JD Vance Downplays Trump’s Cruelest Immigration Policy Coming Back

Vice President-elect J.D. Vance is trying to rewrite the narrative on the term “family separation.”

In an interview with Fox News on Sunday, the relatively mum MAGA official candidly brushed off criticisms that Donald Trump’s aggressive immigration policies are needlessly cruel, claiming instead that the language used by opponents to the highly controversial program is “dishonest.”

“This term is something you’re gonna hear a lot in the next couple of months, the next couple of years, Shannon: ‘family separation,’” Vance told host Shannon Bream. “I think it’s important—that’s a euphemism, that is a dishonest term to hide behind the fact that Joe Biden has not done border enforcement.”

Vance then went on to disingenuously liken family separation to a program that only jails violent offenders, thereby separating convicted criminals from their families ipso facto. But that’s not what family separation does. Instead, the immigration deterrence program (launched by Trump during his first administration) instituted a “zero tolerance” policy at the U.S.-Mexico border, targeting immigrants attempting to enter the country. At the time, Attorney General Jeff Sessions directed the Justice Department to prosecute every adult who entered the United States irregularly.

It was made possible by the vicious combination of two federal laws. First, the government prosecuted immigrants with minor federal charges for improper entry. Officials then transferred them from U.S. Customs and Border Protection to the U.S. Marshals Service during their court hearings, labeling their children as unaccompanied throughout the process. U.S. Customs and Border Protection then used a different law to send the children to a subsidiary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that was responsible for handling unaccompanied children.

The program separated more than 4,600 children from their parents before it was ended in 2021. As of December, 1,360 children remain unaccounted for, according to a report by Human Rights Watch, which said the practice met the definition for “enforced disappearance,” amounted to “torture,” and was a “crime under international law.”

“If you come into this country illegally, you need to go back home,” Vance told Fox. “And what the Democrats are going to do is they’re going to hide behind this. They’re going to say this is all about compassion for families.”

But experts who have sized up the scope and devastation of Trump’s family separation policies don’t agree.

“It’s chilling to see, in document after document, the calculated cruelty that went into the forcible family separation policy,” Michael Garcia Bochenek, senior children’s rights counsel at Human Rights Watch and an author of the December report, told the international organization. “A government should never target children to send a message to parents.”

Republican leadership continues to use one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history as political leverage.

On Monday, House Speaker Mike Johnson told CNN’s Manu Raju that there should be “conditions” on the proposed federal aid to California in the wake of the deadly wildfires in Los Angeles County.

“It appears to us that state and local leaders were derelict in their duty in many respects, so that’s something that has to be factored in. I think there should probably be conditions on that aid.”

Asked whether he planned on conditioning the aid to debt ceiling negotiations, Johnson said that option is on the table. “There’s some discussion about that, but we’ll see where it goes.”

Nearly 200,000 L.A. residents have been placed under evacuation order, and many won’t have homes to return to. Over 12,000 buildings—including a public library, a medical center, a church, a synagogue, and large swaths of a predominantly Black neighborhood—have been destroyed so far in the wildfires. At least 24 are dead, and likely counting. The total land burned in these Los Angeles wildfires is bigger than Paris.

In short, the wildfires are a devastating national catastrophe. For Johnson to so casually suggest that there should be any conditions at all on aid to the affected areas of California is absolutely cruel and unusual.

Johnson isn’t the only one. Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso told Face the Nation on Sunday that he expected “there will be strings attached to money that is ultimately approved, and it has to do with being ready the next time, because this was a gross failure this time.” He thinks that because the “policies of the liberal administration” had “made these fires worse,” the people of that administration should suffer too.

On Monday, Senator Ron Johnson told Wake Up America that he wouldn’t vote for any aid to California “unless we see a dramatic change in how they’re gonna be handling these things in the future.… These are decisions Californian Democrats have made.… It’s their fault.”

At the time of this writing, the fires continue to burn through Los Angeles County.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is already helping Donald Trump get his plan for mass deportations started.

On Monday, DeSantis called for state legislators to hold a special session to help the incoming Trump administration’s immigration plans, with the president-elect’s inauguration taking place in one week. The session will be the week of January 27, one week after Trump is sworn in.

“State and local officials in Florida must help the Trump administration enforce our nation’s immigration laws,” DeSantis said. “In order to do that effectively, we are going to need legislation to impose additional duties on local officials and provide funding for those local officials.”

DeSantis has suggested that he would take action against any elected officials who “neglect their duties” and do not work to implement Trump’s mass deportations. It wouldn’t be the first time for the Florida governor: DeSantis previously suspended State Attorneys Monique Worrell and Andrew Warren for opposing him.

The Florida governor said he plans to spend tens of millions of dollars in new funding to expand immigration detention, and would consider activating the Florida National Guard and the Florida State Guard to help with enforcement. All of these actions show that DeSantis has apparently buried the hatchet with Trump, who called him “Meatball Ron,” “Rob,” “Ron DeSanctimonious,” and “Ron DeSanctus” during the Republican presidential primaries.

