Ethnic Cleansing: Europe, U.S. & Global Issues
- STOCKHOLM, Sweden, January 13 (IPS) - At the moment, ICE's advancement in the U.S.
- ICE has currently 22,000 employees,a number destined to grow thanks to new recruits.
- In 2025, US deportations did last year surge with over 622,000 official removals and an additional 1.9 million self-deportations, totalling over 2.5 million people leaving the U.S.
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STOCKHOLM, Sweden, January 13 (IPS) – At the moment, ICE’s advancement in the U.S. is apparently dividing the nation’s population into desired and undesirable elements. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was born after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the Twin Towers and intended to be a response to terrorism. Though, with Donald Trump’s return to the White House, federal immigration agents have become the president’s praetorian guard, implementing his immigration politics.
ICE has currently 22,000 employees,a number destined to grow thanks to new recruits. Its budget is USD 30 billion a year. during 2025, the agency’s spending on fire arms has grown 600 percent. Its agents generally act with their faces covered, and move around heavily armed, in unmarked vehicles.
In 2025, US deportations did last year surge with over 622,000 official removals and an additional 1.9 million self-deportations, totalling over 2.5 million people leaving the U.S. This forced migration has been likened to ethnic cleansing, i.e.the systematic forced removal of ethnic, racial, or religious groups from a given area, with the intent of making a society ethnically homogenous. An interpretation which appears not to be entirely unreasonable considering President Trump’s constantly repeated rhetorics. Politics that might be compared to similar xenophobic statements from a number of so-called patriotic parties in Europe.
This while it has been indicated that between 900,000 and 1.6 million Ukrainians on Russian-occupied territories have been deported to Russia, including 260,000 children. Outside of Europe similar activities are taking place in several other areas. For example, in Gaza where from the beginning of the Gaza war on 13 October 2023, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) forced the evacuation of 1.1 million people from Northen Gaza, while the land strip has been bombed and destroyed.
We have to admit that after reaching catastrophic dimensions during the last century the phenomenon of ethnic cleansing is still with us. As the herd animals that we are, we humans have become afflicted with the unfortunate trait of dividing individuals into groups, which we judge and treat according to broad generalizations based on people’s group affiliation, regardless of their unique personality.
Given the xenophobic storms now raging in both in the U.S. and Europe, it may be appropriate to recall the human disasters that such behavior has caused on their continents. the genocide that the indigenous people of the U.S. were subjected to is well known, and also when during World War II U.S. forcibly relocated and incarcerated about 120,000 U.S, citizens of Japanese
Potsdam Conference from 17 July to 2 August 1945 the heads of the leading Allies – the USSR, the United kingdom, and the U.S. – agreed upon “orderly and humane” expulsions of the “German populations” from Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, but not Yugoslavia and Romania. As a result,between 13,5 and 16.5 million “ethnic Germans” were expulsed from Central and Eastern European countries.
Estimates of the number of those who died during this process are being debated and range from a half to 3 million. As an example, investigations by a joint German and Czech commission of historians did in 1995 established that 2.1 million ethnic Germans were deported from Czechoslovakia to Germany. The death toll was at least 15,000 persons, but it could range up to a maximum of 30,000 dead, if one assumes that many deaths were not reported.
Yugoslavia was a particularly horrifying example of ethnic cleansing both during and after world War II. As mentioned above Croats and Serbs constantly massacred each other. During the so called foibe massacres (foibes are sink holes common in the region and many victims were thrown into them) ethnic Italians were killed by Communist partisans. During and after the war these crimes caused an exodus amounting to between 230,000 and 350,000 “ethnic Italians”, estimates of massacred victims range from 3,000 to 11,000.
These are just a few examples of expulsions and massacres of some Europeans,without mentioning the horrible fate of many Greeks,Albanians,Bulgarians,Hungarians,Turks,and many others who happened to be minorities in countries where they had lived for centuries. While considering this often forgotten, or at least unmentioned, history of millions of unwelcomed victims and refugees criss-crossing a bombed out and miserable Europe it is challenging to comprehend that so many descendants of these suffering people are now gathering around xenophobic parties which make refugeeism, whether for one’s life, or due to general misery, a crime.
Contemplating the heavily armed ICE agents in the U.S. “liberating” their nation from “foreign elements” you might easily evoke images of equally armed SS troopers, Soviet NKVD agents, Romanian Iron Guards, Croatian Ustaše and many similar units who expelled, and frequently enough killed, ethnic groups all over Europe.
Main sources: Judt, tony (2005) Postwar: A History of Europe as 1945. London: Vintage.Lieberman, Benjamin (2013) terrible Fate: Ethnic Cleansing in the Making of Modern Europe. Lanham MD: Rowman & littlefield. Totten, Samuel et al., eds. (1997) Century of Genocide; Eyewitness Accounts and Critical Views. New York: Garland Publishing.
IPS UN Bureau
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