Republicans caught and returned as damaged goods over time. 

As the Trump administration flexes its muscle, the immigrant landscape has become the devil’s in the detail language workshop. I write this coincidentally the week of the 80th anniversary of the Jan. 1945, liberation of Auschwitz, the complex of Nazi concentration camps in occupied Poland where my maternal grandparents were slaughtered. The radio story that awakened me spoke of the Nazi weltanshauung (world view) as dependent on the “deliberate dehumanization” of people, Jews in particular. 

I try to disassociate the histrionics of history from contemporary events. Any words or language associated with Nazism ring as alarmist hyperbole. I should know better. I risk it because the parallels are disturbingly compelling. 

In Germany before World War II, the Nazi government focused on antisemitic policies and actions intended to get Jews to leave voluntarily or be deported. If countries wouldn’t accept them, Jews were forced into ghettos to segregate and contain them. Germany was initially reluctant to deport Jews until the war was over because of a fear of resistance from the German population, according to the Wiener Holocaust Library in London. By the autumn of 1941, the deportations picked up, with countries in the Third Reich outside Germany the preferred destinations. The Library’s Holocaust Explained site characterizes the deportations as “improvised and haphazard.” Almost all nations, including the United States refused to admit deportees or refugees. 

In her book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Philosopher Hannah Arendt described Jewish refugees’ predicament in this way: “[The refugees] were welcomed nowhere and could be assimilated nowhere. Once they had left their homeland they remained homeless, once they had left their state they remained stateless; once they had been deprived of their human rights they were rightless, the scum of the earth.” 

Being a Nazi was not ignoble for Germany in 1932, at least not for the plurality of German voters in 1932 who voted Nazi, thereby creating enough of a mandate for President Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as governing Chancellor. Being MAGA is not ignoble for America in 2024-5, at least not for the majority 77 million who voted for Trump, thereby creating enough of a mandate for him to follow through on his pledge of “mass deportations.” 

The Jews of Nazi Germany are the immigrants of MAGA America. 

Trump laid the foundation for the “deliberate dehumanization” of immigrants at the outset of his first term, as detailed in NBC News’ retrospective - “From 'rapists' to 'eating the pets': Trump has long used degrading language toward immigrants” – on Sept. 19, 2024. 

Typically the wedge terms in the news media and among pundits and politicians of both parties have been “undocumented immigration” and “illegal immigrants,” though the Haitians at the center of the Springfield, Ohio pet-eating propaganda were neither undocumented nor illegal. Trump got ahead of the language banter. 

“The Democrats say, ‘Please don’t call them animals. They’re humans.’ I said, ‘No, they’re not humans, they’re not humans. They’re animals.’” 

Non-existent animals like unicorns. No matter, though language does.

 

The Trump administration and Republicans have seized control of the language high ground again with the issuance on day 1 of the Executive Order Protecting the American People from Invasion and nine days later with the signing of the Laken Riley Act, the first bill of Trump's second term to become law. Taken together, they are being framed as requiring the detention of unauthorized immigrants accused of burglary, theft, larceny, or shoplifting.

A key in the language distortions is that neither the Executive Order nor the Laken Riley Act applies only to unauthorized immigrants. Both apply to all aliens. Aliens include illegal immigrants. They also include green card holders (lawful permanent residents), asylum seekers, refugees, even some students on F1 visas. That can matter in nefarious and intended ways.  

Trump’s Executive Order underscores multiple times that pursuant to part VII of subchapter II of chapter 12 of title 8, United States Code, all aliens 14 years of age and over must register with the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) or the U.S. Department of State within 30 days of entry into the US. They are to be fingerprinted when registered. 

It also lays out that every alien, eighteen years of age and over, shall at all times carry with him and have in his personal possession any certificate of alien registration or alien registration receipt card issued to him. Any alien who fails to comply shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and shall upon conviction for each offense be fined not to exceed $100 or be imprisoned not more than thirty days, or both. 

Violation of either provision is “a civil and criminal enforcement priority.” 

As federal law enforcement officials roll out raids this week in and around Chicago and many other places, I presented a likely scenario to an array of immigrant services offices: It appears that in a raid, the crimes that ICE or a deputized agents or cooperating law enforcement are to consider are if anyone arrested in a raid has ever committed a crime, including shoplifting (at any time in any country), even if not prosecuted or convicted for it, also includes failure to register as an alien or failure to carry a registration card, which is a civil and criminal enforcement priority. 

With detentions being mandatory, if there is a raid, let’s say of a workplace or county jail or on the streets anywhere in the US, and 100 people are detained in the raid, if I were ICE or deputized agents or cooperating law enforcement, wouldn’t I detain everyone temporarily to determine if they’ve ever been arrested for burglary, theft, larceny, shoplifting or failing to have an alien registration card on their person? That includes green card holders, asylum seekers, and refugees. I think that means the detention can last as long as it takes within reason to make that determination. 

Is that possibly right? I heard back from six contacts in the immigrant services community. None is sure. All are alarmed. All are aware that for the foreseeable future, the lives of the immigrants they counsel have changed. There’s will be lives in hiding, trusting few people. 

If so, I think it’s foreboding. It’s also consistent with the Trump administration’s goals, which are to deliberately dehumanize immigrants to help drive home that anyone who as a non-citizen is deportable and anyone who has committed any crime or infraction of certain immigration rules should not be allowed to stay in the U.S. 

Millions of Americans support mass deportations, according to a recent poll that digs deeper into the specifics of who and how. 

Now that Americans can watch the Trump deportations already in progress, with Dr. Phil narrating, the Trump administration shouldn’t have a problem recruiting eager, able-bodied law enforcement agents to assist ICE. 

In the Executive Order, Trump established the Homeland Security Task Forces (HSTFs) in all states nationwide. Among the federal agencies deputized so far are Department of Justice law enforcement officials, U.S. Marshals, agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Already in place is the 287(g) Program, which allows ICE, through the delegation of specified immigration officer duties, to enhance collaboration with state and local law enforcement partners to protect the homeland through the arrest and removal of aliens who undermine the safety of our nation’s communities and the integrity of U.S. immigration laws. There’s also members of the Sheriff’s Constitutional movement, whose ideology is that the county – not state or federal governments – should control all land within its borders, and the county sheriff should be the ultimate law enforcement authority in the U.S. They’re locked and loaded, as are many of the nearly 1,600 people granted clemency from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol. 

The Trump administration has drawn the lines. Homeland Security has issued a directive allowing ICE and other law enforcement to enter schools and churches to arrest aliens. Sanctuary locations - many metropolitan cities and counties like Chicago, Atlanta, Baltimore, New York, New Orleans - are on notice that they are to cooperate with ICE and other law enforcement…or else. 

The name “Homeland Security Task Forces” or the acronym HSTFs is unwieldy. No more unwieldy than the Geheime Staatspolizei, which was created in 1933 to combine various agencies into one organization. Not a problem. The name was shortened. To Gestapo. 

Why not shorten the Homeland Security Task Forces? To Hestafo. (Gestapo's brother-in-law). Language matters and it works for me.

ICE and Hestafo arrest tracker here [updated regularly]

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Jack Doppelt is Emeritus Professor of Journalism, Medill School, Northwestern University, co-author of Nonvoters: America’s No-Shows, founder/former publisher of Immigrant Connect, and co-founder/publisher of Lines n' Lyrix