In North Carolina on Wednesday, J.D. Vance stepped up his attacks on immigrants by telling the press that even people who are here legally are “illegal” and could be deported. He did this in front of a crowd of his fans.
A reporter asked Vance about the Haitian refugees in Springfield, Ohio, that he said were killing and eating pets, which was not true. The reporter said that most of those immigrants are legally in the U.S. because they have Temporary Protected Status.
This means that they would not be affected by Trump’s plans to deport all illegal immigrants in the future.
Vance said that he still thought they were “illegal” and called the question “a fact check by the media and Kamala Harris.”
“The news loves to say that the Haitian immigrants are here legally,” What they mean is that Kamala Harris used two different schemes, one called “mass parole” and the other temporarily protective status. “She waved her magic wand and said, ‘We’re not going to deport those people here,'” Vance said.
If Kamala Harris waves her magic wand in a way that is against the law and says these people are now here officially, I will still call them an illegal alien. If Kamala Harris does something illegal, that doesn’t make an alien legal. “That’s not how this works,” Vance said as his fans cheered.
Last week, Vance said on CNBC, “If the path to prosperity was flooding your nation with low-wage immigrants, then Springfield, Ohio, would be the most prosperous city in the world.” Vance’s comments on Wednesday are similar to those.
This view goes against what Vance said many years before he became a politician. As early as 2012, Vance spoke out against the Republican Party’s immigration policies, saying that a plan to remove “millions of unregistered aliens… fails the laugh test.” It also doesn’t make sense because his wife, Usha, is the daughter of Indian refugees.
Vance’s comments in North Carolina are upsetting because he now says that legal immigrants are illegal, even though he doesn’t know how they got into the country. He says that the Biden administration illegally made them legal.
It’s not likely that Vance would say the same thing if Trump or another Republican “waved a magic wand.” It also makes it clear that Trump’s first administration’s unstable and cruel immigration policies would get even worse if he wins again.