JB Pritzker Compares Trump’s ICE Raids to Nazi Germany: ‘This Is How Authoritarian Regimes Do It’
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) compared President Donald Trump using ICE and Border Patrol agents to crackdown on illegal immigration to Adolf Hitler rounding up Jews and other minorities in Nazi Germany, with Pritzker saying 2025 America resembles the dark years leading up to the Holocaust.
The Democrat made the provocative claim during an hour-long interview at an event hosted by The Economic Club of Chicago on Tuesday.
“This is how authoritarian regimes do it. They create these kind of fake ideas that there’s an enemy out there and it could be sitting next to you at one of these tables. So just somebody sitting at your table that you don’t like might be one of those enemies,” Pritzker said. “So let’s round them up, let’s make sure they are the subjects of the laws that we’re passing, because we don’t like who they are. That is what authoritarian regimes do.”
Pritzker, a moment earlier, said he knows Republicans do not like it when he compares the Trump administration to Nazi Germany, but defended the comparison by saying he knows a lot about the topic after having helped build a Holocaust Museum in Chicago.
“I can tell you, sitting next to Holocaust survivors, that what they will say in this moment is ‘This is what happened. This is what happened — people’s rights started getting taken away. People got accused of being immigrants’ — this is before the Holocaust really took place,” he said.
Pritzker continued: “People were accused of being immigrants, and then laws were passed to limit immigrants. And then people who weren’t actually immigrants were called immigrants, and then it was ‘othering’ people, and that led to a lot worse things.”
Critics would push back on a few aspects of Pritzker’s comparison. For example, German Jews were suddenly stripped of their citizenship by the Nuremberg Laws in 1935. And of course, there are no immigrants being sent to death camps on cattle trains in the U.S..
Pritzker’s latest comments come as he has vocally opposed President Trump’s use of the National Guard, as well as ICE and Border Patrol agents, in his state. The governor, alongside Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson (D), sued the Trump administration earlier this month to stop him from deploying troops.
The governor has also accused Trump and ICE agents of “inciting” residents to violence on multiple occasions.
Watch above via NBC 5 Chicago on YouTube.
