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In Chicago, politicians are comparing ICE to the Gestapo — are they right?
On Halloween afternoon in Evanston, Illinois— just a couple miles north of my home — masked, armed men went on a rampage: They deliberately caused a fender-bender accident, shoved women to the ground, repeatedly punched a young man in the head and dragged him across the pavement, and pointed pistols at and pepper-sprayed passersby. These masked men were agents of the United States Customs and Border Protection.
“As soon as I walked up,” local resident Jennifer Moriarty recalled in an online interview, “an agent grabbed me by my neck and threw me back and threw me to the ground and was on top of me.”
As horrifying as the assault was, it had sadly become the norm for our community: For the previous two months, the greater Chicago area was the target of a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) crackdown on immigrants and, increasingly, those who came forward to protect their immigrant neighbors.
The following day, Daniel Biss, Evanston’s mayor, spoke to hundreds who gathered to protest the federal government’s campaign. “We in Evanston are on fire,” Biss said. “We know what is being done to our people… We know the violence and the emergency and the authoritarian nightmare that is coming at us.”
He then evoked the memory of his grandmother, who as a young woman in Europe in 1940 had not comprehended the dangers she faced. “By the time she knew the truth,” said Biss, “it was too late to protect herself, and she and her siblings and her parents were put on a cattle car, and the day they got off that cattle car was the last day her parents lived.”
The analogy is an extraordinary one, but Biss is not alone in evoking the specter of the Holocaust to describe the daily reality here — a reality that was subsequently visited upon Charlotte, North Carolina and is planned for New Orleans next. Several members of Chicago’s city council called out “the Gestapo tactics” of the twin DHS agencies, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). And as far back as February, JB Pritzker — the first Jewish governor of Illinois — publicly decried the Trump administration’s “authoritarian playbook,” warning “It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic. All I’m saying is when the five-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.”
The very name of the DHS campaign — “Operation Midway Blitz” — served to conjure up the WWII bombing of London. And the daily itinerary of its agents called to mind aspects of 1930s Germany. Every morning, federal agents departed their local headquarters in the near-west suburb of Broadview in unmarked SUVs, wearing gator-style face-coverings and carrying semi-automatic weapons.
They cruised the streets of a rotating group of targeted neighborhoods or suburbs, looking for dark-skinned workers whom they deemed would be easy pickings: tamale vendors, landscape workers, day laborers at Home Depot, drivers in the ride-share lot at O’Hare. They made only cursory efforts to determine whether their targets were citizens, legal residents, or undocumented individuals. The DHS talking point that agents are only seizing the “worst of the worst” criminals is easily refuted by the data: When the Trump administration finally released names of people they arrested in the Chicago operation, 598 of the 614 had no criminal record at all.
The DHS arrestees were manhandled and taken to Broadview, where they were held in gruesome conditions and pressured to sign self-deportation agreements. Many detainees are so fearful of indefinitely staying at Broadview — or a similarly cruel detention facility — that they sign. They often leave behind families and shattered lives.
The federal agents made a point of flouting the law, as if celebrating their indifference to anything other than their own cruel mission. If an immigrant refused to leave their car, agents routinely smashed the window, dragged the person from the vehicle, and sped off, leaving their victim’s car unattended and unsecured. When agents found themselves surrounded by residents calling attention to their presence, they brandished guns, hurled epithets, fired pepper bombs, and lobbed teargas canisters.
An investigation by Block Club Chicago found that federal agents employed tear gas and other chemical weapons 49 times in the Chicago area from Oct. 3 through Nov. 8. Even an admonishment from U.S. Circuit Court Judge Sara Ellis did not stop them; after her temporary restraining order, federal agents used chemical weapons at least four more times.
