Vice President-elect JD Vance readily took on critics of the incoming Trump administration’s plans to reclaim the nation’s borders by handily refuting emotionally-charged appeals with common-sense responses.
Shannon Bream, hostess of “Fox News Sunday,” asked Vance in an interview that aired last weekend to respond to the concerns of “humanitarian activists and others who are worried about these deportations, saying families are going to be separated, people are going to be put in tents and in terrible conditions.”
“The most important thing that we have to do is to send a message that America is closed to illegal immigration,” the vice president-elect said, noting: “For the past four years, we have been wide open. And you’re going to see, I think, dozens of executive orders coming from the Trump administration, coming from us on day one, that send a message to Customs and Border Patrol: you guys are allowed to do your job again; and to illegal immigrants all over the world: you are not welcome into this country illegally. If you want to come through, you’ve got to come through proper channels.”
Undeterred by Bream’s question concerning the reference to “family separations,” Vance spoke frankly, identifying the phrase as an emotionally-charged “euphemism”:
“So, this, this term, is something we’re going to hear a lot in the next couple of months, the next couple of years, Shannon: ‘family separation’,” he said. “That’s a euphemism, that is a dishonest term to hide behind the fact that Joe Biden has … not done border enforcement.”
“If you say, for example, in the United States, we have a guy who’s convicted of a violent crime and has to go to prison – we want that guy to go to prison,” Vance continued. “But, yes, it does mean that that guy is going to be separated from his family. That is the consequence of committing violence upon your fellow citizens.”
“If you come into this country illegally, you need to go back home. You need to have basic law enforcement,” Vance said.
“And what the Democrats are going to do is they’re going to hide behind this. They’re going to say that this is all about compassion for families,” he pointed out. “It is not compassion to allow the drug cartels to traffic small children. It is not compassionate to allow the worst people in the world to send minor children, some of them victims of sex trafficking, into our country.”
“That is the real humanitarian crisis at the border,” Vance stressed. “You’re not going to exacerbate it through law enforcement. You’re going to fix it through law enforcement, and that’s what Donald Trump is going to do.”
When Bream countered that it is only a “small fraction of the millions of people who are here, who have built lives” who have committed “those egregious things that you cite,” Vance included in his response a reminder that those who have crossed the border illegally have already committed a crime.
“So, you do have hundreds of thousands, maybe even a million people who, in addition to crossing into the border illegally, have also committed some measure of violent crime,” he explained. “So, it’s actually a very large number of people, Shannon, and the point is that if you want to fix the overall border crisis, you have to engage in law enforcement.”
“We can’t buy into this lie, really, from the extreme left, because I agree with you, most Americans want common sense border enforcement,” Vance said. “We can’t buy into this lie that law enforcement at the American Southern border is somehow not compassionate to families who want to cross illegally.”
In summarizing the Trump administration’s focus on putting an end to illegal immigration, Vance emphasized “Our number one responsibility is compassion to our fellow Americans, and that starts with enforcing the southern border.”
“You cannot have a country of law and order, of stability, of basic good governance, unless you get control of what Biden has left us, at the American southern border, and President Trump is committed to doing it on day one,” he concluded.