Of all the many, many heartbreaking exhibits I saw in early 2025 at the Jewish Museum in Berlin, what shocked me the most was the room pictured above, housing banners displaying the hundreds and hundreds of laws passed during the Nazi regime that systematically stripped Jews of their German citizenship, of their right to work, of their right to … exist. What was doubly shocking to me was that not all of these laws were imposed by the Nazis at the federal level, but rather, virtually every German state and every German city, down to some of the very smallest municipalities, also enacted cruel antisemitic laws both to plug loopholes and to curry favor with Hitler.
This story in The Guardian this morning, “Tennessee to test Stephen Miller’s plan of enlisting states for immigration enforcement,” chilled me to my very core. Please read it. The article describes Miller’s having worked with Tennessee House Speaker Cameron Sexton on draft legislation that would
turn state and local police officers, judges, teachers, social workers and others into an auxiliary extension of the federal immigration system. It makes the presence of an undocumented person with a final deportation order a state crime in Tennessee. And it mandates that officials report the presence of undocumented persons to ICE, while criminalizing disclosure of information about immigration enforcement activities to the public.
The Guardian article further explains that one of the proposed laws would require schools to verify the immigration status for public school students, and that this legislation “directly challenges Plyler v Doe, a landmark 1982 US supreme court case that establishes a constitutional right for undocumented children to an education at public expense.” Tennessee xenophobes and racists are hoping, and not without reason, that the compromised majority on the Roberts court will overturn this earlier ruling.
Another proposed bill prohibits undocumented (but otherwise commercially licensed) long-haul drivers to pass through Tennessee. If passed, other red states, from Indiana down through Texas, could follow suit and become a “dead man’s zone” of potential seizure and deportation, creating a logistical nightmare and nullifying any notion of interstate commerce.
Another law would make it a state crime to publicly disclose any information about ICE activities.
Several of these laws are based on the big lie that undocumented immigrants are costing Tennessee taxpayers money, when in fact they contribute many tens of millions of dollars to state and local coffers. But why should state legislators worry about truth when lies are so politically advantageous?
Because of a slight passing physical resemblance, Stephen Miller is often compared to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. But Miller’s twisted, hateful, and evil vision of an all-white America and his policies and pronouncements are far more closely aligned with those of Heinrich Himmler, architect of Hitler’s “Final Solution.”
I wish this were hyperbole, but it most assuredly is not.
May all people of goodwill in Tennessee and elsewhere fight against the enactment of such cruel and unjust laws. Please sound the alarm!
