Refugees by Honoré Daumier (1808-1879)
By Jan Lundius
STOCKHOLM, Sweden, Jan 13 2026 – 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. However, 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.
ICE agent, photo from Huffington Post
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 behaviour 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 descent in various concentration camps. Lesser known is probably the forced deportation of between 300,000 and 2 million Mexicans and Mexican-Americans during the Great Depression between 1929 and 1939, forty to sixty percent of them were U.S, citizens and overwhelmingly children.
The European 20th century history of mass deportations and human slaughter is even darker. It began at the outskirts of the continent when Russian forces between 1863 and 1878 invaded Circassia by the Black Sea, systematically killing and deporting 95 to 97 percent of its population, resulting in the deaths of between 1 and 1.5 million. This was followed by the pogroms, i.e. mass killings of Jews, in for example Odessa (1881), Kishinev (1903), Kiev (1905), and Bialystok (1906), leaving more than 2,000 dead and resulting in a mass migration of Jews from the affected areas, worsened during the following civil war when 35,000 to 250,000 Jews were massacred between 1918 and 1920. At the same time the Bolshevik regime killed and/or deported an estimated 300,000 to 500,000 Don Cossacks.
After World War I between 90,000 and 300,000 Albanians were deported from Yugoslavia and up to 80,000 were killed during this new nation’s colonization of Kosovo. The expulsion and genocide of Armenians and Greeks which occurred in Turkish Anatolia both during and after World War I resulted in mass migrations and between 2 and 3 million Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians were killed. Over 1.2 million ethnic Greeks were expelled from Turkey in 1922-1924, while the Greeks expelled 400,000 Muslims.
Even worse was to come. Between 1935 and 1945, Nazi Germany systematically killed an estimated 130,500 Roma and Sinti people and between 1938 and 1945 more than 6 million Jews. During the same period Nazi German forces killed 3 million Ukrainians, 1,6 million Poles, 1,6 million Russians, 1,4 million Byelorussians. The German allies in Croatia massacred between 200,000 and 500,000 Serbs, as well as approximately 25,000 Roma/Sinti and 30,000 Jews. Their adversaries, the Serbs, killed 32,000 Croats and 33.000 Bosniaks.
The overwhelming part of all these victims were civilians, not combatants, and the estimations above are only some examples of massacres and deportations that occurred all over Europe during World War II.
In the Soviet Union (USSR), Stalin ordered the resettlement of more than 3,5 million ethnic minorities – Ukrainians, Volga Germans, Chechens, Balts, Kalmyks, Crimean Tatars, Balkars, Karachays, Turks, and Ingush. Many of them never returned to their homelands and up to 400,000 deaths due to these expulsions were archived by Soviet authorities.
Before that the Holodomor, a massive man-made famine from 1932 to 1933 had killed 3.5 to 5 million in Ukraine, as well as 62,000 in the Kuban area, while over 300,000 Ukrainians were deported to Kazakhstan, where many died.
All these numbers are just estimations and they might be higher or lower. However, we have to keep in mind that behind every single number we find cruelty and unimaginable suffering.
At the conclusion of World War I, it was borders that were invented and adjusted, while people were on the whole left in place, but during and after World War II what happened was rather the opposite – boundaries remained broadly intact (though USSR significantly expanded its territory) and people were moved instead … millions of them.
For example, 1.6 to 2 million Poles were by the invading Germans expelled from their lands, not counting millions of slave workers deported from Poland to the German Reich. At the same time the USSR transferred 380,000 Poles from their home territories, while 410 000 Finns had to leave Karelia, ceded to the USSR.
On top of that, losses on the battle fields were enormous – Soviet Union lost 6 million soldiers, Germany 4 million, Italy 400,000, and Romania 300,000. If combining military and civilian losses Poland lost one person in 5 of her pre-war population, Yugoslavia one in 8 and Greece one in 14, compared with one in 15 in Germany and 1one in 77 in France.
Nazi Germany captured 5.5 million Soviet soldiers and out of them 3.3 million died in the camps, of the 750,000 German soldiers captured by USSR 20,000 survived.
All this cruelty continued after the war and it was now members of ethnic groups connected with loosing nations who were lumped together into one unit, where individuals came to suffer, both the guilty and the innocent ones.
At the 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 difficult 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 often killed, ethnic groups all over Europe.
Main sources: Judt, Tony (2005) Postwar: A History of Europe since 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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