Gestapo tactics: Trump’s deportation war not about “fighting antisemitism”

Donald Trump wants the world to believe that fascist thugs kidnapping people in broad daylight is simply a necessary step to protect the poor, suffering Jewish community from an onslaught of antisemitism. 

According to the president, the key to winning the battle against antisemitism is to seize and deport pro-Palestine activists, students, professors, and labor organizers. Whether it was Mahmoud Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk, Alfredo Juarez, Rasha Alawieh, Yunseo Chung, or one of the other people facing abduction and deportation by Trump’s regime, the fact pattern was roughly the same. 

Kidnapping workers and activists

Enter a worker, student, or activist going about their lives. Some are on their way to dinner with friends. Some are on their way to work. Some are arriving home along with their pregnant spouses. Now, enter a squad of jack-booted Gestapo throwback agents from the Department of Homeland Security. Before too long, the person is far from their loved ones in a hellhole of a federal detention center. 

Donald Trump wants the Jewish community, and really the entire working class, to believe that they should accept the kidnapping and concentration of their neighbors because it is necessary to defeat antisemitism. How ironic, a fascist demagogue would attempt to use the trauma of the Holocaust to justify the usage of the exact same tactics from the holocaust against oppressed communities and progressive organizers.

All this comes from the same man who insisted that there were “good people on both sides” when hundreds of violent neo-Nazis marched on Charlottesville, Virginia. The Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville saw white polo-wearing Nazis marching around chanting “the Jews will not replace us.” The rally also led to the murder of DSA activist Heather Heyer. Good people on both sides, he says. 

Donald Trump did not deport a single neo-Nazi who marched on Charlottesville. Donald Trump did not deport the cohorts of Robert Bowers, the fascist organizer who murdered 11 Jewish people in cold blood at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Donald Trump did not deport any of the vicious anti-Semites who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. In fact, Trump pardoned all of them. 

A new red scare

No Jewish person should be fooled by these deportations as anything but a new attack on the working class and anti-imperialist organizing during a new red scare. 

Bring them home! End the deportations! Tear down the prisons! 

Lev Koufax is an anti-Zionist Jewish activist.