Trump’s Victims of Immigrant Crime Engagement (VOICE) is a program that establishes a link between the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), in addition to issuing quarterly reports of undocumented immigrant crime and the names of individuals accused of crimes. The stated intention is to prevent crime committed by undocumented aliens living in the United States and to give a voice to those who have been victims of crimes committed by immigrants.

I do not mean to minimize the tragedies of those who have been victims of similar crime, such as Jamiel Shaw, Susan Oliver, her daughter, Jenna Oliver, and Jessica Davis, who Trump mentioned in his address to congress justifying this new system. But their personal tragedies are just that, they are tragedies that are the result of isolated incidents of crime that are not indicative of a larger trend of crime coming from immigrants. In fact, there is no empirical evidence that suggests that immigrants are more likely to commit crime than native-born or naturalized American citizens.

While it is not always tactful to draw comparisons of anybody’s actions to those of the Nazi Party, it is sometimes necessary to truly contextualize the actions of our leaders and help understand the gravity of their actions. Within Nazi Germany there were similar efforts by the government to single out a group and portray them as the enemy, then it was the Jews, and now it is undocumented immigrants.

Furthermore, this concept of creating a report of crimes committed by a group of perceived enemies to is not dissimilar to the actions of the press and government of Nazi Germany. In the Nazi periodical, Neues Volk, there was a column entitled “Der Jude Kriminell” (The Criminal Jew), in which the photos of Jews who had been accused of crimes were published alongside the crimes of which they were accused. This, in addition to other anti-Semitic propaganda published by the Nazis resulted in a spike of hate crimes against Jews within Germany.

This is not meant to insinuate that President Trump has committed any atrocities on any level similar to that of Adolf Hitler, or that he has any intention of doing so. It is just helpful to maintain an open mind about the actions of the President, and to understand the possible consequences of a program such as VOICE, no matter how well-intentioned it may be.