Philadelphia DA Vows to ‘Hunt’ Down ‘Wannabe Nazis’ of ICE After Trump Leaves Office

On the menu today: The progressive fury over the Trump administration and the actions of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has now led not merely to Nazi comparisons, but to pledges to hunt down lawbreaking ICE agents like the Nazis, and the treatment of Trump supporters to the way the French treated collaborators with the Nazis after the war. Read on.

Philly’s Larry Krasner Takes Aim at ICE

Standing before supporters carrying placards that read “Abolish ICE” and “ICE Out of Philadelphia,” Philadelphia district attorney Larry Krasner announced that he and other state and local prosecutors would pursue criminal charges against agents of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, characterizing the agents as “a small bunch of wannabe Nazis.”

He repeated the Nazi comparison, pledging, “If we have to hunt you down the way they hunted down Nazis for decades, we will find your identities”:

This is a small bunch of wannabe Nazis. That’s what they are. In a country of 350 million, we outnumber them. And as long as we stick to our values, protect our rights, make it very clear that homicide is not okay just because you are a federal officer. If we do that, this will end differently. I have one final promise to you, and that is that I along with a bunch of other state prosecutors — keep your eye on this, you’ll be hearing more about it tomorrow — but I along with a bunch of other state prosecutors are rallying around Mary Moriarty who is the prosecutor in Minneapolis. I know for a fact she is working 24/7 to make sure that there is justice coming out of two, what appear to be by all indications, criminal homicides and what appears to be by all indications, a criminal shooting of someone in the leg. I want you to understand that just as you have come together, there are state prosecutors coming together right now to make sure that people understand there will be accountability. There will be accountability now. There will be accountability in the future. There will be accountability after Trump is out of office. If we have to hunt you down the way they hunted down Nazis for decades, we will find your identities. We will find you. We will achieve justice and we will do so under the Constitution and the laws of the United States.

Krasner’s office said the coalition included:

• Jose Garza, District Attorney, Travis County, Austin, TX

• John Creuzot, District Attorney, Dallas County, Dallas, TX

• Laura Conover, Commonwealth’s Attorney for Pima County, Tucson, AZ

• Steve Descano, Commonwealth’s Attorney for Fairfax County, Fairfax, VA

• Parisa Dehghan-Tafti, Commonwealth’s Attorney for Arlington County and City of Falls Church, VA

• Stephanie Morales, Commonwealth’s Attorney for Portsmouth County, Portsmouth, VA

• Ramin Fatehi, Commonwealth’s Attorney Norfolk, Norfolk, VA

The U.S. has a lot of progressive prosecutors vehemently opposed to the president and his administration, but if any local district attorney was going to declare a metaphorical war against federal immigration enforcement and compare them to the Third Reich, Krasner ranks among the most likely suspects.

He was elected to the position of Philadelphia district attorney in 2017, after working as a criminal defense attorney for nearly 30 years. Progressive billionaire George Soros contributed $1.7 million to Krasner’s 2017 campaign, “more than five times as much as Krasner himself spent — and nearly 30 percent of all the spending in the seven-candidate primary.”

Krasner was considered part of a wave of Soros-backed progressive prosecutors who had dramatically different approaches to crime, particularly on prosecuting marijuana possession and prostitution and eliminating cash bail. Those other prosecutors — Kim Foxx in Chicago, George Gascón in Los Angeles, and Chesa Boudin in San Francisco — are no longer in office and all ended their terms in various states of controversy and/or disgrace and a loss of public faith in their abilities. But Krasner endures, having been reelected twice.

Upon stepping into the top job, Krasner fired 31 prosecutors, an early sign of the tumultuous staff changes to come. In 2021, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported:

When District Attorney Larry Krasner took office in 2018, he set about traveling the country, to Ivy League law schools and historically Black universities, inviting top graduates to help fulfill his vision for a progressive prosecutor’s office.

