JD Vance Says Mass Deportations Should ‘Start With 1 Million’
Ivan Pereira, ABC, August 11, 2024
Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance defended his past comments on women and families without children, the Trump campaign’s proposals to deport undocumented immigrants and more in a wide-ranging interview with “This Week” co-anchor Jonathan Karl, which airs in full on Sunday morning.
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The senator brought up the ongoing migrant crisis and again blamed Harris and the Biden administration’s policies, such as ending “Remain in Mexico.”
When asked how he and Trump would accomplish their stated goal of mass deporting as many as 20 million immigrants – a proposal experts previously told ABC News would be a “nightmare” — Vance said they would take a “sequential approach.”
“I mean do you go knock on doors and ask people for their papers? What do you do,” Karl asked.
“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 has failed. And then we can go from there,” Vance said.
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Karl also asked Vance about a racist attack targeting his wife, Usha, from white nationalist live-streamer, Nick Fuentes, who Trump dined with in November 2022.
In a recent livestream, Fuentes said, “What kind of man marries somebody named Usha? Clearly, he doesn’t value his racial identity.”
“My attitude to these people attacking my wife is, she’s beautiful, she’s smart. What kind of man marries Usha? A very smart man and very lucky man,” Vance said of his wife during the ABC News interview. “If these guys want to attack me or attack my views, my policy views, [or] my personality, come after me. But don’t attack my wife. She’s out of your league.”
Trump faced significant blowback for dining with Fuentes, along with rapper Ye (formerly Kanye West) back in November 2022 at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida. At the time, Trump said he did not know who Fuentes was and that he was brought to the dinner by Ye. In a statement given exclusively to Fox News Digital, Trump said, “I had no idea what his views were, and they weren’t expressed at the table in our very quick dinner, or it wouldn’t have been accepted.”
But the former president has not denounced Fuentes’ white nationalist views beyond that, or the recent comments about Usha Vance.
In the interview, Vance contended Trump had “issued plenty of condemnations,” and did not question the former president’s dinner with Fuentes.
“The one thing I like about Donald Trump, Jon, is that he actually will talk to anybody. But just because you talk to somebody doesn’t mean you endorse their views,” Vance said, adding that Trump has been close and friendly with his family.
