Dear Editor:

Under the control of Hitler, Stalin, and Trump, these agencies of mass deportation terrified the populace and cowed political opponents of their respective authoritarian regimes.

Untethered by any judicial restraints, the Nazi thugs who comprised the Gestapo used their powers of ‘preventative arrest’ to kidnap leftists, Jews, intellectuals, homosexuals and other persons deemed inimical to the Third Reich. Their victims disappeared into concentration camps.

Agents of the NKVD Soviet security police, who also controlled regular law enforcement and state militias, were sent throughout the empire to apprehend Stalin’s “enemies”, often arriving after midnight in dreaded, unmarked vehicles — the ‘Black Marias.’ Their victims were summarily executed or transported to the ‘Gulag Archipelago’, a widespread network of prison and labor camps; the more fortunate ones were exiled or deported.

Without these instruments of terror, the power of an entire state could not be concentrated in the hands of one man … which brings us to Donald J. Trump.

With the complicity of Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, Kash Patel, the Republican Congress and the Conservative Supreme Court, Trump has unleashed the masked, plainclothes, heavily armed and body-armored ICE agents to raid court houses, churches, hospitals, schools, domestic violence shelters, farms, businesses and work sites, seizing U.S. citizens, elected officials, visa holders, student protesters, international scholars, tourists, and immigrants with no criminal records.

He has ordered Marines and National Guard troops to “protect” these agents in cities and states whose elected leaders have protested their deployment.

During these arrests, the abductors show no ID, present no warrant and speed off with their detainees in unmarked vehicles. Mothers are separated from their children, husbands from wives — and those left behind have no information regarding their family members’ whereabouts, even whether they have been deported to a third country or sent to the ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ gulag.

The ruthlessness of these indiscriminate ICE arrests is driven by Stephen Miller’s ambitious quotas: 3,000 people per day, one million a year — numbers Hitler and Stalin would admire.

America will never be “great again" by reprising the tactics of 20th-century dictators.

Bill Hammond

Boothbay