Ellis’s 233-page opinion in the use-of-force case, released on Thursday, is a compendium of immigration enforcement run amok. With access to aerial, bodycam, and cell phone footage, along with extensive testimony, the court found a consistent pattern of violence from government operatives, and an equally consistent pattern of lying about that violence from their superiors. In determining whether the government had violated the plaintiffs’ Fourth Amendment rights, Judge Ellis noted that “repeatedly shooting pepper balls or pepper spray at clergy members shocks the conscience… Tear gassing expectant mothers, children, and babies shocks the conscience… Tackling someone dressed in a duck costume to the ground and leaving him with a traumatic brain injury, and then refusing to provide any explanation for the action, shocks the conscience.”
When assessing the government’s truthfulness, Ellis wrote that “[CBP Commander Gregory] Bovino appeared evasive over the three days of his deposition, either providing ‘cute’ responses to Plaintiffs’ counsel’s questions or outright lying.”
The use of force, along with the targeting of individuals based on their ethnic identity and the government mandate to deport one million immigrants per year, brings to mind for me the Polenaktion, the mass arrest and deportation of 17,000 Polish Jews from Germany in 1938. At the same time, I ask myself, are such equivalences accurate and helpful? Holocaust scholar Daniel H. Magilow, in an astute discussion of ICE/Gestapo comparisons, reminds us that while “analogies can be useful for clarifying complex ideas… they risk oversimplifying and trivializing history.”
For my parents, who came of age as Brooklyn Jews as the Nazis were coming to power in Europe, the question had hovered over their lives: “Could it happen here?” After two months of brutal and lawless behavior, I was asking, “Is it happening here? Now?”
So I called my nonagenarian parents to ask them what they thought. My dad said Operation Midway Blitz did remind him of “Gestapo tactics, a Gestapo presence, the Gestapo’s impact on society.” My mom added a note of caution: “We should be careful talking about them like all individuals in ICE are the same. It takes a while to answer the question ‘who are they,” how Gestapo-ish all the people in ICE are.”
Who are the officers of ICE and CBP? It is a question that Illinois Senator Dick Durbin addressed in a letter to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. Durbin pointed to loosened standards for ICE hiring and training, and to recruiting advertisements — targeted to white applicants — urging them to join up to “defend your culture.” (A recent article in Haaretz also raised alarms that imagery on DHS’s social media used antisemitic dog whistles and was intended to appeal to neo-Nazis.) Durbin asked Noem whether there was any vetting to check if applicants were January 6 rioters or members of white nationalist groups and, if so, whether those extremists were getting hired.
Such concerns go back many years. A ProPublica investigation in 2019 uncovered a secret Facebook group for current and former CBP personnel that revealed “a pervasive culture of cruelty aimed at immigrants.” In 2022, twenty-seven civil rights organizations wrote the Justice Department to warn that CBP was collaborating with white supremacist paramilitary groups on the U.S. southern border.
Whether one accepts the “Gestapo” analogy or not, it is clear that Chicago residents are heeding the dire warnings coming from politicians and activists alike. When the “five-alarm fire” commenced, the response of thousands of residents was rapid and well-organized. Secure chat groups were launched; ICE-watch trainings were at capacity. In my neighborhood and beyond, during the worst days of the crackdown, one could see on every street-corner people on patrol with orange whistles around their necks, ready to document and peacefully confront the armed federal incursion.
During the Halloween incident in Evanston, CBP agents stuffed three people — including Jennifer Moriarty — in an SUV. They then drove erratically around Evanston and Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood, attempting to goad other drivers into more traffic accidents. But wherever they went, the orange whistles were sounding. “When I was on the ground and when I was in the car,” Moriarty recalled, “looking out at all the people, all the faces of the community members… I never felt I was doing anything wrong. And all those people were also there, doing all the right things, as well.”
My experience when I joined a local patrol was the same as Moriarty’s. I had a sense of pride and wonder that so many neighbors were united in non-violent opposition to racist attacks. Whether DHS agents were akin to the Gestapo, in the end, did not matter to me. What mattered was that there was definitely a Resistance.
