TOLEDO, Ohio — Vice President JD Vance, previewing a trip to Minneapolis later in the day to meet with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and members of a community awash in tension, said Thursday that he will aim to “turn down the chaos” and project calm.
He also used coarse language to reinforce President Donald Trump’s position that Democrats there are impeding ICE operations and have created an environment that breeds unruly protests.
“If you disagree … fine, make that argument,” Vance said in response to a question from a reporter during an event here to promote the White House’s economic policies. “But make that argument at the ballot box. Write an op-ed in the newspaper, argue about it on social media. Don’t go to the streets and start assaulting federal law enforcement officers because you disagree with the policies of our administration. It’s cowardly bulls—, and it’s got to stop.”
The remarks came hours before Vance was expected to hold a roundtable discussion and deliver a speech in Minneapolis, where a federal officer this month fatally shot Renee Nicole Good, 37, during a confrontation. Trump, Vance and other administration officials have, without offering conclusive evidence, said that Good was connected to left-wing protesters and that she was a threat to officers as they approached her car and she began to drive.
Vance told his Toledo audience, gathered on the floor of a shipping warehouse, that he was headed there afterward and planned to “talk with local officials about how we can turn down the chaos.”
“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,” the vice president added. “It’s not that hard. If you look all across our country, what’s happened in Minneapolis is happening almost nowhere else in the United States of America, and that’s because — whether it’s in Texas or Tennessee, it’s in red states, it’s in blue cities, even within our country — most people are cooperating with the simple principles that we ought to be able to enforce our immigration laws and get illegal criminals the hell out of the United States of America.”
Trump said this week that federal agents sometimes err in enforcing his immigration crackdown.
“ICE is going to be too rough with somebody, or, you know, they’re dealing with rough people,” Trump said during a White House press briefing. “They’re going to make some mistakes sometimes,” he said. “It can happen. We feel terribly.”
Vance, responding Thursday to a question from NBC News, agreed with the president’s sentiment.
“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,” said Vance, adding that “99% of our police officers, probably more than that, are doing everything right.”
But, he continued, “the number one way where we can lower the mistakes that are happening, at least with our immigration enforcement, is to have local jurisdictions that are cooperating with us.”
Democrats, including Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, have disputed assertions about the ICE encounter with Good. They also have found themselves pulled into a federal investigation into whether state officials conspired to impede law enforcement in the administration’s immigration operations. The Justice Department has sent subpoenas to Walz, Frey and other state leaders, according to a document reviewed by NBC News and a person familiar with the investigation.
“Certainly one of my goals is to calm the tensions, to talk to people, to try to understand what we can do better,” Vance responded when asked if he hoped the visit would help deescalate things there.
A moment later, Vance asserted that ICE’s operations in Minneapolis are essential to rooting out sex offenders and accused local officials of refusing to cooperate with those efforts.
“So when I talk about lowering the temperature, those are the two things that we want those local authorities to do — help us find sex offenders and get them out of their community,” Vance said. “This is bonkers. Think about this. If you’ve got a neighbor who’s a sex offender and somebody wants to go and take that person away, I’m going to raise my hand and say, ‘Yes, please get that person away from my children.’ What is wrong with Minneapolis authorities?”