WASHINGTON — Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) likened President Trump’s immigration crackdown in the Twin Cities to the barbaric Nazi occupation chronicled by Anne Frank.
“We have got children in Minnesota hiding in their houses, afraid to go outside,” Walz declared during a fiery press conference on Sunday. “Many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank.”
“Somebody’s going to write that children’s story about Minnesota.”
Frank famously chronicled her harrowing time in hiding during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands for over two years before her capture. Ultimately, she died in a concentration camp.
Taking a somber tone, Walz vowed to be defiant in the face of Operation Metro Surge and re-upped his well-worn demands for the Trump administration to end the surge of federal law enforcement personnel to the state.
“If it was the intention of Donald Trump to make an example of Minnesota, then I’m damn proud of the example that the world is seeing,” the governor added.
Tensions in Minneapolis have soared in the wake of a Border Patrol agent’s shooting of Alex Pretti, 37, an ICU nurse, on Saturday.
Footage showed multiple officers pinning Pretti to the ground and removing his 9mm handgun, the gun slide of which appeared to move. Officers then opened fire on Pretti.
Attorney General Pam Bondi penned a letter to Walz on how to end the chaos in Minnesota but the governor shrugged that off.
“There’s 2 million documents in the Epstein files we’re still waiting on. Go ahead and work on those,” Walz snapped back on Sunday.
“We cooperate. We don’t do their job,” Walz later contended when pressed about the Trump administration’s demands that it can get more access to the state’s jails. “It’s their job to do immigration.”
The shooting of Pretti came some two weeks after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer shot Renee Good, also 37, after she accelerated her SUV in his direction.
An investigation into Pretti’s death is ongoing, according to top officials, including Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem.
“I don’t care if you are conservative, are flying a Donald Trump flag, a libertarian ‘Don’t Tread on Me,’ a Democratic Socialist — this is an inflection point, America,” Walz stressed.
“If we cannot all agree that the smearing of an American citizen and besmirching everything they stood for and asking us not to believe what we saw, someone has to be accountable.”
