Protesters in San Francisco and other cities descended on the offices of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to demand an end to the “zero tolerance” policy on the border, comparing the agency to the Nazi Gestapo.

Demonstrators were reacting to reports that illegal aliens who were caught crossing the border with children were being detained and separated from them as the Trump administration ended the practice of “catch-and-release.”

The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

Hundreds of protesters descended on a block of San Francisco’s Financial District on Tuesday to protest the Trump administration’s policy of separating thousands of immigrant children from their parents at the border. Demonstrators, armed with homemade signs and rallying cries, blocked the entrance to the U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement field office in San Francisco around 1 p.m., choking the stretch of road on Sansome Street between Jackson and Washington and diverting traffic. Emily Nahmanson, who left her IT job [sic] at a video game console manufacturer to attend the protest, held a sign that read, “ICE = American Gestapo” while noting parallels she sees between the Trump administration and Nazi Germany. … “Honestly, there are people who think the Nazis were not wrong,” she said, adding that it was time for people to get off Instagram and start paying attention to the politics around them.

Similar protests were held this week at ICE offices in Portland, Oregon, among other cities.

The Gestapo were the secret police of the Nazi state. They suppressed political dissent and were used to hunt down, deport, and murder Jews. They became notorious for their brutality.

One crucial difference: the Gestapo murdered Jews for being Jews, not for crossing an international border illegally.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He was named to Forward’s 50 “most influential” Jews in 2017. He is the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.