Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz is facing pushback from a prominent holocaust remembrance museum after suggesting children in Minnesota today are fearful in the same way Anne Frank was before she was killed by Nazis.
“Anne Frank was targeted and murdered solely because she was Jewish,” the U.S. Holocaust Museum posted on X on Monday.
“Leaders making false equivalencies to her experience for political purposes is never acceptable. Despite tensions in Minneapolis, exploiting the Holocaust is deeply offensive, especially as antisemitism surges.”
During a recent press briefing, Walz said some children in the state felt scared to go outside because of aggressive tactics being employed by federal agents cracking down on illegal immigration.
“We have got children in Minnesota hiding in their houses, afraid to go outside. Many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank,” Walz said on Sunday after the shooting day of Alex Pretti during an encounter with federal agents, referring to the German-Jewish teenager who documented her life in hiding during the Nazi persecution in World War II.
“Somebody is going to write that children’s story about Minnesota, and there’s one person who can end this now,” he said, referring to President Donald Trump.
The comment sparked criticism from many on social media, President Trump’s antisemitism envoy, and a Republican congressional candidate who spoke to Fox News Digital.
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“Governor Tim Walz’s decision to compare federal immigration enforcement in Minnesota to Anne Frank and the Holocaust is dangerous, disgusting, and profoundly irresponsible,” retired Minnesota State Patrol Lt. John Nagel, running for Congress as a Republican against Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar, told Fox News Digital.
“No matter where people stand on immigration policy or recent enforcement actions, invoking the Holocaust — one of the darkest chapters in human history — has no place in responsible public leadership. These comparisons do not clarify the debate. They distort it.”
Nagel went on to call Walz’s comment a “troubling pattern” rather than an “isolated remark.”
“Governor Walz has repeatedly reached for extreme historical analogies — including references to Nazis and the Gestapo — when discussing law enforcement and political opponents,” Nagel added. “That kind of rhetoric matters. When elected officials portray police or federal agents as Nazis, they create an environment where protesters can convince themselves that violently confronting law enforcement is not only justified, but morally required. That is how words turn into real-world danger.”
Fox News Digital reached out to Walz’s office for comment.
Numerous activists across the country have used Nazi comparisons while blasting the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigrants, including Mexican-American journalist Maria Hinojosa compared Latino children in the U.S. to Jewish children during the Holocaust, saying some fear abduction and death like Anne Frank, Fox News Digital previously reported.
On Monday, Walz appeared to be striking a less inflammatory tone, speaking with President Trump on the phone in a call his office told Fox Digital on Monday was a “productive” call where he was making the “case that we need impartial investigations of the Minneapolis shootings involving federal agents, and that we need to reduce the number of federal agents in Minnesota.”
Trump announced Monday that he was deploying White House border czar Tom Homan to Minnesota and that he will report directly to the president.
Fox News Digital’s Emma Colton and Louis Casiano contributed to this report.