The post In Chicago, politicians are comparing ICE to the Gestapo — are they right? appeared first on The Forward.
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If Iran Won’t Deal, Trump Must Make the Cost of Refusal Unbearable
A US Navy sailor signals an F/A-18E Super Hornet on the flight deck of the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln in support of the Operation Epic Fury attack on Iran at an undisclosed location, March 4, 2026. Photo: US Navy/Handout via REUTERS
The ceasefire with Iran is expiring. The talks collapsed after 21 hours in Islamabad. Iran has closed the Strait of Hormuz. Trump himself, speaking aboard Air Force One, put the choice plainly: “Maybe I won’t extend [the ceasefire]. So you have a blockade, and unfortunately, we’ll have to start dropping bombs again.”
That is the right instinct. But dropping bombs alone is not a strategy. It is a continuation of what has not worked. The question before the administration is not whether to apply pressure, but what kind of pressure actually changes Iran’s calculus. The answer requires being honest about what the war has so far failed to accomplish, and clear about what must follow.
Start with what the strikes achieved and what they did not. The United States and Israel killed Iran’s supreme leader, wiped out much of its senior military command, and damaged its nuclear facilities. These were historic accomplishments. But US intelligence assessments say Iran’s regime likely will remain in place for now, weakened but more hardline, with the Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) exerting greater control. As one analyst put it: “When President Trump says he has changed the regime in Iran, he’s right in one sense: he’s changed it to a much more radicalized regime.” The war shifted who holds power in Tehran, but it did not shift what that power wants.
The IRGC, which now runs Iran more openly than at any point since 1979, looks at the nuclear question through the lens of survival. Analysts say the IRGC will be looking toward the example of North Korea, noting that the country has not been subject to attacks precisely because it possesses a nuclear deterrent. Former Supreme Leader Khamenei’s fatwa banning a nuclear bomb died with him, and for any military whose conventional deterrence has been degraded, the ultimate deterrent is now “a very attractive prospect.”
This is the central strategic reality the Trump administration must accept: Iran’s incentive to acquire a nuclear weapon has increased, not decreased, as a result of the war. Bombing alone will not change that. Only a combination of measures that makes the pursuit of the bomb more costly than abandoning it can.
The first requirement is maintaining the naval blockade unconditionally, regardless of Iranian announcements about Hormuz openings. Iran has been selectively admitting ships from China, Turkey, Pakistan, and India under bilateral arrangements while blocking others, converting the strait into a political instrument rather than surrendering the leverage it provides. A blockade that can be circumvented through side deals is not a blockade. It is theater. CENTCOM must enforce the blockade against all sanctioned traffic without exceptions, including Chinese tankers, and Trump must be prepared to make that enforcement the hill his presidency stands on, economically and diplomatically.
The second requirement is activating European snap-back sanctions immediately. Secretary of State Marco Rubio urged European countries on April 18 to quickly reimpose sanctions, warning that Iran is approaching nuclear weapons capability. This call should not have been made publicly as a request. It should have been delivered as a condition. Washington has leverage over European access to American markets and defense cooperation that it has consistently refused to use in Iran policy. That reluctance must end. A European sanctions regime that closes off the money that the blockade does not reach, will give Iran no economic off-ramp that does not run through US terms.
The third requirement is the most uncomfortable to name. The Iranian people have already done the work the administration hoped bombing would do. Surveys conducted inside Iran show that Iranians believe protests, foreign pressure, and intervention are more likely to bring about political change than elections and reforms. The regime is militarily weakened, culturally weakened, and economically weakened, with a plummeting currency. Protests that began in December 2025 over economic conditions grew into nationwide demonstrations in all 31 provinces, with hundreds of thousands participating and calls shifting from economic grievances to the overthrow of the Islamic Republic itself. This is the most significant popular uprising Iran has seen since 1979, and it is happening right now, under the weight of the war and the blockade.
