When Minnesota Governor Tim Walz stood at the University of Minnesota Law School commencement on May 17, 2025 and declared that President Trump’s immigration officers were a “modern?day Gestapo,” he crossed a line that decent Americans of every stripe should reject. What might have been dismissed as overheated rhetoric became a national story when Republican members of Congress confronted him at a House hearing on June 12, 2025 and demanded answers. The raw fact is simple: a governor who uses Holocaust imagery to describe federal law enforcement invites chaos and undermines the rule of law.
Conservative Americans know instinctively what happened next — brave men and women doing a dangerous job were publicly smeared, and the predictable consequence is an emboldening of anti?law enforcement actors. The Department of Homeland Security even warned that demonizing language has been linked to a sharp rise in assaults on ICE personnel, a reality that should sober any leader before he resorts to incendiary metaphors. Our officials must protect people who enforce the law, not fan the flames that make them targets.
Rep. Tom Emmer and other Republicans were right to press Walz about both the words and the policies that flow from that worldview. Minnesotans have watched as policies like driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants and sanctuary?style protections have tied the hands of officers trying to keep communities safe, and lawmakers on June 12 laid out how those choices look on the ground. Elected leaders who encourage defiance of federal law and then complain about federal enforcement are offering excuses, not solutions, and Main Street voters are not fooled.
Worse still is the moral bankruptcy of comparing routine immigration enforcement to the Gestapo — an insult to Holocaust victims and to the decent Americans who wear a badge to protect their neighbors. Conservatives do not tolerate trivializing genocide for political theater, and many who voted for Walz or supported his party deserve an explanation and, frankly, an apology. If a governor cannot speak responsibly about law enforcement and public safety, he should expect to be held accountable by the voters he claims to serve.
The bottom line for patriotic, hard?working Americans is this: rhetoric has consequences. If Minnesota’s leaders want less disorder and fewer confrontations, they will stop demonizing the people charged with enforcing the law, cooperate where appropriate with federal partners, and put community safety ahead of political grandstanding. Until that happens, conservatives will keep insisting that respect for law and order — and for the men and women who keep us safe — must come before cheap applause lines.
