Tim Walz Compares Trump’s ICE Raids to Anne Frank Getting Arrested by Nazis
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) compared President Donald Trump’s ICE and Border Patrol raids on illegal immigrants to Anne Frank being captured by Nazi Germany during a press conference on Sunday.
The governor made the comparison while urging Trump to withdraw federal immigration agents from his state following the shooting death of protester Alex Pretti a day earlier.
Walz said kids who are either in the country illegally or are the children of illegal immigrants are terrified of going to school because of Trump’s raids — and that history will judge his administration harshly for it.
“Allow our children to go back to school. 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.”
Critics would point out there are some holes in Walz’s comparison, like the fact that Frank was a German citizen before Adolf Hitler’s government stripped her and other Jews of their citizenship. And of course, there are no immigrants being sent to death camps on cattle trains in the U.S.
Frank and her family were living in the Netherlands when they went into hiding to avoid the occupying Nazis; they were discovered and captured in 1944, and Frank died in a concentration camp at the age of 15 a year later. Her diary from her time in hiding was published a few years after World War II and became one of the defining accounts of living under harrowing Nazi occupation.
Walz previously referred to ICE as President Trump’s “modern-day Gestapo” last year. He is not the only Democrat who has compared the president’s crackdown on illegal immigration to Nazi Germany, though.
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) last October compared Trump’s ICE raids to Nazi stormtroopers rounding up Jews and other minorities.
“This is how authoritarian regimes do it. They create these kind of fake ideas that there’s an enemy out there and it could be sitting next to you at one of these tables. So just somebody sitting at your table that you don’t like might be one of those enemies,” Pritzker said at the time. “So let’s round them up, let’s make sure they are the subjects of the laws that we’re passing, because we don’t like who they are. That is what authoritarian regimes do.”
Watch above via CNN.
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