Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz compared Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to Hitler’s Gestapo in the keynote address at the University of Minnesota Law School on graduation on Saturday.
“Donald Trump’s modern-day Gestapo is scooping folks up off the streets,” Walz said. “They’re in unmarked vans, wearing masks, being shipped off to foreign torture dungeons. No chance to mount a defense. Not even a chance to kiss a loved one goodbye. Just grabbed up by masked agents, shoved into those vans, and disappeared.”
Tim Walz calls ICE agents modern day “Gestapo.” The Gestapo were the Nazi secret policy.
Walz should either read a book on the Gestapo or shut his mouth and stop trivializing the Holocaust to score cheap political points.
— Eyal Yakoby (@EYakoby) May 18, 2025
Walz, who was a high school social studies teacher prior to entering politics and was a Belfer Fellow at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. He signed into law, following the 2023, a Holocaust education mandate for Minnesota schools.
“The governor, among Minnesota elected officials, is singularly knowledgeable about the Holocaust,” said Steve Hunegs, the executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas. “He knows the importance of careful language when referring to the Holocaust and the perpetrators of the Holocaust.
“We share the governor’s concern about due process for all. But loose language undermines what we’re trying to accomplish with Holocaust education. The governor should walk back ‘Gestapo’ language from his commencement address.”
The governor’s office has not responded to requests for comment.
In his remarks at the ceremony, Walz was likely referring, in part, to the case of Rümeysa Öztürk, a graduate student at Tufts University and a Turkish citizen, who was one of the co-authors of an op-ed in the student newspaper that was critical of the Tufts Community Union (TCU) Senate’s resolutions on the ongoing war in Gaza. ICE had released a statement accusing her of supporting Hamas, although it provided no evidence of those claims. Öztürk was released on bail by a federal judge after it was ruled that she posed neither a danger to the community nor a flight risk.
Since Walz was elected governor in 2018, the JCRC has also been critical of Republican politicians who made comparisons between his policies and the Holocaust.
In 2022, during the COVID-19 pandemic, then-GOP gubernatorial candidate Scott Jensen compared mask mandates to Kristallnacht. Walz and Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan stood with Jewish members of the Minnesota legislature to counter those comments.
“[Jewish leaders] were very clear to say, ‘don’t make this analogy because it is incredibly harmful, both from the trauma but also from the diminishing of what it does.’” Walz said in a 2022 press conference. “They were asked, and they were ignored. They asked again and offered to educate, and they were ignored again and again.”
In 2020, the JCRC spoke out against Minnesota Republican legislative candidates who had used Holocaust comparisons to COVID restrictions, with GOP House and Senate leadership offering assurances “that such comparisons between COVID-19 and the Holocaust were wrong and they had communicated to their members and candidates they should not make such comparisons.”
“As Jews, we are offended by these reprehensible and historically inaccurate comparisons,” Hunegs wrote in a statement at the time.
The JCRC was also critical of members of the public who were using Hitler, Nazis, and other Holocaust-related imagery in the debate over how to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Were you concerned when Dictator Walz did this?
Shutdowns,
Lockdowns,
Mandates,
Snitch-lines,
Favoritism,
Political prosecutions,
Forced intubations,
Abuse of “emergency powers,”
Election theft,
Cancelling little league,
Cancelling the state fair,
Ordering doctors to falsify death certificates,
Trying to de-license doctors who speak up against being ordered to lie,
Fomenting riots with false accusations against police and citizens, and so on…
Where was “Due Process” then?
I’m mostly concerned about the false equivalencies in this article. Comparing things to Hitler’s regime or the Holocaust is, of course, a tactic to be used sparingly. However, while the Holocaust itself is fairly unique, many of these individual tactics used have had parallels in other regimes. It is not taking anything away from the Holocaust to justifiably compare specific tactics to those used during the Holocaust. There are undeniable parallels between the tactics currently used by ICE and the tactics that were used by the Gestapo. ICE and Homeland Security should deeply consider the long-term repercussions that the use of these tactics will have on the ability of ICE and other law enforcement agencies to operate effectively due to loss trust and creation of paranoia.
In this case, similarities include:
1. Lack of due process around arrests (spiriting people out of the country in a way that avoids any judicial oversight).
2. The ability to imprison people without any judicial proceedings based on administrative warrants.
3. Use of sudden raids to produce a climate of fear.
4. The attempt to “disappear” individuals through use of secrecy and movement (including extra-judicial deportation) in order to deprive them of their right to counsel and avoid judicial oversight.
Meanwhile, this article draws an equivalency with those who compared mask mandates and COVID restrictions to the Holocaust. While some of these mandates and restrictions may have been misguided, none of them have any similarity to Holocaust policies in either execution or intent.
Similarly, one of the “related” links is to a story on TC Jewfolk about Gov LePage’s comments in 2012 about the IRS and Obamacare, which are an excellent example of the type of false equivalency that we should condemn.
In the current climate of hate and anti-semitism, we cannot lose our sense of proportion and truth even as we are influenced by both real and imagined fears. I fear that this article retreats to orthodoxy rather than real criticality in the way that it represents these significantly different statements.
Thank you Ethan. I couldn’t agree more, false equivocations emanating from certain similarities are dangers that lead to misleading perceptions and bad policy. It can especially repugnant when untethered comparisons to the Holocaust are made.