A hearing over legislation that would ban sanctuary cities in Michigan prompted fiery testimony from a Holocaust survivor , who likened the immigration crackdown under President Donald Trump to Nazis rounding up Jews.

The Michigan state House is considering bills that would prevent cities from enacting policies that limit cooperation between local authorities and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials. These so-called sanctuary policy prohibition acts have similar counterparts in more than 30 other state legislatures .

At a hearing on the bills Wednesday, representatives heard about an hour of testimony from opponents of the bill, none more excoriating than from Rene Lichtman, 79, who works with several groups of Holocaust survivors.

Im a child survivor of the Holocaust, Lichtman said. I was about 2 years old when the war began and I went into hiding. My family members were picked up in the streets of Paris in the very same way that ICE people are deputizing local police and picking [undocumented immigrants] up in the streets.

He said that the French police, deputized by the Nazis, kept lists of Jews in Paris, including Jewish children, including children on my street, who were picked up and went to the gas chambers while I was fortunate to be in hiding.

I see a lot of parallels to what is going on in cities like Ann Arbor and Pontiac, where ICE is coming in and with the help of the local police are picking up immigrants, Lichtman said.

No cities in Michigan call themselves sanctuary cities, but a few, including Ann Arbor, limit cooperation with ICE and would be in violation of Michigan law if the new bills are passed. Advocates in Ann Arbor and Pontiac have reported an uptick in immigration arrests.

Under Trump, ICE has ramped up enforcement of illegal immigration, arresting 41,000 people in the first 100 days of the new administration, a 38 percent increase compared with the same period last year.

Some local governments have immigrant-friendly policies, such as prohibiting police from honoring ICE requests to continue detaining suspected unauthorized immigrants. The White House has vowed to punish sanctuary cities , and Trumps executive order to withhold their federal funding has been challenged in court .

Critics of Michigans bill and others, like the extreme law passed in Texas last month , say the push against sanctuary policies erodes safety, because immigrants are less likely to report crimes or cooperate with police .