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JD Vance has bizarrely compared the US’s challenges with immigration and the southern border to eating “a really big sandwich” that’s too big for your mouth.
Speaking at a Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States post in Pennsylvania on Thursday, the Republican vice presidential candidate – who has been branded “weird” by his Democratic opponent Tim Walz – responded to a question about whether Trump’s promised “largest deportation operation in American history” would require using the National Guard to round up millions of people.
Vance said that while he didn’t know, he wouldn’t rule out the measure.
At this point, the Ohio senator offered up a curious analogy as to how the matter could be handled.
“The first thing you have to do is stop the bleeding,” Vance explained to reporters.
“The second thing is, okay, well, now that we’ve gotten illegal immigration as close to zero as physically possible, what are you and President Trump going to do about the 20 million illegal aliens who are here?” – a figure that is not backed up with data.
“Well, that’s a really big sandwich. It’s 10 times the size of your mouth. How are you possibly going to eat the whole thing?”
Vance went on to describe the Trump-Vance administration’s plans to “eat” the problem by deporting undocumented migrants “bite” by “bite”.
“Well, you take the first bite, and then you take the second bite, and then you take the third bite,” he said. “And that’s how you approach the 20 million illegal aliens who are here.”
During his speech, Vance also repeated the major Republican talking point that Kamala Harris was President Joe Biden’s “Border Czar,” put in charge of tackling crossings at the US-Mexico border.
In reality, Harris was not in charge of the border. She was actually tasked with investigating the root causes of migration from Central American countries like Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.
In his speech, Vance also flip-flopped on the number of illegal immigrants who he claimed had entered the US since Harris became vice president in 2020.
“It’s probably more like 25 or 30 million,” he later said, adding on 10 million to his initial figure.
It is not clear where Vance has plucked his numbers from.
The Center for Immigration Studies estimated that in January 2022 there were 11.35 million illegal immigrants in the US – a similar figure to its estimate under the Trump administration in January 2019.
Under the Biden administration, Democrats actually pushed for a bipartisan border funding bill in May that would have clamped down on the number of migrants allowed to claim asylum at the US-Mexico border.
But, that bill was ultimately shot down by Republicans, at the behest of Trump.
Immigration is a key policy issue going into the election at a time when Trump has started to trail Harris by around 2.7 points in the national polls.