About 70 of those recruits have already left, joining an exodus that has included both veteran prosecutors and young idealists. In all, the loss of 261 attorneys during Krasner’s first term has thrown the office — already beset by conflict with the police and judiciary, and mired in pandemic-related backlogs — into what some describe as a state of chaos. . . .

Several young lawyers said they felt ill-prepared for their jobs in high-profile units, and said the staffing issues have impacted case outcomes. Nearly three-quarters of the 21,000 cases that resolved this year were either withdrawn by prosecutors or dismissed by judges, according a website maintained by the DA’s Office — 73 percent, compared to 36 percent of cases resolved in 2017.

“The DA’s Office is completely ill-equipped to prosecute serious cases outside a handful of prosecutors. They don’t have the experience. They don’t have the talent, and they don’t have the numbers to prosecute all the cases they need to,” said Shuaiyb Newton, a former homicide prosecutor.

That report was published in December 2021, shortly after Krasner was reelected with more than 66 percent of the vote in the primary, and 71 percent of the vote in the general election. In 2025, Krasner was reelected with 64 percent of the vote in the primary and 76 percent of the vote in the general election. If there’s been chaos and mismanagement in the Philadelphia district attorney’s office, the voters of Philadelphia don’t seem to mind.

In 2022, the Pennsylvania House of Representatives impeached Krasner for being unable or unwilling to prosecute criminals and perform his duties, by a vote of 107-85. The impeachment trial in the state senate was postponed indefinitely and in September 2024, the state Supreme Court ruled the articles of impeachment “became null and void” when that legislative session came to a close.

On Krasner’s watch, crime in Philadelphia has followed the pattern of many American cities: relatively low before the pandemic, spiking to all-time highs during and in the immediate aftermath of Covid, and then declining rapidly in recent years. “In 2025, 222 people were killed — the fewest since 1966, when there were a fraction of as many guns in circulation and 178 murders.” The city’s homicides peaked at 562 in 2021. Krasner and the rest of the city’s law enforcement can take a bow at an increase in solved homicide cases:

Most notably, he said, detectives are making more arrests in non-fatal shootings and homicides. Experts say that arresting shooters is a key violence prevention strategy — it prevents that shooter from committing more violence or from ending up as a victim of retaliation, sends a message of accountability and deterrence, and improves the relationship between police and the community.

The homicide clearance rate this year ended at 81.98 percent, the highest since 1984, and the clearance of nonfatal shootings reached 39.9 percent.

“That’s unheard of,” said [Adam Geer, the city’s director of public safety]. “The small amount of people who are committing these really heinous, violent crimes in our neighborhood are being taken off the street.”

Perhaps Krasner has concluded that crime in Philadelphia is largely solved, freeing him up to focus on prosecuting ICE agents.

You may recall that earlier this month, Philadelphia Sheriff Rochelle Bilal called ICE agents “made up, fake, wannabe law enforcement” in the aftermath of the shooting of Renee Good. Her statement caused some headaches for the Philadelphia Police Department, the city’s main law enforcement agency. Philadelphia Police Commissioner Kevin J. Bethel issued a statement clarifying, “The Philadelphia Sheriff’s Office is a separate entity led by an elected official. Its responsibilities are limited to court security, service of legal process, prisoner transport, fugitive apprehension, and sheriff’s sales. It does not police the city, conduct criminal investigations, or direct or oversee municipal policing.”

The Philadelphia Inquirer editorial board has argued that the Philadelphia Sheriff’s Office, long plagued by corruption, is a dysfunctional, poorly performing anachronism and its duties should be transferred to other agencies.

(I notice this morning that the Frequently Asked Questions page of the Philadelphia Sheriff’s Office begins, “As the pandemic continues. . . .” This suggests the organization’s webpage has not been updated in a half-decade or so.)

On January 23, the Philadelphia Sheriff’s Office announced the policy that “ICE agents are NOT permitted to effectuate warrants/make arrests inside the courtrooms, inside the courthouse, or on courthouse grounds.” Lenore Ramos Juarez, the defense organizer for the Philadelphia-based nonprofit organization Juntos, told a local news site “that more than 90 individuals have been detained by ICE at the Center City courthouse in 2025 alone.”

