JD Vance blames local officials ‘not cooperating’ with ICE for Minneapolis violence | JD Vance
On Thursday, J.D. Vance put the onus on local authorities to “lower the temperature” in Minneapolis, where federal immigration agents in recent days detained a five-year-old boy with his father and tear-gassed protesters in the city.
The US vice president, surrounded by federal law enforcement, said he spoke with immigration agents and local business leaders but not the state’s governor, Tim Walz, before speaking to the press. He said local authorities can help ICE identify and arrest violent criminals so the operation can be more targeted.
The U.S. justice department this week issued subpoenas to Walz and a handful of state and local elected officials, including Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, as part of an investigation into whether local officials allegedly conspired to obstruct federal immigration enforcement in the state.
Following the subpoenas, Walz said the state “will not be drawn into political theater.”
“My focus has always been on protecting the people of this state. Families are afraid. Kids are afraid to go to school. Small businesses are hurting. A mother is dead and those responsible have yet to be held accountable,” Walz said Tuesday. “This is where the federal government’s energies should be directed: toward restoring trust, accountability, and genuine law and order, not toward political retaliation.
Vance said the goal of his visit was to “lower the temperature a little bit, reduce the chaos, but still allow us as the federal government to enforce American immigration laws.”
Vance claimed the administration was not trying to send a political message with the presence of federal law enforcement in the state. Walz described the Trump administration’s crackdown here as a political revenge campaign.
“Why can’t we see this anywhere else? We only see this level of chaos in Minneapolis,” Vance said. “We’ve had some problems in L.A. and Chicago. You don’t see the same level of chaos, you don’t see the same level of violence in almost every jurisdiction where these guys operate. You don’t see the problems that we see in Minneapolis. Maybe the problem is specific to Minneapolis, and we believe it is, and it stems from a lack of cooperation between state and local law enforcement and federal law enforcement.”
He claimed that immigration agents do a great job and that “frankly a lot of the media lies every day about the work they do”, but that there are “occasionally” cases where not all agents do everything right. When asked by the media about incidents such as the detention of a five-year-old child or the attack on protesters, Vance claimed that much of what was reported on the ground was exaggerated or out of context.
He called those trying to disrupt ICE “far-left agitators” and said state and local public officials should cooperate on immigration enforcement. He said he has “reason to believe” local officials will soon become more cooperative and ask local law enforcement to help facilitate the arrest of people such as sex offenders. The “number one thing” that would lower the temperature would be for local authorities to help facilitate “reasonable enforcement of the law.”
Vance claimed that the federal government did its best to lower the temperature, but local officials did not let them down. He called the situation in Minneapolis “the inevitable outcome of state and local government deciding that they are not going to cooperate in any way in immigration enforcement.”
Earlier in the day, Vance urged protesters to take their grievances to the ballot box rather than confront federal agents on the streets, dismissing protesters who physically blocked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) vehicles in Minneapolis and hurled objects at agents, calling it “cowardly nonsense.”
Vance, who attended a factory in Toledo, Ohio, on Thursday morning, 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 officials have chosen to work with federal immigration enforcement. He cited Memphis and Austin as examples of blue cities without the unrest currently gripping Minneapolis, and argued that the difference comes from cooperation between local police and ICE.
“When you look at Memphis, Tennessee, or Austin, Texas, or pretty much any community in the United States, and you don’t see the same level of chaos in Minneapolis, the natural conclusion is that this is not what ICE is doing in Minneapolis, it’s what Minneapolis officials are doing to prevent ICE from doing their job,” he said.
Vance added that in recent months, ICE has arrested scores of people convicted of sex crimes in Minneapolis, but a 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, put them in jail, and then they go home safely with their families. That’s not what happens,” Vance said.
