Frantic callers besieged the sheriff’s switchboard in a tiny Georgia community early last month. They feared the town was under attack. Armed men were swarming the neighborhoods and kicking in doors. Residents were understandably terrified.
The invasion had ominous overtones. “This reminds me of what I read about Nazi Germany; the Gestapo coming in and yanking people out,” newspapers quoted the town’s mayor as saying.
It wasn’t the Gestapo. It was federal agents rounding up allegedly undocumented immigrants. The escalating raids are part of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Secure Border Initiative launched earlier this year.
Since Aug. 8, ICE agents have raided a Milwaukee, Wis., packaging plant, arresting 25 immigrants; a Tallahassee, Fla., janitorial services company on Aug. 26 where they arrested 55 immigrants; a Stillmore, Ga., poultry plant; and a trailer park on Sept. 1 where they arrested more than 120 immigrants; a construction site just east of Denver, Colo., Sept. 20 where they arrested 120 immigrants; and a private residence in Quincy, Mass., Sept. 28, where they arrested 11 immigrants. Most were immediately deported.
While the discovery and deportation of foreign nationals residing in the country illegally was a token victory for law and order, who actually benefits? Not the families torn apart by the deportations. Not local businesses that relied on the immigrants for labor and trade. Not the state and local treasuries that depended on sales and employment taxes paid by the immigrants. Not American fruit and vegetable growers, whose produce is rotting in the fields for want of workers to pick it. Not the tourist industry straining to staff hotels, motels and restaurants.  
Nor is it the country’s security. First of all, there are still an estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. Some may have been deported before; some more than once. Yet their desperate longing for a better life compels them to risk re-entering the country. Furthermore, none of the 9/11 terrorists came from south of the border. And finally, being in the United States without documentation is a civil offense, not a criminal offense. 
So what is really driving the increased ICE raids?
While juxtaposition to Gestapo tactics sounds farfetched, the raids are unquestionably occurring in an atmosphere zealously charged with intense nationalism and violent xenophobia. Both are characteristics of radical, right-wing ideology. Adolf Hitler, Germany’s Fascist dictator, asserted that multiculturalism was dangerous in a nation. Ethnic minorities, he declared, weakened and destabilized, and the weakest nations were those of mongrel races.
Under the Nazi regime, millions of mostly Jewish Europeans were displaced, robbed, tortured and murdered. But the wholesale aggression didn’t start instantly upon Hitler’s rise to power. It began with the passage of increasingly harsh laws and ostensibly random acts of violence against Jews. Little by little over time, ordinary Germans became habituated to progressively more outrageous treatment of Jews.   
The increase in ICE raids arises in concert with an alarming upsurge in violence against immigrants. According to a report released last spring by the Anti-Defamation League, “White supremacists, racist skinheads and others identifying with far-right extremist groups are using the national debate over immigration reform as a means to encourage like-minded racists to speak out, or even commit violent acts against immigrants.” 
And a recent study by the Southern Poverty Law Center found that organized anti-immigrant networks on the radical right blame non-white immigrants for “nearly all the country’s ills, from poverty and inner city decay to crime, urban sprawl and environmental degradation.” Many also believe that there’s a secret plot by the Mexican government and American Hispanics to seize control of the U.S. Southwest.
At an anti-immigrant rally in Tennessee last spring, a speaker publicly advocated shooting immigrants as they come across the border. Radio talk show hosts across the country have echoed that abomination on the air. Over the airwaves and the Internet, virulent anti-immigration groups have put forward a number of brutal tactics to bedevil undocumented immigrants.
And the American Civil Liberties Union is investigating allegations that police officers in a Milwaukee suburb are racially profiling and harassing Hispanics.
Officials concede that it’s impossible to round up and remove 12 million or so undocumented immigrants. Then what’s the point of upping the number of raids? Are they in reality the onset of a deliberately disguised campaign with a far more sinister objective?