Are America’s ICE Agents Like Gestapo and Hamas?
A mother is pulled away from her screaming children by America’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Germany’s public broadcaster zdf wanted to show its viewers the full horror of what was happening in the United States. The trouble is, the video it aired on the Heute Journal on February 15 was fake—created by artificial intelligence. It never happened.
Even in the introduction, the moderator says there are a lot of fake videos: “Not all of them are real, but many are. And the violence with which the deportation officers often act, as well as the arbitrariness that can be seen there, has definitely achieved one thing. There is a climate of fear that does not even spare children.” But as Germany’s Spiegel commented:
Unfortunately, two of the videos included in this contribution are also fake. One—which supposedly shows a mother being led away by two ice agents while her young children cling to her, crying—is an AI video. The other clip is supposed to show how the pursuers deport children from schools. This video is real, but it dates from 2022. In it, police officers lead away the suspect after a threat of a shooting rampage at a school in Florida.
https://x.com/RMXnews/status/2023482983303573586
What was zdf’s response to the critics? “AI-generated images should have been labeled in the contribution. For technical reasons, this labeling was not transferred during the playback.”
Either the broadcaster purposefully played an AI clip, or it didn’t want to admit that it believed the clip was real.
And the narrative that ice agents are brutal, merciless and a modern reincarnation of the Gestapo has spread far already.
“Donald Trump’s modern-day Gestapo is scooping folks up off the streets,” Minnesota Governor Tim Walz said in a May 2025 speech at the University of Minnesota Law School commencement ceremony.
It’s not just anti-Trump Democrats who compare ice agents to Germany’s fierce secret police. Popular U.S. podcaster Joe Rogan said in mid-January:
I can also see the point of view of the people that say, “Yeah, but you don’t want militarized people in the streets just roaming around snatching people up, many of which turn out to actually be U.S. citizens that just don’t have their papers on them.” Are we really going to be the Gestapo? “Where’s your papers?” Is that what we’ve come to?
The Gestapo did a lot worse things than asking people for their papers and deporting illegal immigrants on comfortable planes. They brutally cracked down on resistance to the Nazi regime, used torture and violence in interrogations, and coordinated the deportation of Jews to death camps.
If the Gestapo were ruling America, Walz and Rogan would have been shot or put into a concentration camp.
However, for some Germans, the comments from Walz and Rogan are a sign of hope for America.
In her February 5 podcast of Make America GOOD Again with former German Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, Ricardia Bramley said: “All the time, we hope that somehow a collective mass will come to its senses because it has seen the light, or rather the dark side of those it has elected. Is Minneapolis such a tipping point?” Guttenberg’s response:
I believe it is more of a gradual shift and not one that can be seen solely in the moment when two people, Renée Good and Alex Pretti, were shot in a truly horrific manner. However, one thing is noticeable, which is that suddenly there were stronger reactions coming from the ranks of the Republicans, who said, we support Donald Trump’s extreme immigration policy, but this is something that could really hurt us among the population and also among Trump voters.
So suddenly, critical voices came from Congress and even from those who could be described as hard-core supporters of Trump. That’s one thing, but the second thing I found even more significant, and it was something that had already been looming over the last few weeks, was that some of the media figures … suddenly began to waver a bit, and one of them is Joe Rogan. … He has millions and millions of listeners worldwide, and he suddenly started talking about Gestapo methods, and if you wanted to identify tipping points, then it would be more likely in these groups than just in Congress and elsewhere. Nevertheless, one thing must not be forgotten. There is still a deeply rooted dissatisfaction with the immigration policy of recent years in the U.S.
He added another comparison:
There was an interesting piece by Tom Friedman, the New York Times columnist, who drew a comparison between the Hamas terrorists and … ice, simply because the images were so similar. So on the one hand, that shows the emotional impact, but on the other hand, it also shows what I wanted to say, which is that this dissatisfaction is still being covered up in part by some states in the U.S., which are actually doing very little to address the problems on the ground.
In his January 25 article, Friedman wrote:
Which video should I linger on longest? The footage of Renée Good, shot in the face by an ice officer in Minneapolis while she was clearly trying to evacuate the scene? Or the video from Saturday of federal agents shooting Alex Jeffrey Pretti, an intensive care nurse, after he tried to help a woman who was being pepper-sprayed? Or perhaps the video from Wednesday showing the aftermath of Israeli strikes that killed three Palestinian journalists, among others, in Gaza? The journalists had been working for a committee providing Egyptian aid and were documenting its distribution at a displacement camp. Or perhaps the videos of Hamas executing rivals and refusing to yield, despite the fact that the war the group ignited on Oct. 7, 2023, has resulted in nothing but catastrophe for Palestinians?
These stories have much more in common than you might think. All are driven, in my view, by terrible leaders who prefer easy, violent solutions to the hard work of negotiated problem-solving. These leaders see an iron-fisted approach as the best way to win their next elections: President Trump in the 2026 midterms; Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who is expected to call elections around the same time; and Hamas, in its desperate effort to lead the Palestinian movement in the postwar era, despite having lost the war.
Hamas and ice also share one very visible trait that I never thought I’d see in the United States: Almost all of their foot soldiers wear masks. My experience as a reporter in the Middle East taught me that people wear masks because they are up to something bad and don’t want their faces captured on camera. I saw it often in Beirut and in Gaza; I never expected to see it in Minneapolis. Since when have America’s domestic policing forces, charged with defending the Constitution and the rule of law, felt the need to hide their identities?
I understand why Hamas fighters wear masks—they have both Israeli and Palestinian blood on their hands and fear retribution. But if you placed a photo of an ice officer next to a Hamas militiaman in a news quiz, I would defy you to tell them apart. Memo to the Homeland Security secretary, Kristi Noem: That is not a good look. What are you hiding?
Hamas terrorists brutally massacred over a thousand Jews, beheaded babies, and raped women—yet because they wore masks, they can be compared to ice? Perhaps ice agents feel the need to wear masks because people like this author defame them as the most wicked terrorists and Gestapo agents!
Our history books tell us that the German people should have done more to resist the rising Nazi regime. They should have defended the persecuted. They should have refused collaboration. That’s the same message many commentators are pushing regarding the Trump administration and its law enforcers.
Some sincerely believe that Donald Trump is another Adolf Hitler. But that narrative is fabricated with a malicious plan.
As the late Herbert W. Armstrong explained in his book The United States and Britain in Prophecy, the U.S. today descended from ancient Israel. Its blessings have been the result of the obedience of the patriarch Abraham; its curses are the result of its own disobedience. The division in America is certainly such a curse.
The Bible also reveals that God will raise a nation to lead an alliance to overthrow the American superpower. This nation is Germany, referred to in Bible prophecy as the king of the north, Assyria and the beast of Revelation.
To conquer the U.S. superpower requires two things: The U.S. has to be divided from within; the German people need to be fired up with self-righteous fervor to finish them off.
Accusing America of being a reincarnation of the Nazi empire does both. The truth, however, is that many Nazi officials went underground after World War ii and planned the future conquest of America. You can read about these plans in our books Germany and the Holy Roman Empire and Germany’s Conquest of the Balkans, as well as in many other books, such as Germany Plots With the Kremlin.
It appears these underground Nazis have found many helpful collaborators within America to further their plot.