Vance tells Minneapolis to ‘stop fighting’ ICE as White House doubles down on crackdown
Vice President JD Vance stops in Minnesota Thursday, which is ground zero in the heated battle over President Donald Trump's aggressive illegal immigration crackdown.
A White House official told Fox News that Vance will use his trip to "highlight the Administration’s commitment to restoring law and order in Minneapolis."
The official said that Vance will meet with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents during his stop, "to reinforce the White House’s unwavering support for federal immigration officials." He also plans to hold a roundtable discussion with community leaders and hold a news conference.
Apparently not on Vance's itinerary: any olive branches to top Democratic officials and protesters who are fiercely opposed to the aggressive efforts by the massive deployment to Minnesota of masked ICE agents, who have raided homes as they search people for proof of citizenship.
"I'm headed from here to Minneapolis, where we're going to talk with some of our ICE agents, talk with local officials about how we can turn down the chaos. And my simple piece of advice to them is going to be, look, if you want to turn down the chaos in Minneapolis, stop fighting immigration enforcement and accept that we have to have a border in this country. It's not that hard," Vance said a couple of hours ahead of his arrival in Minnesota.
But he added, "Certainly one of my goals is to calm the tensions, to talk to people, to try to understand what we can do better."
The vice president's trip to Minneapolis comes two weeks after the fatal shooting by an ICE agent of Renee Good, a Minnesota woman and mother of three, went viral, sparking protests and a national debate over the agency's efforts to carry out Trump's push for the mass deportation of millions of undocumented migrants.
And Richard Carlbom, chair of the Minnesota Democrats, argued that "JD Vance isn’t serious about accountability. He’s here to do Trump’s dirty work: defending disgusting ICE actions like the tragic killing of Renee Good and using Minnesota as a political backdrop."
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The White House says Vance "will point out how Minneapolis’s sanctuary city policies have degraded public safety and endangered ICE officers. He will also celebrate the essential work ICE agents have done to take dangerous, criminal illegal aliens off of America’s streets."
Good's death and the continued ICE raids have fueled demonstrations, with protesters facing off against federal immigration officers.
Hours ahead of Vance's arrival, Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino said at a news conference in Minneapolis that "our agents are being violently assaulted by agitators and anarchists."
Hundreds of military police troops are on alert for deployment to Minneapolis after Trump last week warned that if Minnesota's political leaders don't stop what he argued were "professional agitators and insurrectionists from attacking the Patriots of I.C.E., who are only trying to do their job, I will institute the INSURRECTION ACT."
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and other prominent Democrats, including state Attorney General Keith Ellison and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, were served Tuesday with subpoenas from the U.S. Department of Justice over an alleged conspiracy to obstruct or impede federal law enforcement during ongoing ICE operations.
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"Minnesota will not be intimidated into silence and neither will I," Walz fired back in a statement.
And he charged, "Families are scared. Kids are afraid to go to school. Small businesses are hurting. A mother is dead, and the people responsible have yet to be held accountable. That’s where the energy of the federal government should be directed: toward restoring trust, accountability, and real law and order, not political retaliation."
Earlier Thursday, before his arrival in Minnesota, Vance asked, "What is wrong with Minneapolis authorities? They so hate the idea of enforcing immigration laws that they're telling their people not to get sex offenders out of their community. It's crazy. And it's why we see so much chaos in Minneapolis, but not elsewhere."
Vance has been one of the most vocal members of the Trump administration defending ICE and targeting the backlash over the federal crackdown, and his trip to Minnesota is another sign that the White House isn't backing down on its mass deportation push.
After Good's death, Vance charged that Democrats were "rallying the mob against legitimate law enforcement operations."
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At a White House news briefing earlier this month, the vice president claimed that Good had been "brainwashed" and argued that the Minneapolis mother of three had links to a "broader, left-wing network."
Vance's trip comes amid flagging support for ICE in a slew of recent national polls.
The most recent survey, a New York Times/Siena Poll conducted Jan. 12–17 and released on Thursday, showed a slight majority approving of the job Trump is doing on the southern border with Mexico and his administration's deportation efforts.
But the president's overall approval on the issue of immigration was underwater in the poll, with nearly two-thirds disapproving of how ICE was handling their job and 61% saying ICE's tactics had gone too far.
Vance's stop in Minnesota also comes amid the sprawling federal fraud investigation that has led to charges against dozens of people in the state's large Somali-American community. The fraud scandal has put Democratic leaders in the state on the defensive and convinced Walz to end his bid this year for re-election to a third term as governor.
The Trump administration is keen to highlight the scandal, and Vance is expected during this stop to spotlight the recent creation of a new assistant attorney general position "to crack down on widescale fraud and abuse of taxpayer-funded programs as seen in Minnesota and several other states."
The vice president was previously in Minnesota in September, in the wake of a mass shooting at a Minneapolis-area Catholic Church.
Vance traveled earlier on Thursday in his home state of Ohio, stopping by an industrial shipping facility in Toledo to deliver remarks about the administration's efforts to lower prices.