‘Anne Frank was in Amsterdam legally,’ Trump antisemitism envoy says in refuting Walz’s ICE comparison

Donald Trump and Yehuda Kaploun light a candle during an Oct. 7 remembrance event at the Trump National Doral Golf Club in Doral, Florida on Oct. 07, 2024. Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images

(JTA) — In the lead-up to International Holocaust Remembrance Day, both the State Department’s antisemitism envoy and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum criticized Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz for invoking Anne Frank in discussions of federal immigration raids.

The remarks by Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun, the antisemitism envoy nominated by President Trump, that “Anne Frank was in Amsterdam legally and abided by Dutch law” added fuel to an ongoing debate over the appropriateness of modern-day comparisons to the Holocaust. Other Jewish leaders have mobilized in force against immigration agents in the state.

“Ignorance like this cheapens the horror of the Holocaust,” Kaploun tweeted Monday. 

He was responding to Walz’s press conference over the weekend, in which the former Democratic vice-presidential candidate stated, “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.”

Kaploun continued with a dig at the state’s large migrant community, the focus of chaotic Immigrations and Customs Enforcement activity that has prompted intense criticism and led to the shooting deaths of two protesters. 

“Anne Frank was in Amsterdam legally and abided by Dutch law. She was hauled off to a death camp because of her race and religion. Her story has nothing to do with the illegal immigration, fraud, and lawlessness plaguing Minnesota today,” the envoy wrote. “Our brave law enforcement should be commended, not tarred with this historically illiterate and antisemitic comparison.”

His comments were followed two hours later by the Holocaust museum’s, which rebuked Walz while avoiding the subject of ICE operations. Walz, a former public school teacher, wrote his master’s thesis on Holocaust education. 

“Anne Frank was targeted and murdered solely because she was Jewish,” the museum tweeted 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.”

CNN anchor Jake Tapper, who is Jewish, last week rebuked a guest for comparing ICE detention facilities to concentration camps.

But in the week since, even some conservatives have joined the voices comparing ICE to the Gestapo, as a backlash against ICE has brewed. That backlash appeared to escalate in the hours after the statements from Kaploun and the museum, including from within the Trump administration.  

Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol commander-at-large who has led federal immigration enforcement in Minneapolis and has himself decried growing comparisons between ICE and the Gestapo, is reportedly set to leave the city, and a judge has ordered acting ICE director Todd Lyons to appear in federal court. Pressure also continues to mount on other officials including Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Trump’s Jewish far-right immigration advisor Stephen Miller. 

Kaploun’s comments about Anne Frank — echoed by other State Department officials — were the latest in years’ worth of controversies over whether her family are an appropriate analogue to modern-day immigration. The comparison also arose in response to the first Trump administration’s immigration crackdown and was incorporated into a 2021 animated adaptation of Frank’s diary.

Some historians pointed out that Kaploun’s remark that Frank “was in Amsterdam legally and abided by Dutch law” belies the fact that the Frank family had defied official papers ordering Anne’s sister Margot to report to a labor camp. 

“The Frank family ignored their call-up, meaning they were officially in Amsterdam illegally from this point on,” Joel Swanson, a Jewish studies professor at Sarah Lawrence College, wrote on BlueSky. “The Trump administration is doing Holocaust revisionism to avoid the possibility of empathy for migrants.”

Others noted the escalation in Nazi race laws that progressively and systematically excluded Jews from public life in Europe.

“The German regime first created mass statelessness to facilitate the Holocaust,” historian and author John Ganz wrote in response to Kaploun. “In every European country occupied by the Nazis, collaborationist governments might nominally protect citizen Jews, but were happy and relieved to see stateless and ‘illegal’ immigrants disappear.”