Sunday, January 25, 2026

All Too Eager to Defend ICE | Bloomberg Opinion

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Vice President Vance Visits Minneapolis To Meet With Community Members And Local Leaders

JD Vance Seems All Too Eager to Defend ICE

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Vice President JD Vance visited Minneapolis, claiming he was on a mission to “turn down the chaos” after aiming incendiary words at a woman killed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
Vance met with ICE agents and appeared at a press conference, but his actions were partisan and performative, and he reportedly only met with Republicans.
The Trump administration's immigration enforcement efforts have sparked protests and criticism, with a New York Times/Siena College poll showing 63% of respondents disapprove of how ICE is handling its job.

Vice President JD Vance is full of contradictions.

Two weeks after he aimed incendiary words at a woman killed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Minneapolis, he visited the city on Thursday, claiming he was on a mission to “turn down the chaos.”

The vice president met with ICE agents and later appeared at a press conference in an attempt to wrest the ICE narrative away from the viral images that have damaged the agency’s reputation.
It was yet another example of Vance stepping awkwardly into the spotlight as the Republican most likely to succeed President Donald Trump in the White House.

But his actions were partisan and performative — Vance’s only mode. He claimed to want to meet local officials halfway, yet he reportedly only met with Republicans. Rather than offer humanity and humility in the case of a five-year-old Minneapolis boy who now sits in a Texas detention facility with his asylum-seeking father, Vance offered shrill and legalistic arguments in defense of ICE.

His visit was the clearest sign yet that the Trump administration is worried about the political fallout of its chaotic mass deportation efforts. That campaign has swept up legal immigrants and American citizens along with undocumented arrivals, and has sparked protests in several cities. And on Saturday, another Minneapolis resident, VA nurse Alex Pretti, 37, was killed by federal immigration agents.

According to a New York Times/Siena College poll, 63% of respondents disapprove of how ICE is handling its job, including 70% of independents, 57% of White voters and even 19% of Trump voters.

Vance has emerged as the agency’s leading defender, hammering protesters as radical leftists and local officials as obstructionists, while largely absolving federal immigration agents.

“My thought on that is, well, of course there have been mistakes made, because you’re always going to have mistakes made in law enforcement,”

--- Vance said Thursday when asked about missteps.

The stories and images that continue to emerge from the administration’s immigration enforcement efforts suggest something other than a few minor mistakes. Some 3,000 agents have been deployed to Minneapolis, vastly outnumbering the local police force. Social media images have shown American citizens being pulled from their cars and homes, being asked for identification because of their accents and detained without explanation. Protesters have been thrown to the ground and pepper-sprayed at point-blank range. A six-month-old baby was tear-gassed. And now two Minnesotans, one a mother of three and the other an intensive care nurse at a Veterans Affairs hospital, have been killed.

And that’s just Minneapolis. Chicago and Los Angeles have their own stories of US citizens shot by federal immigration agents. A new immigration blitz, “Operation Catch of the Day,” has now begun in Portland, Maine, another Democratic-run city. A masked agent in that city was filmed telling the woman videotaping him that her information would be in a database and she would be considered a “domestic terrorist.”

All of these stories are now baggage for the Trump administration, with Vance as the frontman.

“I’m glad the Vice President agrees the temperature needs to be turned down, but actions speak louder than words,” Minnesota Governor Tim Walz posted on X on Thursday.
“We don’t need 3,000 ice agents in our streets — more than every local police department combined.
Take the show of force off the streets and partner with the state on targeted enforcement of violent offenders instead of random, aggressive confrontation.”

This won’t happen. The Trump administration’s preferred approach is confrontation.

The Department of Justice subpoenaed Walz, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and state Attorney General Keith Ellison in an investigation into whether they conspired to impede ICE.
Trump’s DOJ has arrested protesters and threatened to go after journalists.
And after the arrest of Nekima Levy Armstrong, a Minneapolis lawyer who appeared at an anti-ICE protest at a church, the White House’s X account posted an altered image of her as she was detained.
Rather than appearing composed, she was sobbing in the White House’s version, and her skin had apparently been darkened.

“The memes will continue,” Kaelan Dorr, the deputy communications director, wrote on X in response.

And so will the chaos.

Vance said there aren’t any plans to invoke the Insurrection Act but that Trump “could change his mind, of course, things could get worse.”

There is reason to believe that things could and will get worse. And Vance, with an eye on 2028, will continue to defend the images and actions inundating Americans. Like Trump, Vance has staked out ground as an immigration hardliner. But, unlike Trump, Vance will be on the ballot again and asking for greater power. He is increasingly at odds with what Americans want to see from their government.

Vance’s insistence on backing policies that have led to such chaos and cruelty is a stark warning for Americans as they begin to consider what they want the country to look like after Trump.

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