JD Vance heads to Minneapolis to praise immigration crackdown as tensions over ICE shooting continue
Vice President JD Vance is headed to Minneapolis Thursday, arriving in a city consumed by clashes over federal immigration policy following the fatal shooting of Renee Good.
According to a White House official, Vance’s trip will include meetings with ICE personnel and a speech praising their efforts while condemning Minneapolis’ “sanctuary” policies, which he will say restricts cooperation with federal immigration authorities.
Vance will focus “on restoring law and order in Minnesota”, his office said.
The fallout from the January 7 shooting has seen mass protests and fresh confrontations in the city after President Donald Trump threatened to deploy the military to restore order.
The U.S. Army has ordered several dozen additional active-duty soldiers to prepare for a possible deployment to Minneapolis if needed, a defense official said Wednesday, as protests in the city continued.
Meanwhile, the Department of Justice also issued subpoenas to several Minnesota officials this week, including the state’s Governor Tim Walz, a frequent critic of how President Donald Trump and the vice president have handled the crisis.
ICE agents are among around 3,000 federal law enforcement officers currently deployed to the area in a show of force the Trump administration has said is aimed at halting immigration violations as well as forming part of a fraud investigation into social service programs in the Somali community.
Vance has been among the Trump administration’s most prominent defenders of ICE’s aggressive tactics and has repeatedly condemned protests against the White House’s crackdown on immigration violations.
The day after Good’s fatal shooting, Vance told reporters, without offering any evidence, that Good was in Minneapolis “to interfere with a legitimate law enforcement operation in the United States of America”.
He described her as being part of “a broader left-wing network to attack, to dox, to assault and to make it impossible for our ICE officers to do their job”.
“If the media wants to tell the truth, they ought to tell the truth that a group of left wing radicals have been working tirelessly, sometimes using domestic terror techniques to try to make it impossible for the President of the United States to do what the American people elected him to do, which is enforce our immigration laws,” Vance said.
It later emerged that Good was on her way home from dropping her 6-year-old son off at school when she encountered the ICE agents.
Vance has also suggested the broader protests in reaction to the Trump administration’s heavy-handed crackdown on immigration enforcement are inauthentic, instead claiming they have been organized and paid for by subversive groups providing unprincipled thugs with the means to commit violence.
He asked: “When somebody throws a brick at an ice agent, or somebody tries to run over an ICE agent, who paid for the brick? And who told protesters to show up and engage in violent activity against our law enforcement officers?”
Vance’s assertions appear to be based on a debunked right-wing conspiracy theory which emerged during protests following the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020.
At the time, pro-Trump social media personalities claimed that pallets of bricks found on streets were purchased by unknown parties and strategically placed for rioters to throw at law enforcement.
However, multiple fact-checking organizations found at the time that the bricks had been purchased for nearby construction projects.
Vance arrives in Minneapolis as multiple recent polls indicate the Trump administration is haemorrhaging public support for its immigration tactics.
A CNN survey conducted after Good’s shooting found most adults viewed the incident as unjustified, saw it as part of broader problems within ICE, and believed the agency is making cities less safe.
A CBS poll found that 61 per cent of Americans think ICE is overly aggressive when detaining people, while a recent Wall Street Journal survey showed a majority of voters now disapprove of Trump’s handling of immigration.
