Two weeks after Vice President JD Vance took over a White House press briefing to excoriate anti-ICE protesters and the news media — and to issue a blanket defense of federal immigration officers — he tried a different tactic.
Walking out of a roundtable with immigration enforcement officials Thursday in Minneapolis, where a woman was fatally shot by an ICE officer earlier this month, the vice president said his goal was to help lower the temperature in a city roiled by chaos in recent weeks.
“The directive that I got from the president of the United States is ‘Meet these guys halfway,’” Vance said of local leaders whom he and other Trump officials have described as stonewalling Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s efforts in Minnesota. “Work with them so that we can make these immigration enforcement operations successful without endangering our ICE officers, and so that we could turn down the chaos a little bit, at least. I think a lot, actually.”
The vice president’s comments were in tonal contrast with his declaration earlier this month that the officer who fatally shot 37-year-old Renée Good — a woman protesting ICE from inside her vehicle, which federal authorities say struck the officer — was “protected by absolute immunity.”
He said Thursday that federal agents who “violate the law” are “going to face disciplinary action,” but that they would not be “judged in the court of public opinion.”
Vance’s visit coincided with a tumultuous week in a city that has become ground zero for the Trump administration’s clash with Democratic officials and activists. The vice president arrived Thursday after two activists were arrested and charged in connection with a protest that disrupted a Sunday morning worship service at Cities Church in St. Paul.
And school officials in a Minneapolis suburb said Wednesday that ICE detained at least four children from the district this month, including a 5-year-old boy whose father was arrested. Trump administration officials said that agents did not “target” the child, but that the 5-year-old was “abandoned” when his father fled from agents.
Vance conceded that he understood the public’s pushback on some of what they have seen unfold during immigration operations in the city. But he called for city and state leaders to allow police to better cooperate with federal agents to keep enforcement efforts more targeted to violent criminals, and he blamed local officials for making the situation more chaotic.
“From one perspective, I certainly understand why a business leader or why an employee would say, ‘Well, what’s going on?’” Vance said of complaints about surges of law enforcement activity at businesses and other locations. “It’s a little scary, no matter your position in life, if a bunch of cop cars show up and they’re arresting somebody.”
On Friday, some business and union leaders are expected to join with faith leaders to march in downtown Minneapolis to call for an end to ICE operations in the state.
Vance said he had “hope” and “some reason to think that there’s going to be better cooperation” in the near future between federal and local officials, though he did not elaborate. He also said he believed the federal government “can do better on” communicating with local officials about their operations. And despite President Donald Trump’s previous threats to bring the military into the city by invoking the Insurrection Act, Vance said Thursday, “Right now, we don’t think we need that.”
Vance seemed to make a concerted effort to come across as calm as he defended federal agents’ work, in contrast to his briefing room appearance and some social media posts. And rather than describing the anti-ICE activists as a sweeping movement of wayward locals, the vice president said it was merely “a few very far-left agitators” who were causing problems for federal agents, and that while he disagrees with the protesters’ politics, “most of them have been peaceful.”
He said that he, too, was initially troubled when he came across news stories about children and U.S. citizens being detained — including an off-duty Minneapolis police officer saying he was stopped by ICE — but he claimed many of them were lacking “context.”
Vance said that as a child, he saw his own family members arrested, describing the experience as “terrible,” “heartbreaking,” “chaotic” and “traumatic.”
“We’ve got to be sympathetic to the kids who are caught up in some of these enforcement actions,” Vance said. “We’ve also got to say we have to enforce the law without bias, with fairness, but we’ve got to enforce the law.”
The vice president has emerged as the administration’s leading spokesman for not only defending controversial ICE operations in Minnesota, but also attacking Democratic officials there in connection with the alleged fraud of hundreds of millions of federal dollars within housing, food, and child care programs. The state in recent months has been under investigation in connection with an alleged Medicaid fraud operation.
Vance promoted a video late last month by conservative YouTuber Nick Shirley, alleging that some day care centers receiving taxpayer funds weren’t providing any services — a video that was viewed millions of times and prompted outcry from other right-wing activists and Trump administration officials.
The Trump administration has announced a pause on federal child care funds in Minnesota, a state Trump called a “hub of fraudulent money laundering activity.”
Vance made a rare appearance in the White House briefing room earlier this month, an event originally planned to announce an assistant attorney general position to investigate alleged fraud of federal dollars, beginning first in Minnesota. But the news conference took place a day after Good was fatally shot, and Vance used the opportunity to vociferously defend the agent and the federal government’s immigration crackdowns.
Public polls show that majorities of voters believe the ICE agent was not justified in shooting Good, disapprove of ICE’s work and think the agency is making cities less safe.
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