‘History's gravest chapters’: Netizens weigh in after Tim Walz invokes Anne Frank to criticise ICE crackdown

“Terrible things are happening outside. At any time of night and day, poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes.....Families are torn apart; men, women and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared.”

If those lines sound hauntingly familiar, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz believes they should. The words were written by Anne Frank while hiding in an attic during Nazi occupation, her diary later becoming one of the most devastating records of state-sponsored persecution in history. Now, Walz says, that same fear is resurfacing in America.

As outrage mounts over the killing of ICU nurse Alex Pretti by federal immigration agents, the Democratic governor has invoked Anne Frank’s famous book, 'The Diary of Anne Frank', to condemn President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota. Speaking at a press conference on Sunday, Walz compared ICE and Border Patrol operations in the state to the kind of authoritarian pursuit that once hunted families like Frank’s, urging the administration to withdraw federal agents immediately.

Walz said children, whether they are undocumented themselves or the US-born children of undocumented parents, are increasingly afraid to attend school amid stepped-up immigration raids. He warned that history would judge the federal government harshly if such enforcement continues unchecked.

“Somebody’s going to write that children’s story about Minnesota,” Walz said, urging a de-escalation of immigration enforcement activity.

Walz has made similar comparisons before. Last year, he referred to ICE as President Trump’s “modern-day Gestapo.” He is not the only Democratic leader to liken the administration’s immigration policies to authoritarian regimes.

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker previously warned: “This is how authoritarian regimes do it. They create these kinds 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. 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.”

Critics say such rhetoric reflects growing alarm over ICE’s tactics on the ground. In recent weeks, social media has been flooded with videos and testimonies of people being stopped, questioned and detained in public spaces, fuelling fear within immigrant communities.

Just last week, a widely shared image showed ICE agents detaining a five-year-old boy wearing a Spider-Man backpack in the Minneapolis suburb of Columbia Heights. The child, Liam Ramos, became a flashpoint for outrage, with advocates calling his detention evidence that Trump’s mass deportation campaign has “little to do with crime and a lot to do with terrorizing children and their families.”

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said ICE officers took the boy into custody only after his father fled during an attempted arrest. But advocates argue the incident is part of a broader pattern.

According to a Guardian analysis of records obtained by the Deportation Data Project, ICE booked around 3,800 minors into immigrant family detention between January and October 2025, including children as young as one or two years old. More than 2,600 of those minors were apprehended by ICE officers inside the country rather than at the border, a shift critics say reflects an increasingly aggressive enforcement strategy. Public reaction to Walz’s Anne Frank analogy was swift.

One user wrote, "And just like we look back and ask “how could this happen” one day people will look back on 2020s America and wonder the same. All it takes is for good men to stay silent."

Another said, "If Anne Frank was alive today: "You don't need to hide in my basement....you can just take the free flight to your home country""

A third added, "Governor Walz's words are a stark warning, and entirely warranted. This administration's vindictive, unchecked immigration crackdown, with agents evading accountability for deadly force while terrorising communities, fosters exactly the kind of fear that echoes history's gravest chapters. It's lawless, un-American, and a disgrace."