Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, invoked Anne Frank in exhorting US President Donald Trump to call off the ICE operations in the Twin Cities in which a second protester was killed over the weekend, prompting a rebuke from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Speaking at a press conference on Sunday, Walz — whose master’s degree focused on Holocaust education — suggested that the conditions facing children in his state during the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement raids were of a kind with those facing Frank during the Holocaust.

“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,” he said. “Somebody is going to write that children’s story about Minnesota.”

The prominent mention of Frank, who died of disease in a Nazi concentration camp after her family’s hiding place was betrayed, adds to a growing discourse about whether ICE’s operations targeting immigrants in Minnesota can be compared to the Nazis’ tactics in rooting out Jews during the Holocaust. Figures such as Stephen King and Bruce Springsteen have likened ICE to the Gestapo.

Until recently, Nazi comparisons were long considered inappropriate by many in the Jewish world who argued that such analogies cheapen the memory of the particular........

© The Times of Israel