Mark Hertzberg/Zuma
Donald Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), has said a lot of wild things. But on Sunday, he made headlines for something he didn’t say.
In an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, Vance left the door open to renewed family separations under Trump’s promised “mass deportation” plan. Despite moderator Kristen Welker directly asking Vance three times if families would be separated in a second Trump administration, Vance failed to clearly answer. Instead, he parroted the right’s critique of Vice President Kamala Harris, falsely claiming she had been designated as “border czar.”
A federal judge assailed the policy as one of the country’s
“most shameful chapters.”
“Millions upon millions of illegal immigrants that have come in just since Kamala Harris became the border czar,” Vance told Welker.
“She was put in charge of the root causes of migration,” Welker corrected Vance.
“Well the root causes of migration, Kristen, is that Kamala Harris refused to do her job as border czar,” Vance replied.
My colleague Isabela Dias has explained how that’s not true—and how “border czar” fails to accurately describe exactly what Harris was tasked with:
As vice president, Harris was tasked with attacking the “root causes” of migration from Central America to the United States. Those drivers are not only complex, but long-standing—and deeply tied to America’s Cold War politics and imperialism. Harris had the (potentially impossible) job of trying to understand, and fix, over half a century of US meddling in the region—in addition to country-specific dynamics of that meddling—that has boomeranged into a migrant crisis.
Harris was never appointed the “czar” of “the border.” Nor is she in charge of it. That is to a large extent the purview of the secretary of homeland security, which of course Republicans know all too well. They tried and failed to impeach Biden’s head of [the Department of Homeland Security] Alejandro Mayorkas on baseless allegations that he deliberately enabled “open borders.”
As Welker pressed Vance on whether a new Trump administration would separate families, one way he dodged the question was by claiming the Biden-Harris administration was already doing so.
It’s unclear what Vance was referring to, but as Welker pointed out, under the Biden administration “there are some families who have been separated…because their parents are criminals,” contrasting the situation with the “zero tolerance policy” launched by Trump’s Department of Justice in May 2018.
The controversial scheme memorably—and heartbreakingly—led to kids being held in cages and years-long disastrous ripple effects. Trump issued an executive order meant to end the policy just a month later, following massive public backlash. But families remained in legal limbo for years as a result. The policy was conclusively killed in December 2023, when a federal judge in San Diego approved a settlement to end it, writing that the separations of migration families represented “one of the most shameful chapters in the history of our country.”
In 2021, when the Biden administration set up a task force to reunite the families, it estimated that 3,924 kids had been separated under Trump. The average age of children separated from their parents? Nine years old, and more than a quarter of them were under 5, according to federal officials. As of last fall, roughly a thousand kids remained separated from their parents.
“Whether your administration would tear families apart and put kids in cages should not be a tough question,” wrote Kevin Munoz, a senior spokesperson for Harris-Walz 2024. “But JD Vance is ducking and dodging because he knows Donald Trump would go as far as using the military to tear children from their mother’s arms and round up migrants into mass detention camps.”
In another part of his Meet the Press appearance, Vance tried to claim that his comments denigrating “childless cat ladies” had been a critique of government policies unfriendly to families. “I think that it’s really a profound change that’s happened in our country where we’ve become anti-family,” Vance told Welker on Meet the Press, “and I would like to change that.”
Somehow, he does not see Trump’s family separation policy as part of the problem.
Update, August 25: This post now includes comment from the Harris campaign.
