Repeating history while refusing to learn from it
Under Donald Trump, the United States is openly pursuing a policy of "remigration," a right-wing term for ethnic cleansing.
Knowledge is an imperfect form of prevention. Still, there was at least a chance that the men and women of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement could have learned something.
In 2016, ICE announced it was partnering with the Museum of Tolerance, a Los Angeles-based institution founded by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, so named for the famed survivor and investigator of Nazi horrors. ICE staff would learn about some of the darkest chapters in the recent past, the agency said at the time, a press statement noting that the museum is “dedicated to challenging visitors to understand the Holocaust in both historic and contemporary context.”
The museum would also help ICE employees “confront all forms of prejudice and discrimination in today’s world.” One of the inaugural training sessions included in-person testimony from one of the first Black students to walk past a racist, white mob to attend desegregated classes at Little Rock Central High School.
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A decade later, ICE, flush with cash — about $100 billion sitting in its federal account, and spending up to $20 million alone on “gloves that deliver electric shocks” — is embracing austerity, at least when it comes to education. In a recently published notice, the agency announced it was scrapping its relationship with the Museum of Tolerance and indeed ending all such investments in “experiential learning.” Those interested in career development are now being directed to online classes from LinkedIn, or as ICE explains: the bare minimum that is required by federal law.
The abandonment of experiential learning — the agency also ended a leadership training course at Gettysburg, the Civil War battlefield, citing a desire to cut costs — comes as ICE personnel are engaged in a campaign of mass deportation that, to other students of history, looks awfully familiar.
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Thousands of people each day are now being detained by immigration agents, the vast majority having no criminal record. The White House claims it has now deported more than 600,000 people and compelled another 1.9 million to leave the country. To hit the astronomical goal of millions deported each year — the number demanded by Trump's base — people in America are being openly questioned by authorities based on nothing more than the color of their skin and the language they speak. English with an accent? That’s probable cause. Spanish, the native tongue of millions in the United States? Get out of the vehicle.
In June, immigration judges selected by the Trump administration ordered a record number of removals: over 100,000, or more than double the monthly average a year before. More than 65,000 people are in immigration detention centers, where more than 50 people have died since Trump returned to office, fatalities now coming at twice the rate seen during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In 2025 alone, 1.6 million immigrants were unilaterally stripped of legal status by the Trump administration. Hundreds of thousands of Haitian men, women and children, legally residing in and contributing to American communities, are now facing the threat of imminent removal almost entirely because the American president and his 2024 running mate decided it was politically advantageous to tell racist lies about them eating dogs and cats.
Citizenship is no sure protection, either. The Trump administration has already deported someone who had a “substantial claim of U.S. citizenship,” in defiance of a court order, and the president regularly speaks of Somali-Americans as if they were a foreign enemy — and revolting filth, recently using the Oval Office to proclaim tens of thousands of U.S. citizens to be unintelligent, possessing “no aptitude” and having “nothing going” for them, with no right to take part in public life.
And there is no reason to believe it won’t get worse, long before it gets better.
Charles R. Davis
Federal records I recently uncovered show the agency may soon formally extend its reach abroad. A document posted on the federal government’s website for contracting opportunities says the agency is looking for private partners who could help facilitate the detention of recently deported immigrants in overseas detention centers, each with the capacity to hold up to 1,000 people. Such facilities, if they come to pass, would by design keep those within them far from the eyes of legal counsel, the media or their loved ones; out of sight, neglect and abuse tend to flourish.
The context, too, is one of unapologetic extremism. At a conference this summer in Portugal, Greg Bovino, the former face of the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement operations, mingled with avowed neo-Nazis to push the idea of “remigration,” which holds that tens of millions of people — legal residents or otherwise — must be removed from the United States and Europe in a purifying campaign of ethnic cleansing. Bovino put the figure at 100 million, or roughly one in three Americans, who he said should be deported to restore white hegemony, a number cosigned by the Department of Homeland Security.
The U.S. State Department too has embraced “remigration,” the “underlying ideology” of which is rooted in 1930s German fascism, as the University of Vienna’s Daniel Sharp, an expert on the history and ethics of immigration controls, told me, the term itself having been first popularized by the Austrian extremist and founder of Europe’s Identitarian Movement, Martin Sellner. Federal records show that the “Office of Remigration” is now the point of contact for refugee assistance, a development that comes as the only refugees now being admitted to the United States are white people from South Africa.
Charles R. Davis
The White House’s latest effort to unilaterally rewrite the Constitution and deny citizenship to people undeniably born in the United States, for more than a century the undisputed right of any newborn child, is but another salvo in this campaign for remigration. In context, it makes sense why ICE would not want its employees to be even familiar with the sordid history of bigots and demagogues deciding other citizens — other Americans; other Germans — are illegitimate, due to their ancestry, and should be denied the right to remain free in the land they call home.
History does not repeat, nor does it reliably predict the future. But those familiar with it, from the internment of Japanese-Americans to the atrocities of 20th-century fascism, know that the road these United States are headed down has been well trod before.
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