In a press conference marking the first anniversary of his second term in office, President Donald Trump conceded that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) would “make mistakes sometimes.” He added that he “felt terribly” when he heard that the father of Renee Good, a Minneapolis woman whom an ICE agent killed, was a “Trump fan.”
“I hope he still feels that way,” Trump said.
A couple days later, his vice president was asked about the president’s remarks. JD Vance has been one of ICE’s staunchest defenders. In the 48 hours after Good’s killing, the vice president shared or reshared 22 X posts defending the killing, refuting the agency’s critics and, in one case, lying about key details of the shooting, including the angle from which the agent shot Good. He also accused protestors of “classic terrorism” while talking about “a broader left-wing network” that was aiming violence against law enforcement.
Yet while Trump’s talk of “mistakes” was somewhat of a departure from his vice president’s argument, Vance appeared unfazed. “You’re always gonna have mistakes made in law enforcement,” he told a crowd in Ohio. The critical matter at hand, he argued, is not what ICE is doing in Minneapolis — “it’s what Minneapolis authorities are doing to prevent ICE from doing their jobs.”
Vance shared a similar version of this argument only a few days later, when another Minneapolis resident, an ICU nurse named Alex Pretti, was killed by Border Patrol agents who were part of the overwhelming federal presence in the city. As was the case with Good, video analysis contradicted the government’s narrative that Pretti was somehow a threat to the many federal agents who tackled him to the ground.
“When I visited Minnesota, what the ICE agents wanted more than anything was to work with local law enforcement so that situations on the ground didn’t get out of hand,” Vance said. “The local leadership in Minnesota has so far refused to answer those requests.”
Amid the federal insurgency in Minneapolis, the vice president is the face of an expansionist approach to law enforcement rooted less in proof and more in conspiracy. According to him, the government — especially the executive branch — is carrying out the will of the people, and anyone who opposes this will is a terrorist, likely operating on behalf of a shadowy network of left-wing operatives.
This argument is at the heart of the investigation into Minnesota’s leaders, and it’s the same argument that may send Texas protestors to prison for decades.
“Nothing is more central to the Trump administration’s priorities than immigration, and immigration law enforcement specifically,” says César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a law professor and civil liberties expert at Ohio State University.
He sees Vance as “a key vocal supporter of the administration’s most aggressive immigration law enforcement policies,” and, as Hernández puts it, Vance “has learned from President Trump’s success that tapping xenophobic rhetoric can prove quite successful politically. And so I think we see him doubling down on that rhetoric, including going so far as to embrace aggressive immigration law enforcement tactics that result in the deaths of people.”
Hernández adds, “What we’re seeing these days is that the sky’s the limit when it comes to the aggressiveness of policies and the divisiveness of rhetoric.”
The vice presidency is often mocked, even by those who hold the job. When describing the role, Nelson Rockefeller said, “I go to funerals. I go to earthquakes.” John Adams called it “the most insignificant office.”
But Vance occupies a more unique role — and perhaps a more influential position — than any other vice president in recent memory. He built his reputation, in part, on criticizing Trump. Now he’s the second highest-ranking official in Trump’s administration. Many heavyweights within the MAGA movement believe Vance is the heir apparent to the presidency, and he’s also seen as something of a unifying force between the far right and Silicon Valley.
Vance has advocated for policies that would certainly benefit the tech industry, such as when he used his first major foreign policy speech as vice president to criticize European leaders for overly regulating artificial intelligence. In that same speech, he argued that AI leadership would strengthen America’s national security.
Vance is also a self-professed fan — and, in some cases, a friend — to some of the fringe pseudointellectuals who are popular on the far right. One example is Curtis Yarvin, a blogger who has, in the past, advocated for the president assuming control over law enforcement authorities in every state.
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Mike Sexton, a longtime national security analyst and policy advisor for the think tank Third Way, is among those troubled by Vance’s affinity for Yarvin. He’s also troubled by a parallel he sees between the Trump administration and George W. Bush’s administration.
Sexton argues that Bush entered office with a clear eye for invading Iraq, just as Trump and Vance were determined to cast immigration as a national security issue.
“I really think that’s the only thing I can compare it to in terms of a White House coming in with an agenda and then just wrangling the intelligence community and all of the tools we have for national security in service of that agenda, against all reason,” Sexton says. “Vance seems to be basically a right-wing technology solutionist, where he wants to use technology in service of all these other really bad goals. The fact that we are using spyware for immigration enforcement right here, right now, is unconscionable.”
Before the Pretti shooting, Vance visited Minneapolis to, as he put it, “calm the tensions” in the city in the wake of Good’s killing. But just as he placed some of the blame for ICE’s “mistakes” on local law enforcement, he also said local authorities needed to play a role in “lowering the temperature” by helping his administration “find sex offenders and get them out of their communities.”
As covered by local journalists, talk of “sex offenders” is deliberately misleading. What’s more, ICE has been taking credit for arrests made weeks, months, or even years before they arrived en masse in Minneapolis. Vance and the administration have also been relentless in their messaging that “criminal illegal aliens” are the primary target of their immigration enforcement operations — despite the fact that nearly three-fourths of the immigrants detained by ICE have no criminal convictions.
This isn’t the first time Vance has lied about immigration in ways meant to shore up support or scare his audience. During the 2024 presidential campaign, he admitted to making up stories about Somali immigrants supposedly eating pets in Ohio, the state he also represented for part of one term in the Senate.
In fact, Vance’s passion for immigration issues reaches back further than his loyalty to Trump. He has advocated for a restrictive view of what it means to be an American, effectively arguing that European immigrants (such as his ancestors) with long ties in the country are more American than immigrants who more recently put down roots in the US.