Trump even called DeSantis a “groomer,” a slur akin to calling him a pedophile. But DeSantis warmed up to Trump last spring after his own presidential bid flopped, helping to fundraise for Trump when the then–Republican presidential nominee’s funds were dwarfed by Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign fortune. DeSantis also looked the other way on whether Trump’s felony conviction allowed him to vote in the 2024 election.

DeSantis’s tenure in Florida has been criticized as authoritarian, and policy-wise, he’s quite close to Trump, so it makes sense that he would support the president-elect. Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara also happens to be angling for a Senate seat, which DeSantis can give her if Marco Rubio is confirmed as secretary of state. It seems that one of Trump’s scariest plans already has a powerful backer.

The Washington Post’s editorial board made the mind-boggling decision Monday to say they support all but four of Donald Trump’s Cabinet nominees, and their rationales were as unconvincing as they were brief.

“We would not have picked any of his choices for our hypothetical Cabinet. But, as we have argued for decades, that is not the standard we—or U.S. senators—should apply when evaluating potential executive nominees for Senate confirmation,” the paper’s editorial board wrote the day before Senate confirmation hearings were set to begin.

So, who exactly does the Post think shouldn’t make it? Fox & Friends host Pete Hegseth, anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist and failed presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., former Democrat turned MAGA acolyte and possible Russian asset Tulsi Gabbard, and Project 2025 contributor Russell Vought.

Pretty good—or bad, that is—choices. Still, the struggling legacy paper being steered by a not-so-benevolent billionaire chose to greenlight the rest of Trump’s sorry cast of characters, who are also radically unqualified and ridiculous choices for their perspective positions.

The Post’s editorial board inexplicably insisted that attorney general nominee Pam Bondi “is qualified,” noting that “lawyers who have worked with her report that she is serious.”

But Bondi’s loyalty to Trump is no less than that of failed nominee Matt Gaetz, who was touted as an instrument of retribution against the president-elect’s political enemies. After the 2020 presidential election, Bondi joined forces with Rudy Giuliani to sow doubt about the results. She’s also a former Amazon lobbyist, so that could help explain why she got the nod from Jeff Bezos’s publication.

Meanwhile, Chris Wright, a fossil fuel executive and Trump’s pick for secretary of energy, was deemed passable because he simply “acknowledges that climate change is real.”

But in a 2023 video on LinkedIn, which was removed for containing “false and misleading content,” Wright claimed that “there is no climate crisis, and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition either. Humans and all complex life on earth is simply impossible without carbon dioxide hence the term carbon pollution is outrageous.”

Former World Wrestling Entertainment CEO Linda McMahon, Trump’s nominee for secretary of education, earned the short review of being the “other co-chair of the president-elect’s transition team [who] led the Small Business Administration during Trump’s first term.”

While that makes her qualified to implement the whims of the president-elect, it doesn’t mean she knows the first thing about education. Luckily for her, she may not have to, as her boss (and other Republicans) have hopes to shutter the Department of Education altogether.

Fox Business co-host Sean P. Duffy, who is Trump’s pick to be secretary of transportation, will “still need to study,” the board noted.

Scott Turner, a motivational speaker nominated as secretary of Housing and Urban Development, “has never run a big organization, but that is not disqualifying.” At a certain point, why bother writing anything at all?

To that point, several Cabinet-level officials, including Elise Stefanik, Lee Zeldin, John Ratcliffe, and Kelly Loeffler, did not even receive justifications from the paper but were given the go-ahead anyway. The Post editorial board has chosen to defend the appointment of loyalists because they lack egregiously disqualifying features, and not because they possess any qualifying ones.

Donald Trump has nothing but nice things to say about Senator John Fetterman after he went all the way to Mar-a-Lago to visit him over the weekend.

The Pennsylvania senator and Democrat said last week that Trump invited him for a meeting, and apparently the president-elect was impressed after an hour-long conversation with the man he once accused of abusing heroin, cocaine, crystal meth, and fentanyl.

“It was a totally fascinating meeting. He’s a fascinating man, and his wife is lovely. They were both up, and I couldn’t be more impressed,” Trump said to the Washington Examiner, referring to Fetterman and his wife, Gisele. “He’s a commonsense person. He’s not liberal or conservative. He’s just a commonsense person, which is beautiful.”

Fetterman has taken a major shift in his political ideology to the right in the last two years, particularly with his full-throated support for Israel’s ongoing massacre in Gaza. He’s lost a lot of Democratic support as a result, and even seemed OK with Trump’s crazy idea to annex Greenland, recently comparing it to the Louisiana Purchase.

Fetterman’s wife, Gisele, was once an undocumented immigrant, and has advocated for immigrant rights and the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, whose beneficiaries are called Dreamers. The Examiner didn’t mention if immigration was a topic of discussion during Trump and Fetterman’s meeting, but one wonders if she had anything to say on the topic.

The Pennsylvania senator has co-sponsored the Laken Riley Act, an extreme bill that would allow for the detention of undocumented immigrants merely accused of a nonviolent crime. The bill right now does not include any exceptions or protections for Dreamers. Has Fetterman turned so far to the right that he’s ignoring his own wife’s story—and is Trump secretly applauding him for it?