JD Vance on Thursday put the onus on local officials to “turn down the temperature” in Minneapolis, where federal immigration agents in recent days have detained a five-year-old child with his father and gassed protesters throughout the city.
Flanked by federal law enforcement, the US vice-president said he spoke with immigration agents and local business leaders ahead of talking to the press, but he had not spoken with the state’s governor, Tim Walz. He said local officials could be helping ICE identify and arrest violent criminals so that the operation could be more targeted.
The US justice department issued subpoenas to a handful of state and local elected officials this week, including Walz and Jacob Frey, Minneapolis’s mayor, as part of an investigation into whether local officials were supposedly conspiring to impede federal immigration enforcement in the state.
After the subpoenas, Walz said the state would not be “drawn into political theater”.
“My focus has always been protecting the people of this state. Families are scared. Kids are afraid to go to school. Small businesses are hurting. A mother is dead, and the people responsible have yet to be held accountable,” Walz said on Tuesday. “That’s where the energy of the federal government should be directed: toward restoring trust, accountability, and real law and order, not political retaliation.”
Vance said the purpose of his visit is an attempt to “tone down the temperature a little bit, reduce the chaos, but still allow us as a federal government to enforce the American immigration laws”.
Vance claimed the administration isn’t trying to send a political message with the federal law enforcement presence in the state. Walz has called the Trump administration’s crackdown here a campaign of political retribution.
“Why are we not seeing it anywhere else? We’re seeing this level of chaos only in Minneapolis,” Vance said. “LA and Chicago, we had some problems there. Pretty much every jurisdiction where these guys are operating, you don’t see the same level of chaos, you don’t see the same level of violence. You don’t see the problems that we’re seeing in Minneapolis. Maybe the problem is unique to Minneapolis, and we believe that it is, and it’s a lack of cooperation between state and local law enforcement and federal law enforcement.”
He claimed that immigration agents are doing a great job and that “frankly, a lot of the media is lying about the job that they do every single day” though there are “occasionally” instances where all agents may not be doing everything correctly. When asked by media about incidents like the detainment of the five-year-old child or aggression toward protestors, Vance claimed that much of what’s been reported on the ground has been overblown or out of context.
He called those who are seeking to disrupt ICE “far-left agitators” and said state and local public officials should be cooperating on immigration enforcement. He said he had “reasons to believe” that local officials will soon be more cooperative and asked local law enforcement to help facilitate arrests of people like criminal sex offenders. The “number one thing” that would lower the temperature would be for local officials to help facilitate “reasonable enforcement of the law”.
Vance claimed the federal government is doing what it can to lower the temperature but that local officials were not meeting them halfway. He called the situation in Minneapolis “the inevitable consequence of a state and local government that have decided that they’re not going to cooperate with immigration enforcement at all”.
Earlier in the day, Vance urged protesters to take their grievances to the ballot box rather than confront federal agents in the streets, dismissing protesters in Minneapolis who have physically blocked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) vehicles and thrown objects at agents as engaging in “cowardly bullshit”.
During an appearance at a factory in Toledo, Ohio, on Thursday morning, Vance said he planned to travel to Minneapolis later in the day to meet with ICE personnel and local officials, promising a simple message about reducing tensions in the city.
Vance drew comparisons between Minneapolis and other Democratic-led cities where local authorities have chosen to work alongside federal immigration enforcement. He pointed to Memphis and Austin as examples of blue cities without the unrest currently gripping Minneapolis, arguing the difference stems from cooperation between local police and ICE.
“When you look at Memphis, Tennessee, or Austin, Texas, or any other community virtually across the United States of America, and you don’t see the same level of chaos in Minneapolis, the natural conclusion is that it’s not what ICE is doing in Minneapolis, it’s what Minneapolis authorities are doing to prevent ICE from doing their jobs,” he said.
Vance added that in recent months ICE had arrested multiple people in Minneapolis with convictions for sexual offenses, but that the lack of local cooperation has forced agents to conduct dangerous street-level operations rather than coordinated arrests.
He also accused Frey of instructing local police not to assist federal agents, forcing ICE officers to work without the protection typically provided during enforcement operations in other cities.
“They throw the sex offender in the back of a car, deport that person, throw them in jail, whatever, and then they go home safely with their families. That’s not what’s happening,” Vance said.
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