Trump’s ICE Goons Detained a 5-Year-Old. Then JD Vance Made It Worse.
In an administration that sometimes seems to lack a well-defined institutional role for JD Vance, he appears to be taking on a new function: putting a softer, more reasonable face on Stephen Miller’s authoritarian police state.
The vice president journeyed to Minneapolis on Thursday, where he urged officials to “tone down the temperature” amid the searing civil conflict unleashed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s crackdown. That’s driving much coverage, with some accounts claiming he’s softened the administration’s posture.
Newsflash: Vance softened matters in no appreciable way that has actual real-world significance. If anything, in concrete policy terms, Vance revealed that the administration’s positions on key matters related to the Minneapolis standoff are more reprehensible than it first appeared.
Vance’s big moment concerned a 5-year-old child detained by ICE in a case that instantly went viral. The child, Liam Kanejo Ramos, was wearing a Spiderman backpack when he and his father were picked up under disputed circumstances: The Department of Homeland Security says his father fled. Locals say others in their home begged to take the child, but he and his father have been shipped to detention in Texas.
In Minneapolis, Vance sought to appear empathetic toward the child. He declared that he too has a 5-year-old, and said he’d been moved by the story. However, he said he’d done “follow-up research” and discovered that the father was an “illegal alien.”
“Are they not supposed to arrest an illegal alien in the United States of America?” asked Vance, speaking of ICE. He then scoffed: “If the argument is that you can’t arrest people who have violated our laws because they have children, then every single parent is going to be completely given immunity.” Watch:
Q: A local school district is alleging ICE agents detained a 5 year old after preschool. Are you proud of how your administration is conducting this immigration crackdown?
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 22, 2026
JD VANCE: Well, I'm proud of the fact we're standing behind law enforcement. The 5 year old was not… pic.twitter.com/VGmFlYpqCY
Gosh, how reasonable! Yet it turns out that the child and his father, Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias, have active asylum claims, according to their lawyer. As many have noted, this complicates Vance’s “illegal alien” assertion, as they appeared to be availing themselves of lawful processes.
But an even more grotesque Trump-Vance stance here is going unnoticed. Vance simply doesn’t think it’s a misnomer to call the father an “illegal alien,” despite his asylum claim. That’s because Vance plainly doesn’t believe those awaiting asylum adjudication are here legitimately at all. He and Trump have adopted the position that legal loopholes allow them to deport asylum-seekers before their claims are heard.
This has gotten scandalously little attention, but ICE has been seeking to deport thousands of people awaiting asylum hearings in the United States to third countries that will take them. This entails asking immigration judges to void asylum applications without ever passing substantive judgment on their merits. When Vance calls this father an “illegal alien,” it appears to reflect the broader position that people awaiting asylum adjudication should be removed before their case receives a verdict.
Vance wants to appear morally grounded in discussing this 5-year-old child. But the administration’s position—that asylum-seekers’ presence here is essentially illegitimate and that their claims can be summarily voided—should offend anyone’s sense of fairness. Even Vance’s sense of fairness, if he has any left after outsourcing it to the most amoral, corrupt, venal public figure in modern memory.
For one thing, many of these people might legitimately merit asylum here, but we’ll never know either way due to redirection of their claims. For another, many came here legally before claiming asylum: Though precise numbers are unavailable, that class surely includes large numbers who came through the Joe Biden–era CBP One app, since terminated by Trump, which allowed migrants to legally enter and make appointments to apply for asylum or seek other legal protections.
Guess what? That includes this 5-year-old kid and his pop. Their lawyer told reporters that they came via the CBP One app.
“This family entered legally and followed the process the government asked them to,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, told me. “They were here lawfully until the administration stripped away their status. Hundreds of thousands who entered with official permission are being smeared as illegal aliens and threatened with deportation.”
Here’s the thing: Even if Vance disagrees with the existence of such programs—which is wrongheaded but at least a coherent position—surely he should agree that it’s unfair for people who availed themselves of lawful channels when they existed to suddenly get detained and deported to a third country.
But Vance’s position is that even if they’re doing things by the book, they’re nonetheless here illegitimately. Period. We’ve seen this in other contexts: In 2024, he claimed that those “dog-eating” Haitians were also here illegally. Most were here lawfully under a form of humanitarian protection. What Vance really meant was that this program was illegitimate too because he said so.
Let’s give Vance some credit: In Minneapolis, he admitted that many protesters are peaceful. He defended the right to protest. And he acknowledged that ICE officers make “mistakes.”
But then Vance immediately undercut all this by blaming those mistakes on the “duress” that ICE officers face due to “a few very far-left agitators.”
The misdirection of blame for ICE misconduct is not trivial. As Don Moynihan writes in a good piece:
Experts on the formation of internal security services in authoritarian regimes point to a sense of impunity as a warning sign. Regime officials abuse their power when they know they will be protected, even praised, for doing so.
Vance has contributed mightily to ICE’s unmistakable sense of its own impunity. He claimed officers “have absolute immunity,” though he softened that claim. He said Renee Good “rammed” her killer with her car and that her death was of “her own making,” which is a vile lie. Now he’s blaming ICE violence on the left.
Vance has dressed up Miller’s authoritarianism in reasonable appeals on other occasions. After Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s removal to a Salvadoran gulag—which Miller was heavily invested in—Vance struck a superficially reasonable posture while offering endless falsehoods and misdirection about it.
It’s beyond obvious that the primary cause of the chaos greeting ICE is ICE itself. Indeed, as Moynihan further documents, Trump’s top paramilitary officials are clearly going out of their way to provoke violent conflict and reprisals, which has Miller’s fingerprints all over it.
Vance probably doesn’t share Miller’s undisguised lust for maximal social conflict. But Vance gets zero credit for conciliation until he stops justifying ICE aggression by blaming its victims—and states categorically that excessive force has indeed been widely happening, that it’s unacceptable, that the administration is committed to stopping it, and that it will face real accountability. Until then, he’s largely putting a softer face on Miller’s police state. And no one should let him get away with it.