In May 2025, in an interview with conservative columnist Ross Douthat, Vance talked about how his interest in immigration was further solidified in law school. As a student, Vance said, he witnessed a “buzz” about immigration law; he and his fellow aspiring attorneys saw a lot of “gray area” and “open space” for how courts could interpret the law.
“Nothing is more central to the Trump administration’s priorities than immigration, and immigration law enforcement specifically.” – César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández
That gray area, he argued, includes how much due process immigrants should receive. “The amount of process that is due and how you enforce those legislative standards and how you actually bring them to bear is, I think, very much an open question,” Vance said.
In that same interview, he criticized judges who have ruled against the Trump administration’s deportation of immigrants without due process. In many cases, people have been sent to countries that are not their own, including the hundreds of people sent to the notorious CECOT facility in El Salvador, where whistleblowers say torture is a common practice.
“I think you are seeing an effort by the courts to overturn the will of the American people,” he said. He added that the courts should be “deferential” to the executive branch, then claimed there are “thousands,” maybe “tens of thousands” of dangerous immigrants who come to the US to commit violence or profit from violence.
In effect, the interview gave Vance an opportunity to articulate his particular vision for a more militarized approach to immigration enforcement. It was a continuation of his brief time as a senator, when he tried and failed to pass a law that would cut funds for cities that don’t cooperate with federal immigration enforcement officials.
When Douthat raised the possibility that amassing an even larger law enforcement and security apparatus for immigration could lead to abuses similar to what was seen in the War on Terror, Vance said his administration is under a high level of “public safety stress.”
In some immigrant communities, he added, the “pre-modern brutality” calls for such an apparatus.
Shortly after Charlie Kirk was killed, in September 2025, Vance hosted Kirk’s podcast. He and Trump advisor Stephen Miller talked about the left-wing “networks” that are behind violent acts like Kirk’s murder (despite the fact that all evidence, then and now, points to a lone gunman).
“With God as my witness, we’re going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks,” Miller said on the show.
Shortly afterward, the Trump administration declared that “Antifa” is a terrorist organization, despite the fact that no singular organization named “Antifa” exists, and the term refers to groups sprinkled throughout the country with no established hierarchy. The administration has also highlighted George Soros’s Open Society Foundations and groups like Indivisible and ActBlue as other organizations they want to investigate. (None of the groups have links to violent acts.)
Most recently, prosecutors have issued grand jury subpoenas to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacos Frey as part of a criminal inquiry into whether they impeded or obstructed federal immigration officers. Neither Walz nor Frey has been charged, and both have dismissed the probe as politically motivated retaliation. Vance has been at the center of this scuffle, too.
In a press conference a couple of days before Pretti was shot, the vice president said part of ICE’s work was to “protect people from the rioters.” Local law enforcement, he said, was “being told by someone” — perhaps the mayor — not to help their federal counterparts.
That same day, Vance applauded the arrests of protestors who’d recently disrupted a Sunday service at a church in St. Paul, Minnesota, where one of the pastors also serves as the acting field office director for the local ICE office. A federal magistrate judge refused to approve arrest warrants for several proposed defendants due to lack of probable cause, and judges have denied DOJ motions to detain the arrested protesters, finding that prosecutors failed to justify continued detention or show that the protesters were dangerous. (The White House, for its part, celebrated the arrest by sharing a digitally altered picture of one of the defendants, a Black woman, in which her skin is darkened and she is sobbing.)
The administration is clamping down on protestors far from Minnesota, too.
In Texas, a sweeping federal prosecution is underway for 19 people connected — often loosely — to a July 4 protest near the Prairieland Detention Center near Dallas. Federal prosecutors have charged all 19 under domestic terrorism–related statutes, even though no one was killed, it remains unclear who fired a single gunshot that grazed a federal officer, and several defendants were not present at the protest at all.
The government’s case rests on a conspiracy-based theory, treating the protest as a coordinated attack rather than an isolated event. Prosecutors have relied heavily on association, including participation in Signal chats, political literature, and anarchist-identifying language, to argue that defendants acted as part of a network. Many of the Prairieland defendants face decades in prison.
“They’re trying to spin the narrative and concoct this idea that there are these groups that are plotting large-scale plots to undermine the government, and there’s just no basis for that,” says Meagan Knuth, an attorney and president of the Dallas-Forth Worth chapter of the National Lawyers Guild. To her, the prosecution reeks of the Red Scare, and it’s a top-down effort that begins with the federal government. “JD Vance seems to be one of the chief messengers of that,” Knuth says.
Jessica Katzenstein, an anthropologist focused on policing, agrees with the Red Scare comparisons. She also sees parallels to the surveilling and harassing of civil rights groups in the 1960s, as well as more recent attempts to use RICO charges against people protesting the “Cop City” development in Atlanta.
“The use of ‘network’ allegations to go after left-wing organizing, broadly conceived, is a classic technique,” Katzenstein says.
The difference this time, she says, is the “performative cruelty” of the Trump administration and its agencies, where shows of force and humiliation are ripe sources for social media content.
“We’re seeing both an administration that has a suite of tools available to it that of course were not available in the sixties, like social media, but also a kind of consciousness of how to deploy those tools in a way that resonates with the right wing ecosphere,” Katzenstein says. “Some people will always be safer than others, but truly, nobody is safe.”
After the Pretti shooting, the Trump administration removed Border Patrol’s Greg Bovino from the city. The shooting will be investigated, officials say. For his part, Vance has remained adamant that the true problem was a lack of cooperation from local law enforcement. “They have created the chaos so they can have moments like yesterday, where someone tragically dies and politicians get to grandstand about the evils of enforcing the border,” he wrote on X. “The solution is staring everyone in the face. I hope authorities in Minneapolis stop this madness.”