Minnesota Governor Likens State’s Immigration Crackdown To Nazi Occupation
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) compared the violent immigration raids in his state to the Nazi’s occupation of Europe during World War II during a Sunday speech, where he invoked the memory of Holocaust victim Anne Frank.
Walz begged President Donald Trump to have his agents stand down while addressing the public one day after 37-year-old ICU nurse Alex Pretti was shot and killed by United States Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis and weeks after another Minneapolis resident, Renée Good, was gunned down by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent while in her car.
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The deaths, along with the intensity of federal agents tactics and their use of force against demonstrators, have incited widespread protests across the North Star State, which Walz described as one of the “safest” places in the country to live.
The former Democratic candidate for vice president went on to lament the fact some young Minnesota residents were living in fear of being detained or possibly killed amid the operations, which began last month.
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“We have got children in Minnesota hiding in their houses, afraid to go outside,” Walz said. “Many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank. Somebody’s going to write that children’s story about Minnesota.”
In personal diaries which were published posthumously, Frank chronicled her and her family’s life in hiding during the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam, Netherlands, between 1942 and 1944. The Franks were eventually captured by Gestapo agents and sent to concentration camps, where Anne died at the age of 16.
Sunday’s speech was not the first time Walz likened the brutality of America’s immigration operations under Trump to agents of the Third Reich.
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While delivering a speech at the University of Minnesota Law School’s graduation last May, he described ICE as “Donald Trump’s modern-day Gestapo is scooping folks up off the streets.”
“They’re in unmarked vans, wearing masks, being shipped off to foreign torture dungeons, no chance to mount a defense, not even a chance to kiss a loved one goodbye, just grabbed up by masked agents, shoved into those vans, and disappeared.”
The Department of Homeland Security denounced Walz remarks in a post on X at the time, calling it “absolutely sickening” to compare American law enforcement to Nazi forces.
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