Immigration and crime headlined a media stop from Republican nominee for vice president J.D. Vance in Michigan Wednesday.
Vance’s appearance in Shelby Township came within weeks of the arrest of a man there who authorities say was in the country without documentation. The suspect was accused of sexually assaulting a child.
Vance doubled down on a proposal from the campaign to mass deport millions of people.
“If you’re not willing to tell at least some of the people who are in this country illegally that you have to go back, then you don’t have a real border policy and, unfortunately, that’s what Kamala Harris has given this country,” Vance said.
Numbers from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement show hundreds of thousands of people have been deported since Harris became Vice President.
Meanwhile, the Office of Homeland Security Statistics estimates there are more than 10 million people living in this country without permission from immigration officials. Many have questioned the impact removing all of them would have on the country’s economy.
Vance’s visit to Michigan follows Harris choosing Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate.
Vance accused Walz of leaning too far to the left on issues like transgender youth, providing IDs to undocumented people and responding to social demonstrations in 2020.
“This is a radical human being who comes from the far-left wing of the Democrat party. And what Kamala Harris is telling all of us by selecting Tim Walz is that she bends the knee to the far left of the Democrat party,” Vance said.
Meanwhile, the Harris campaign accuses Vance of being too far to the right. That’s especially when it comes to abortion access, where Democrats point to Vance’s support of tough, no exceptions abortion restrictions.
Campaign officials said Wednesday’s press conference at the Shelby Township Police Station marked the first open-air event for the campaign since an assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump.
Security appeared turned up, with thorough car checks taking place and snipers lining nearby roofs.
Despite the precautions, Vance took questions from local reporters and criticized the Harris campaign for not fielding reporter questions herself in recent days.
One point of tension arose when a reporter asked Vance about Trump’s questioning of Harris’ race last week at the National Association of Black Journalists' conference in Chicago.
Speaking to a largely Black audience there, Trump falsely claimed Harris “made a turn” to become Black when it became politically advantageous.
Harris is biracial and has always publicly acknowledged both heritages she comes from. Code switching is a term often associated with people of color that describes how someone may change their language to address different environments to find comfort in a space.
When asked about those remarks, Vance, who is married to an Indian American woman and is father of three biracial children, said he saw no trouble with Trump’s comments.
