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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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Why I’m vibing with the pope’s first big statement
I have long been obsessed with the Vatican and the inner workings of the papacy. (I majored and did my Master’s in religious studies.) But usually other people are not as tickled as I am by analyzing the newest theological statements from the Holy See.
Not this week. Pope Leo XIV just put out his first encyclical — the term used to refer to official statements outlining the church’s stance on a topic — and it has gone viral. “Spitting fire right out the gate,” said one of many similar trending posts, as though the encyclical was a rap song.
The topic is buzzy: AI, which the pope casts as one of the greatest threats to human flourishing and morality. (The encyclical is titled “Magnifica Humanitas,” or “Magnificent Humanity” in English, if that gives you the gist.) “Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur,” it opens, “ is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together.”
The document notes many of the concrete risks of AI — sexual abuse, distortion of facts, job loss — and calls for pragmatic solutions. But it is, at its heart, a testament to what makes humans human, written with palpable adoration for the people of the world: our creativity, our empathy, even our weaknesses. It’s a declaration that machines can never have the ineffable qualities of God’s children.
Structuring our world around technology, Leo writes, reduces “creation to an object of exploitation and human beings to mere cogs in a system driven toward ever greater efficiency.”
Later, in a paean to the importance of deep thought over easy answers, he goes on: “The speed and ease with which answers or summaries can be obtained risk extinguishing the desire to ask questions,” he writes, calling on the world “to protect our young people from the promise of the perfect machine” and warning against rendering “human thought seemingly superfluous precisely when it is most needed.”
“Magnificatus Humanitas” is a major statement, both in length — more than 43,000 words — and in symbolism. A pope’s first encyclical indicates the issues they believe are most important to the church, and signals the likely direction of their papacy.
That direction, for Pope Leo, is to be a voice for moral leadership, writ large. He addressed the encyclical not only to Catholics or even Christians, but “to all men and women of goodwill,” and cited thinkers like Hannah Arendt and J.R.R. Tolkien alongside the Bible.
It’s a declaration of a new — or, arguably, very old — relevance for religious leaders. As people rush through our increasingly fast-paced, frantic world, striving to keep up with the newest technology or geopolitical shift affecting markets and jobs, the slow-moving, zoomed-out perspective of religious leaders seems to be more and more important.
The Vatican held massive authority both moral and military for much of Western history. But its sway faded in the modern age. As democracy rose, Christianity broke into factions and religion’s prominence weakened, leaving the Church without the same ability to bestow a divine mandate on nations and rulers.
So many modern popes have kept their sights more narrowly focused on the theological. Even Pope Francis, who was a liberal, modernizing force for the church, and spoke out strongly on topics like the environment and immigration, focused three of his four encyclicals on Christian theological concepts like the Sacred Heart and Christianity as the world’s guiding light.
Pope Leo, however, seems to have found his way to modern, secular relevance by speaking out clearly on major issues of the day. He notes that he drew inspiration for “Magnificatus Humanitas” from Pope Leo XIII, an influential pope in the late 1800s and the inspiration for the modern Leo’s own papal moniker, whose 1891 encyclical “Rerum Novarum,” on the economy and conditions of the working class, was criticized for insufficient focus on the Gospel. The current pope’s own document is remarkably concrete and political.
Making political statements isn’t new for Leo, but the encyclical canonizes his boldness into an official form. In the past few months I’ve written about the ways in which Pope Leo has used sermons and statements to directly counter those made by U.S. leaders. After Pete Hegseth made a speech implying the U.S. military is doing God’s will, the pope gave a homily saying that prayers for war cannot be heard by God. He has made strongly worded comments about the rights of immigrants as Trump announced increased ICE raids, and made a point of appointing foreign bishops in American parishes. He has refused to visit the U.S. despite the fact that he is American and has been invited numerous times, including for the nation’s 250th birthday; he is instead planning to visit an island that serves as a refugee landing point in the Mediterranean.
It’s not all that surprising that Leo is making pronouncements on the justness of wars; popes have always given commentary on the world, albeit often less pointedly. Of course, Catholics have always looked to the pope for moral leadership — though that is increasingly under question, as renegade Catholics doubt the pope. (Even J.D. Vance, a Catholic convert with a book coming out about his conversion, has warned the pope to be “careful” with his theological interpretations — a near heretical statement. That’s how Protestantism came about.) The difference today is that everybody is listening.
I think the reason is that there is a certain ineffable quality that can’t be accounted for in so much of modern-day discourse in our metrics-focused world. Everything needs to be provable with a statistical analysis or some quantifiable indicator, or it needs to be as profitable as possible to extract value. But so much of what is most valuable in the human experience is intuitive — experiences and emotions like love, joy, transcendence. Connection with each other. Religious leaders have been honing the language to talk about these qualities for centuries, and they guard one of the only arenas in which the intangible remains central.
Of course, there are also plenty of issues with religious institutions, and the Vatican in particular is famous as a site where abuses of power were hidden and protected. But “Magnifica Humanitas,” and its virality, points toward a new relationship with religion, and a newly important role for it to play.
Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking, a hope for my own increased importance as a religion reporter.
The post Why I’m vibing with the pope’s first big statement appeared first on The Forward.
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How can I live freely as a Jew in a world where strangers rip my mezuzah off my doorframe?
Twice, the mezuzah on my front door was ripped off.