Trump called on the Iranian people to take their government at the outset of the war. He should not abandon that call as a diplomatic inconvenience. Materially supporting the opposition, providing Internet access to circumvent the regime’s blackout, and making unambiguous public commitments to the protesters that American pressure will not cease while the IRGC shoots demonstrators in the street are actions within the administration’s power. They cost nothing militarily and they impose a political cost on the regime that no bomb can replicate.
A deal that leaves Iran with a five-year enrichment window and underground missile cities under reconstruction is not a deal. It is a countdown. Trump knows what the alternative looks like. He should pursue it.
Amine Ayoub, a fellow at the Middle East Forum, is a policy analyst and writer based in Morocco. Follow him on X: @amineayoubx
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Podcast Hosts and Others Must Continue to Call Out Tucker Carlson for His Hatred
Tucker Carlson speaks on July 18, 2024, during the final day of the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Photo: Jasper Colt-USA TODAY via Reuters Connect
Patrick Bet-David, host of the PBD podcast, made an open video to Tucker Carlson in which he offered to have accountants check Bet-David’s finances as well as his wife’s, to see if Israel has given him money. At the same time, the accountants would look into Carlson and his wife to see if Qatar or other countries have given Carlson money.
Though Carlson will certainly not agree to it, it is a good step to put pressure on Carlson. Carlson’s goal is to turn Christians against Israel — and right now, against Trump. It’s not by chance that he falsely claimed Israeli President Isaac Herzog was on Epstein island. There’s no evidence of it, and Carlson made it up out of his desire to vilify Israel.
Bet-David did an interview with Netanyahu, and didn’t call him a genocider — which was tough for Carlson to handle. Carlson absurdly thought Netanyahu would sit for an interview with him. It will never happen because Carlson, whether motivated by money, revenge, or something we don’t know, has been on the warpath against Israel and Jews, obsessively speaking about these two topics. In addition, he is suddenly buddies with those on the far-left who also hate Israel. Known as the horseshoe effect, those on the far-right and far-left can disagree on everything under the sun, but unite in their hatred of Jews.
Carlson is charismatic and has great delivery, though I’m not sure why his absurd laugh hasn’t thrown people off. In this attention economy, it’s about starting conversations. Bet-David smartly put it out there for Carlson to show transparency, which he will not do. What makes this interesting is that when Carlson was first ousted from Fox News, Bet-David made it publicly known that he was offering Carlson a huge amount of money to work for him. This was before Carlson became anti-Israel.
Bet-David was born in Iran, and fled the country to come to America. Bet-David was also right to question why Carlson was downplaying the harms of Sharia law, and focusing on what Carlson thought were its benefits.
My hope is that this leads to Carlson coming on Bet-David’s show. I doubt he will, although there is a small chance because he may think Bet-David is not as intellectual as Douglas Murray or Ben Shapiro. While that’s true, Bet-David is charismatic, can make good points at times, and his experience seeing the evils of Iran firsthand would make for an interesting conversation with Carlson.
It is hard to understand why people believe the things that Carlson and Candace Owens say, though their personalities can be entertaining, and someone unaware of facts perhaps might think they were correct.
Irrespective of the outcome of the Iran war, Carlson is ready with the narrative that it is a disaster. He said that millions could die if America attacked Iran’s nuclear facilities before Trump took action last June. Of course, that didn’t happen. Being wrong has no consequences in Carlson’s mind; it’s about ratcheting up hatred of Israel and positioning it as an enemy of America. At times, it seems Carlson is the one standing against America. As Bet-David pointed out, Carlson said that Sharia law was leading the Muslim world to thrive, while it was declining under America. Carlson also had everyone believing that he was a big fan of President Donald Trump, until text messages revealed he hated him.
