As the 2024 presidential race gets closer, with Vice President Kamala Harris reportedly taking a slight edge on certain battleground states like Pennsylvania, GOP Vice Presidential nominee JD Vance is stepping up the traditional attacks from the Trump train, such as declaring that his mass deportation plan should "start with 1 million" immigrants.
The Ohio Senator, now Trump's running mate, sat down on three different interviews Sunday with major networks, CNN, ABC News and CBS News. In them, he adopted an increasingly prominent role for the Trump campaign: an attack dog, as Politico describes it.
One of the major focuses for Vance on Sunday was immigration, which is also a major platform for Trump and one of the issues the GOP is trying to criticize Harris with.
Throughout the campaign, Trump has proposed the mass deportation of migrants if he gets back to the White House. On Sunday, Vance doubled down these plans.
The senator blamed Harris and the Biden administration for a surge migrant crossings through the southern border during a large portion of its four years, despite a recent drop. Many experts have said carrying mass deportation to the extent Trump is proposing would be a "nightmare," but Vance said they would do so by taking a "sequential approach."
"You start with what's achievable," Vance said. "I think that if you deport a lot of violent criminals and frankly if you make it harder to hire illegal labor, which undercuts the wages of American workers, I think you go a lot of the way to solving the illegal immigration problem."
"I think it's interesting that people focus on, well, how do you deport 18 million people? Let's start with 1 million. That's where Kamala Harris failed. And then we can go from there," he continued.
Vance's rhetoric on immigration is similar to that of Trump's, who further talked about his mass deportation plans earlier this year during an interview with TIME. In that conversation, he said he would consider using the National Guard to help carry out this effort.
"I don't believe this is sustainable for a country, what's happening to us, with probably 15 million and maybe as many as 20 million by the time Biden's out," Trump said. "Twenty million people, many of them from jails, many of them from prisons, many of them from mental institutions. I mean, you see what's going on in Venezuela and other countries. They're becoming a lot safer."
During his interview, Vance also elaborated on some of the "pro-family" comments he's made in the past, which he has come under fire for.
The best-selling author recently came under scrutiny for repeated comments he made about childless Americans, including one during an interview in July 2021 with then-Fox news host Tucker Carlson, where Vance described leading Democrats including Harris as "childless cat ladies."
In a speech before a conservative group, he also suggested that people with children should have extra votes.
"The Democrats are talking about giving the vote to 16-year-olds, but let's do this instead," Vance said in the speech. "Let's give votes to all children in this country, but let's give control over those votes to the parents of those children. When you go to the polls in this country as a parent, you should have more power."
In his interview runs, Vance said his previous comments should be considered as a "thought experiment" rather than an actual policy stance. He did, however, focus on the economic struggles families are facing, such as increasing cost of goods, rising medical bills and other costs.
"Do I regret saying it? I regret that the media and the Kamala Harris campaign has, frankly, distorted what I said," he said. "They turn this into a policy proposal that I never made... I said, I want us to be more pro-family, and I do want us to be more pro-family."
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