A new federal requirement, implemented on April 11 under Donald Trump’s second term, mandates that all undocumented immigrants living in the United States must register with the federal government or face penalties including fines, detention, and deportation.
While the Trump regime frames this as a return to “long-standing law,” the strategy echoes chilling precedents from pre-Holocaust Nazi Germany. It is a comparison some historians and immigration advocates say is no longer theoretical, but historical.
The registration system went into effect following a February 25 announcement from the Department of Homeland Security. Those who do not comply may be charged with immigration-related crimes. Those who do comply are still subject to surveillance, detention, and deportation.
The federal government has also classified over 6,000 living immigrants as deceased, stripping them of their Social Security numbers and cutting off access to banking, employment, and basic services. The measure is intended to push immigrants into so-called “self-deportation” by making life in the U.S. logistically impossible.
REGISTRATION AS A WEAPON OF CONTROL
For anyone with a working knowledge of 20th-century history, the implications are striking. In 1938, Nazi Germany issued decrees requiring all Jews to register their property. That same year, Jewish passports were stamped with a red “J.” Jews without “recognizably Jewish” names were forced to adopt additional names — such as Israel for men, and Sara for women.
In 1939, Jews were required to carry special ID cards. The registration was not just bureaucratic. It was the groundwork for targeted exclusion, expropriation, and eventually genocide.
The Trump regime’s immigrant registry operates with a comparable mechanism. The government now requires every undocumented person to carry registration documents at all times, a demand indistinguishable in spirit from the mandatory ID cards issued to Jews in the Third Reich.
Those who fail to register may be fined or jailed. Those who do register face possible incarceration in detention facilities — many of them private, profit-driven, and expanding at scale — before deportation proceedings begin.
The U.S. now holds tens of thousands in immigration detention, and the infrastructure for mass detentions is growing under federal contracts. Advocates warn that this process not only isolates immigrants from their communities but builds a system of state control that could later be redirected against other marginalized groups.
ANNE FRANK REIMAGINED IN MILWAUKEE
These fears are not abstract in cities like Milwaukee, where Latino families — many of them Catholic — are already experiencing the consequences of aggressive immigration enforcement.
A 2019 feature published by “Milwaukee Independent” drew attention to the eerie parallels between the Holocaust and America’s treatment of Hispanic immigrants during Trump’s first term. The article imagined Anne Frank’s diary rewritten as the journal of a young Mexican girl, hiding from federal agents instead of the Gestapo.
Entire passages were transposed word for word, only changing “Jew” to “Latino” and “Nazis” to “ICE,” with devastating clarity.
> READ: Pride and Prejudice and Latinos: There could be a modern-day Anne Frank in Milwaukee who is Hispanic
The article described how a Latina mother and her children lived in hiding in Milwaukee, protected by a Jewish woman who recognized in their suffering the same existential fear her ancestors once knew in Germany.
The re-staged presentation of “The Diary of Anne Frank,” re-cast entirely with Latino characters hiding from immigration agents, brought the comparison into the public spotlight. Now, in 2025, the same fears have intensified — but the policies have become law.
WHEN LEGALITY MASKS INJUSTICE
It is not illegal to be present in the United States without documentation, unless a person has been deported and returns without permission. For first-time undocumented immigrants, federal law considers the issue a civil violation, not a criminal one.
However, by implementing a mandatory registration law and attaching criminal penalties for failure to comply, the Trump regime has effectively criminalized the undocumented presence outright. This mirrors the legal transformation Jews faced in Germany after the Nuremberg Laws, which stripped them of citizenship and criminalized their existence in public life.
Additionally, the cancellation of Social Security numbers for targeted immigrants is nearly identical in function to the Nazi policy requiring Jews to register their financial assets in 1938, a step that enabled mass confiscation of property before deportation.
Today, the U.S. Federal government under Trump is using administrative mechanisms to render people invisible on paper. By revoking Social Security numbers and classifying living individuals as deceased, the system effectively removes their legal existence. It cuts them off from employment, banking, housing, and nearly all forms of public life. The tactic is designed to isolate, dehumanize, and force departure without a direct confrontation.
