WASHINGTON—Claudia Koonz, a historian at Duke University, wrote a book about how the Nazis prepared Germans to accept genocide.

One of their tactics was portraying average Jews, who were overwhelmingly law-abiding, as a menace to society. In the 1930s, for example, a Nazi newspaper published a weekly list of Jews’ alleged crimes.

In January, U.S. President Donald Trump ordered his government to publish a weekly list of crimes committed by illegal immigrants, who are overwhelmingly law-abiding, in most of the country’s biggest cities.

Trump’s order also established a government office solely dedicated to helping victims of crimes committed by undocumented people. On Tuesday, he promoted the office — VOICE, for Victims Of Immigration Crime Engagement — in a prime-time address to Congress.

“Oh my God,” Koonz said Wednesday. “That’s disgusting.”

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Trump has drawn effusive praise from pundits for a speech in which he abandoned his usual stream of insults for the language of optimism. But he also horrified and alarmed many observers, including scholars of dictatorial regimes and of immigration, for using his office to single out the misdeeds of a small minority within a marginalized minority.

Numerous studies show that immigrants, including illegal immigrants, are less likely to commit crimes than native-born citizens.

“It’s tough to make parallels when the scapegoat is so different. But the process is the same,” Koonz said. “The process was to exaggerate every piece of evidence showing the criminality of the targeted group. So even though it was atypical and not representative, by the media blitz that accompanied it, people began to see it as normal.”

Trump is very much unlike Hitler, Koonz said, stating the obvious, and there is no indication his policy aims are more draconian than a border wall and a hard line on deportations. But advocates for immigrants say his demonization manufactures a public appetite for punitive policy and fosters a climate of fear and animosity that puts millions at risk for discrimination and violence.

“It’s everything from cold-blooded murder to kids taunting in the schoolyard. But it’s turning people against each other,” said Lynn Tramonte, deputy director of America’s Voice, which advocates pro-immigrant reform. For undocumented people, she said, “it hurts. It hurts to think America believes they are here to commit crimes when they’re actually here just to feed themselves and feed their family.”

Trump disparaged illegal immigrants from the first speech of his campaign, when he referred to Mexican migrants as criminals and rapists. (He added: “Some, I assume, are good people.”) As president, he has falsely blamed undocumented people for Chicago’s gang violence.

His creation of VOICE, and demand for a weekly list of crimes committed by illegal immigrants in “sanctuary” cities — likely including New York, Chicago and Los Angeles — represents a significant escalation: the institutionalization of his incendiary rhetoric. Though the U.S. has a long history of discriminating against immigrants, a top scholar said he could not think of an equivalent for a government body that focuses solely on immigrant crime.

“I am unaware of any precedent for this VOICE office. Ever,” said Ruben G. Rumbaut, a sociologist at the University of California, Irvine. “The function of this program will be, one, to further scapegoat immigrants and portray them as deadly threats, and, two, to use the perception of threat to rally and rile the ‘base’ for political gain, relying now the power and prestige of the presidency.”

A white man in Kansas is accused in the murder last week of a legal immigrant, Indian engineer Srinivas Kuchibhotla, whom he encountered at a bar. According to Alok Madasani, another legal Indian immigrant he shot, the killer had asked “what visa are we currently on and whether we are staying here illegally.”

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Trump’s team has dismissed the notion of a link between hate incidents and Trump’s words and acts. His spokesman, Sean Spicer, told reporters it would be “a bit absurd” to “suggest that there’s any correlation” between the president and the Kansas shooting. And advocates of an uncompromising stand argue that crimes committed by illegal immigrants are indeed different from others, since the perpetrators should never have been there at all.

“Highlighting some victims of criminal aliens doesn’t suggest that all immigrants are criminals,” Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, told Time magazine. “Shame on those advocacy groups that are trying to minimize the experience of these families.”

Trump’s chief strategist is Steve Bannon, a nationalist who has opposed even legal immigration. Bannon was formerly chief executive of Breitbart News, a website popular with white supremacists that had a section devoted to “black crime.”

The idea for the dedicated office, though, seems to have come not from Bannon but from the families themselves. On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly invited onto his rally stages members of the Remembrance Project, a group of people who have lost loved ones to illegal immigrants.

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The group argued that they need a special government office because of the “uniqueness of these killings.” Their families, they said, “are almost always forgotten, left to deal alone with their grief, often victimized by an unfamiliar legal system, and frequently face financial ruin.”

They persuaded only one candidate. Ten months later, Trump invited four of them to his quasi-state of the union address, introduced them by name to the country, described the killings as vicious, and declared he was “providing a voice to those who have been ignored by our media and silenced by special interests.”

He did not identify the special interests.