Should immigrants be treated like Nazi war criminals?
Americans have gotten somewhat used to the fact that President Donald Trump often announces outrageous, unworkable ideas, from annexing Greenland to making Canada the 51st state to re-opening the notorious, long-closed Alcatraz prison in San Francisco, then simply abandons the topics when he sees how unpopular the plans are.
But this startling headline on a CNN article last month literally made my jaw drop:
“LAW USED TO KICK OUT NAZIS COULD BE USED TO STRIP CITIZENSHIP FROM MANY MORE AMERICANS”
In late 1978, I interviewed then-Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman (D-NY) about legislation she co-authored which would, in her words, be “a major step in putting our government squarely on record as denying sanctuary in the US to Nazi war criminals. Oddly, our immigration laws exclude everyone from polygamists to marijuana users, but our country’s doors have been wide open to Nazi war criminals.”
The law, which became known as the Holtzman Amendment, was used by the Justice Department to denaturalize and/or deport hundreds of Nazis and those who had assisted them. One example that was quite personal for me was the case of a Latvian-born police chief who’d been found guilty in absentia of ordering the mass execution of 200 residents of a village during World War II. That war criminal lived peacefully a couple of miles away from me on New York’s Long Island for 36 years, until he saw the writing on the wall – and in the legislation — and fled to Germany in 1987, where he was charged with mass murder before dying several years later.
As the son of a mother who fled Nazi Germany with her parents in the 1930s, and a father whose aunts, uncles, and ten first cousins were murdered in the Holocaust, I eagerly followed and reported on the efforts of Congresswoman Holtzman and the Justice Department’s heroic Nazi-hunter, Eli Rosenbaum, for years. Therefore, the news that the Trump administration – which had already invoked the “Alien Enemies Act of 1798” to deport Venezuelans – might attempt to equate undocumented migrants with Nazis in its deportation efforts was shocking to me. And, as it turns out, to Elizabeth Holtzman as well.
Holtzman, now 84, served as District Attorney of Brooklyn after her four terms in Congress, and still works full-time at a law firm. We’ve stayed in touch ever since our first 1978 interview. While it remains unclear whether her specific legislation or similar laws will be used against undocumented or even legal immigrants to achieve the Trump administration’s agenda, I asked her for her reaction to that possibility.
“My law,” Holtzman said, “provides the authority for the US government to deport Nazi war criminals and people who engaged in persecution under the Nazis. We’re talking about people with blood on their hands who engaged in mass murder. The idea that people who came to this country seeking a better life would be deported under this law would be illegal, it would be outrageous, and it would be horrific on every level.”
Holtzman said nobody objects to President Trump’s promise to deport rapists, murderers and other criminal migrants. But, she added, “There’s no authority under my law to persecute – which is what it would be – people who for the most part came to this country to work in factories, as gardeners, to work in agriculture and to take care of the elderly. It’s a desecration of the work that I and so many others did to bring Nazi war criminals to justice. And it’s a desecration of the deaths of Americans who fought Hitler and defeated the Nazis.”
Holtzman first came to national attention in 1973 when, as a member of the House Judiciary Committee, she pushed for impeachment proceedings against President Richard Nixon, who eventually resigned before the House voted on articles of impeachment. Now, she’s appalled at the actions and policies of the current president. “The Trump administration,” she concluded, “is acting with the kind of cruelty that you would expect from a kind of government like the Nazis, or an authoritarian government. Trump said he was going to deport the criminals, but that’s not who’s being deported. So what he’s doing is a lie. And it’s cruel.”