LEGAL STRATEGIES, CHILLING OUTCOMES
While the Trump regime asserts it is merely “enforcing existing immigration laws,” critics point out that such claims echo similar defenses made by German officials in the 1930s. The Nazi regime’s laws were also “legal” under their constitution. Legality, they warn, is not a guarantee of justice.
What sets the Trump-era registry apart is how directly it targets a specific population, with the intent to restrict mobility, terminate employment, and force self-removal. Federal departments, including Homeland Security and the Treasury, have signed agreements allowing the IRS to share tax data with immigration authorities. This lets ICE cross-check names and addresses to initiate arrests or deportation proceedings.
In Germany, a similar bureaucratic network allowed the Reich to confiscate assets, seize businesses, and eventually coordinate transports to ghettos and camps. Each stage relied on compliance through forced registration, quiet normalization, and public indifference.
As deportations intensified, Jewish prisoners in concentration camps were assigned serial numbers, often tattooed onto their forearms, replacing their names in all official records. The system’s efficiency depended on gradually stripping people of all identity, until they could be processed, transported, and eliminated without public resistance.
Today, immigration detention centers across the United States are filling. Private contractors have expanded facilities in Texas and Louisiana. These centers now operate in ways that critics say parallel the earliest Nazi concentration camps: not death camps, but instruments of control and punishment. People are held for indefinite periods in overcrowded conditions, without access to lawyers, and often without having committed a crime beyond lacking citizenship papers.
THE FOR-PROFIT DETENTION MODEL
The rapid expansion of immigration detention under Trump’s current regime is not simply a matter of policy, it is a profitable business model. Federal contracts with private prison corporations are generating billions in revenue through per-capita incarceration. Every undocumented person detained represents a revenue stream.
Under Trump’s 2025 framework, this system has intensified. With a new registry in place, ICE and DHS are now able to identify and apprehend large numbers of undocumented people and funnel them into a growing network of federal and contracted detention centers.
While these are officially referred to as “detention facilities,” the comparison to Nazi-era early camps is not sensational. In the 1930s, Jewish individuals were detained not for crimes, but for identity. They were held under administrative detention — a legal gray zone where due process was suspended. That same mechanism is being mirrored in how today’s detainees, which include asylum seekers, students, and workers, are being held without trial for indefinite periods.
Moreover, the infrastructure itself is expanding. Former schools, warehouses, and temporary shelters are being converted into holding centers. Border Patrol and ICE are granted broad discretionary power. The economic incentive to detain, combined with legal mechanisms designed to bypass traditional court protections, creates a framework eerily similar to the early German system of mass social removal.
ONCE IT IS NORMALIZED, IT EXPANDS
History demonstrates that systems of mass registration and surveillance never remain limited to their initial targets. What begins with one group becomes a precedent for others.
The April 11 registration order is already being enforced beyond the border. University students, foreign nationals with temporary legal status, and individuals affiliated with political protests have been detained.
Civil liberties groups warn that this is a critical inflection point. Once a federal registration system is normalized for undocumented people, there is little to stop expanding that structure to target dissidents, religious minorities, journalists, or political opponents in the future.
In the 1930s, German citizens who were not Jewish supported policies that did not directly affect them. It was only after the machinery of state surveillance and detention had grown strong enough that it turned inward, targeting anyone who resisted.
THE DANGER OF FORGETTING
The reimagining of Anne Frank’s story as a young Latina girl hiding from ICE, as explored in the 2019 “Milwaukee Independent” article, was not meant as satire. It was a warning. And today, it reads more like a prophecy.
Milwaukee, a city far from the Southern border, has become part of that story. With one of the fastest-growing Latino populations in the Midwest, local families have shared their fears of raids, detentions, and the sudden disappearance of loved ones. The comparison to Anne Frank is not rhetorical, it is now drawn from lived experience.
If Americans ignore the warning signs now, if they dismiss the historical parallels as alarmism or political noise, they may one day find themselves registered, isolated, or erased — wondering how it happened, and why no one stopped it.
Gregory Bull (AP), Matt Rourke (AP), Eric Gay (AP), and Alex Brandon (AP)