Call People Nazis Enough Times . . .

The progressive insistence that modern-day Republicans are morally indistinguishable from Nazis is now an old trope.

But that historically ignorant and incendiary charge mostly used to come from some far-left professor, a babbling cable news talking head, a celebrity wanting to look impassioned, or some nut on an internet chat board. Now it’s coming from district attorneys and governors, people with actual political and state power, and, at least in theory, more credibility with the public than some random schmo on the internet.

In his comments yesterday, Krasner is just echoing Minnesota Governor Tim Walz’s declaration that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was “Donald Trump’s modern-day Gestapo” at a commencement speech in May.

(Remember, as this newsletter has laid out, we live in “a political culture full of arsonists,” “elected officials don’t really want peace or calm,” and “the streets of Minneapolis are going to get worse before they get better.”)

I know you’ve all been clamoring for the geopolitical, constitutional analysis of . . . (checks notes) . . . Molly Ringwald. The queen of ’80s teen dramas has been thinking about our current moment a great deal, and on Instagram she posted:

I feel can’t stay silent, and neither should you. There is something horrible, horrible, going on in our country right now. And we have one of the greatest countries — had one of the greatest countries in the world, and I’ve always been so proud to be an American. But right now, this is a fascist government. It’s not becoming a fascist government; it is a fascist government. And ICE is brutalizing people. I don’t care how you identify, if you’re a Democrat, if you’re a Republican, if you’re independent, if you don’t like to be political at all, it doesn’t matter. You have to look at what kind of country you want to live in. And I don’t think I need to remind you — I’ll just give a little history lesson here — if you look at what happened in France, where I lived for a few years in my twenties, they were taken over by the Nazis. They were invaded, they were taken over, and a lot of people, a lot of people, collaborated. And then there were people that did not collaborate and were part of the resistance. Eventually, they got their country back. And those people who collaborated were found to be criminal. And that is what’s going to happen. (emphasis added) I mean, you should not support what is going on, just because, these are human beings. And we are human beings. We cannot forget our humanity. But if you don’t care about that, if you only care about yourself, then realize that you are going to be seen as a collaborationist [sic]. Okay? And I don’t think that anybody wants that. I don’t think that anybody wants to be on the wrong side of history. So please, please, use your voice and protest.

You don’t have to care about what Ringwald says, but notice the progressive argument is shifting from “Trump is like Hitler” and “ICE is the Gestapo” to “Republicans and those who voted for Trump are the Nazis.” The enemy, in their eyes, is not merely the head of government in the Oval Office or the armed agents of the state; it’s the neighbor who voted for him, the guy down the street who wears a MAGA cap, and the local branch office of the Republican Party. It’s no longer a particular leader who represents the dangerous fascist threat who must be punished; it is their fellow Americans, and because someday the Trump presidency will end, those who supported Trump must be treated the way the French people treated collaborators after the war. (Postwar punishment of French collaborators got very ugly and very brutal, and included executions, both judicial and extrajudicial. I wonder if Ringwald has executions in mind.)

Earlier this week, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum put out a statement implicitly rebuking Walz for comparing illegal immigrants to Anne Frank:

“Leaders making false equivalencies to her experience for political purposes is never acceptable,” the statement added, without naming Walz. “Despite tensions in Minneapolis, exploiting the Holocaust is deeply offensive, especially as antisemitism surges.”

Leaders can be bad without being comparable to Adolf Hitler, people can be bad without being Nazis, and government policies can be bad without being comparable to the Holocaust.

The U.S. Holocaust museum was and is right. Sadly, nobody seemed to want to learn anything.

ADDENDUM: Stephen Gutowski, spotlighting a ridiculous contradiction: “As Democrats across the country have spoken up to defend Alex Pretti’s gun rights, Virginia Democrats are moving forward with a new ban that would have outlawed his gun and magazines. They’re even pushing to make possession of currently owned magazines illegal.”