The first time, I was shocked. The second time, I made a decision that still pains me. I did not put it back up.
This was before the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023.
That is the part I keep coming back to. The fear did not begin after the Hamas attacks. It was already there, intruding with the quiet calculation of whether a small Jewish symbol on my home made me less safe.
A mezuzah is not a political statement. It makes no argument about a government or a war. It is a sacred object, a marker of memory, a tiny declaration that says: Jews live here. I thought about that mezuzah again recently when the Anti-Defamation League released its annual audit showing that antisemitic physical assaults in the United States reached record highs in 2025. That increase reflects something many Jews already feel in daily life: the slow erosion of ease, the daily calculation of whether to speak up or stay quiet — things I have felt since the first time my mezuzah was violently torn off my doorframe.
Since then, the realm in which I feel safe as a visibly Jewish person has been shrinking from all directions.
After the Oct. 7 attack, the bulletin boards in my apartment building began filling with calls to boycott Israel. Campaign flyers for a Jewish political candidate who came to speak there were defaced with Hitler mustaches. I learned to scan the walls before I scanned my mail.
This was not happening on a campus quad or in some distant place. It was happening where I live.
Then, among my mother’s things, I found a Star of David necklace from the 1930s — marcasite set against black onyx, delicate and old. A boyfriend had given it to her when they were both 14.
I put it on in Florida, where I spend much of my time caring for my mother. I loved wearing it. It felt like more than jewelry. It felt like inheritance, memory, and a small way of carrying my family with me.
But when my mother knew I was going back to New York, she told me to take it off.
My mother is 102. She is not easily frightened. She has lived long enough to know when the temperature in the room has changed. She was not making a political argument. She was trying to protect her daughter.
I still wear that Star of David. But I admit I am selective. In New York, there are moments when I leave it visible and moments when I tuck it under my shirt. That calculation itself tells me something about the world I am moving through.
Recently, in a private Facebook group for women essayists, I shared a personal piece I had written for the United Kingdom-based Jewish Chronicle about how Oct. 7 changed life for my mother and me. It was not a political manifesto. It was a reflection on fear, Jewish identity, aging and visibility.
And still, I was attacked by other writers.“What about Gaza?” I was asked. The message was clear: even my personal Jewish pain had to pass a political test before it could be acknowledged.
That is the narrowing.
This ugliness is coming from more than one direction now. It stems from old conspiracy theories on the right and newer moral certainties in some of the progressive spaces where I once felt most at home. Different language brings about the same result: Jews become less human, less particular, less entitled to fear.
That collapse is what frightens me most: the definitional collapse between Jew and Israeli; Israeli and Israel’s government; Jewish symbol and political provocation; mezuzah and target.
As Jews like me reckon with that collapse, we must reckon with how much we’ll go along with it.
Right now, too often, Jews are being asked to choose between our own safety and our compassion for others. We should be able to prioritize both. I am a Zionist. I believe in the right of the Jewish people to a homeland. I also believe Palestinians are human beings who deserve freedom, dignity, and protection from suffering.
These beliefs should not cancel each other out. They should make us more careful, more humane, more committed to truth.
Yet now we must choose between speaking about antisemitism and being accused of indifference to other hatreds. That is no way to live.
Since Oct. 7, I have found myself going to synagogue on Shabbat, something I never did before. I was a High Holiday Jew. Now I seek out rooms where I do not have to explain why this moment feels frightening. I have learned where I feel seen. I have learned who can hold my fear without turning it into an argument.
The mezuzah I did not put back up is small. It fits in the palm of my hand.
But what it represents is not small: memory, faith, survival, home, and the right to be visibly Jewish without fear.
When I did not put it back up, I told myself I was being practical. But now — after Oct. 7, the bulletin boards, my mother’s warning, and the explosive allegations I’ve seen travel through respected media without sufficient care or verification — I understand it differently.
I was not just protecting a doorframe. I was learning to shrink.
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Podcast: A lively conversation in Yiddish with actress Lea Koenig
ס׳איז לעצטנס אַרויס אַ פּאָדקאַסט מיט דער באַליבטער אַקטריסע אין ישׂראל, ליאַ קעניג, וועלכע איז הײַנט צום בעסטן באַקאַנט ווי די ייִדיש־רעדנדיקע באָבע פֿונעם פּערסאָנאַזש שלום שטיסל אין דער ישׂראלדיקער טעלעוויזיע־סעריע „שטיסל“.
אינעם שמועס באַטייליקן זיך אויך יניבֿ גאָלדבערג — דער מחבר פֿון אַ נײַער ביאָגראַפֿיע וועגן איר אויף ענגליש; דער איבערזעצער און דראַמאַטורג מיכל יאַשינסקי, און דער ייִדישער זינגער און קולטור־טוער חיים וואָלף. דעם פּאָדקאַסט האָט טראַנסמיטירט די באָסטאָנער ראַדיאָ־פּראָגראַם „דאָס ייִדישע קול“.
ליאַ קעניג גיט איבער אירע זכרונות במשך פֿון איר לאַנגער קאַריערע אין ייִדישן טעאַטער, ווי אויך אינעם העברעיִשן טעאַטער, טעלעוויזיע און קינאָ. כּדי צו הערן דעם פּאָדקאַסט, גיט אַ קוועטש דאָ.
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