While I have my criticisms of Bet-David for not asking tougher questions to idiotic and Jew-hating guests, he deserves credit for calling out Carlson and outing him under the microscope. Because when that is done, what we find is quite ugly. Carlson, through charisma and absurdity, is trying to mainstream the idea that Israel is the enemy of America. He is hoping to reel people in on the lie that Israel bullied America into the war. That’s not the case — and everyone who knows that must continually question Tucker on it.
The author is a writer based in New York.
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The Media Is Biased Against Israel; What Should We Do About It?
The New York Times building in New York City. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Where do we turn when we want to understand Israel as it actually is? Many people still instinctively answer with confidence: newspapers.
It feels rational, grounded, almost automatic. Yet the deeper you look into the global media landscape, the more that confidence begins to erode. What appears to be information often carries something more subtle beneath the surface. It carries intention, framing, and sometimes an agenda that quietly reshapes reality.
Across Israeli media alone, the range is undeniable. Haaretz represents a distinctly left-leaning voice, often sharply critical of Israeli policy and identity. Israel Hayom stands firmly on the right, reflecting a more nationalist perspective. Between them sit publications with all kinds of views.
Diversity in the media is often celebrated as a cornerstone of democracy. In theory, it should strengthen understanding. In practice, it can create confusion when the same reality is presented through completely different lenses. The problem is not that perspectives differ. The problem is that language itself becomes a battleground, shaping perception long before facts are even considered.
Words define the limits of thought. When certain terms are repeated often enough, they stop being questioned. They become accepted truth. The choice between “West Bank” and “Judea and Samaria” is not simply semantic. It reflects history, identity, and legitimacy. One term suggests a modern political construct, the other connects to thousands of years of Jewish presence. The same applies when Jewish communities are labeled as settlements while Arab communities are described as towns. These are not neutral distinctions. They carry implicit judgments that influence how readers interpret reality.
There is a third category: outlets that challenge the normalization of narratives that undermine Israel’s legitimacy. News outlets that refuse to adopt language that distorts historical context do not eliminate bias, but make their perspective transparent rather than disguising it as objectivity.
The broader issue extends beyond terminology. In much of the global media, there is an undercurrent that frames Israel as an outsider, a disruptor, even a colonial presence. This framing is rarely stated outright, yet it appears through emphasis, omission, and tone. Running negative stories about Israel, and positive stories about Gaza is one example that shapes how a country is perceived. Over time, repetition turns suggestion into assumption. Readers absorb these narratives without realizing how deeply they have been shaped.
At the same time, the boundaries of acceptable speech have shifted. On social media platforms, expressing certain criticisms can lead to immediate consequences. Yet hostility toward Israel often circulates freely, sometimes crossing into open antisemitism without similar repercussions. This imbalance does not create fairness. It creates distortion.
Education, which should serve as a safeguard against such distortion, is not immune either. In parts of Europe, including the Netherlands, concerns have emerged about how Holocaust education is approached in increasingly diverse classrooms. When historical truth becomes something to be softened or avoided, the consequences extend far beyond the classroom. Memory fades, context disappears, and space is created for narratives that would otherwise be challenged.
Against this backdrop, the role of media becomes even more critical. Journalism should not be about shaping reality to fit a narrative. It should be about presenting facts with clarity and context. Yet when neutrality becomes a mask for selective framing, trust begins to erode.
This is why clarity matters. Not forced neutrality, not artificial balance, but honest positioning. Readers are not misled by perspective. They are misled by the illusion of objectivity when it does not truly exist.
The responsibility does not lie solely with journalists. Readers must also engage actively, questioning what they read, recognizing patterns, and seeking context beyond headlines. Passive consumption allows narratives to take root unchecked. Critical thinking challenges them.
Standing for Israel in today’s information landscape is not simply about defending policies or decisions. It is about defending the integrity of language and the accuracy of history. It is about refusing to accept distortions simply because they are repeated often enough.
Sabine Sterk is the CEO of Time To Stand Up For Israel.