JD Vance: Nonwhite Citizens Targeted by ICE Must Have Done Something

Vice President JD Vance seems to believe that Black and brown U.S. citizens in Minneapolis being pulled over by ICE did something to deserve it—including the cops of color being targeted.

“Earlier this week, local law enforcement accused federal agents of racial profiling,” a reporter asked Vance at a Thursday press conference in Minneapolis. “Why are there so many U.S. citizens being caught up in this operation?”

Vance blamed those getting arrested instead of the agents.

“Well, I think your question assumes something that’s not necessarily in evidence, which is that when there are American citizens who have been caught up in some of these enforcement operations, very often it is people who have assaulted a law enforcement officer,” Vance said, ignoring that nearly 200 Americans nationwide were detained, dragged, and beaten by ICE last year.

“They’re not being arrested because they violated the immigration laws, they’re being arrested because they punched a federal law enforcement officer,” Vance claimed without evidence. “That is a totally reasonable thing.”

But as that’s precisely the opposite of what Minnesota residents—and Americans everywhere–are claiming. Plenty of U.S. citizens have been detained for simply “looking” or “sounding” like an immigrant.

“Now to the accusation of racial profiling, it’s something that we take very seriously. We will take accusations of racial profiling back to Washington, we’ll certainly look into them as they come up,” Vance continued. “But this is not a group that’s going around and looking for people who violated the law based on skin color. They’re looking for people who violated the actual law—the law of our immigration system.”

Earlier this week, a local police chief warned that federal agents’ racial profiling is so pervasive that many of his cops are being targeted while off-duty. But when asked about that warning on Thursday, Vance was again dismissive.

“I saw one story about this from one local police officer who said this, and look … is it a concern? Absolutely. The first thing we have to figure out is whether it happened or not,” he said. “Many of the most viral stories of the past couple weeks have turned out to be at best, partially true.… We’re not gonna prejudge people.”

While the statement Vance is referring to was delivered by “one cop,” it involved multiple reports of racial profiling from the local force.

“As this went on over the past two weeks, we started hearing from our police officers the same complaints as they fell victim to this while off-duty. Every one of these individuals is a person of color who has had this happen to them,” Brooklyn Park Police Chief Mark Bruley said on Tuesday. “We know our officers know what the Constitution is, they know when right and wrong is, and they know when people are being targeted,” Bruley continued. “If it is happening to our officers, it pains me to think how many of our community members are falling victim to this every day. It has to stop.”

A bipartisan effort to curb AI-generated deepfake porn has linked hands from Washington to Hollywood.

In an unlikely political alliance, Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez appeared beside Republican Representatives Anna Paulina Luna and Nancy Mace Thursday in support of the Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Edits, or DEFIANCE, Act. If passed, the bill would create a pathway for civil action against those who produce, distribute, receive, or possess digitally generated porn that uses the face or likeness of an individual without their permission.

In lockstep with the high-profile politicians outside the U.S. Capitol was another famous face: Paris Hilton, who argued that deepfake porn had “become an epidemic.”

“Before, someone had to betray your trust and steal something real. Now, all it takes is a computer and a stranger’s imagination,” Hilton said. “I know that today there are over 100,000 explicit deepfake images of me made by AI. Not one of them is real, not one of them is consensual.”

Hilton underscored that, barring new legislation, people have little recourse under the current system to stop the digital abuse.

“Each time a new one appears, that horrible feeling returns: that fear that someone somewhere is looking at it now and thinking it’s real. No amount of money or lawyers could stop it or protect me,” she told a crowd of reporters.

“It’s the newest form of victimization happening at scale, to your daughters, your sisters, your friends and neighbors,” Hilton added.

Tech experts argue that the production of deepfakes is doubling every six months, in part due to the widespread availability of AI. While much reporting has focused on the influence of deepfakes and artificially generated imagery on electoral integrity, coverage has practically glanced over the biggest victims of the practice. The vast majority of deepfakes—some 90 percent—are non-consensually generated porn depicting women, reported Context News in 2024.

The issue has come under increased scrutiny in recent weeks after Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok began churning out deepfake porn with its new image-generating capabilities. Some of the images included sexually explicit deepfakes of children, reported The 19th.

“A staggering one in eight girls today are experiencing the harms of AI-generated deepfake porn,” Hilton said.

Ocasio-Cortez has been fighting the battle against deepfake porn for years. In April 2024, she told Rolling Stone that the damage dealt by the disturbing practice is “not a question of mental strength or fortitude” but rather “about neuroscience and our biology.”

“It’s not as imaginary as people want to make it seem. It has real, real effects not just on the people that are victimized by it, but on the people who see it and consume it,” the New York lawmaker told the magazine, underscoring that the impact of deepfakes parallels the intention of physical rape and assault.

“Deepfakes are absolutely a way of digitizing violent humiliation against other people,” she said at the time.

The DEFIANCE Act passed through the Senate with flying colors earlier this month. If it passes a floor vote in the House, it would become the first federal law aimed at protecting victims of deepfakes, allowing victims to pursue damages starting at $150,000.

Donald Trump is trying to take revenge on financial institutions that dropped him after the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection.

The president filed a lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase and its CEO Jamie Dimon Thursday in Florida state court, seeking $5 billion in damages and accusing the bank of ending its business with him for political reasons. The lawsuit claims that Trump, his family, and different businesses were put on a blacklist “for any wealth management accounts that they have title to,” and asserts that Dimon authorized the action.

“Plaintiffs are confident that JPMC’s unilateral decision came about as a result of political and social motivations, and JPMC’s unsubstantiated, ‘woke’ beliefs that it needed to distance itself from President Trump and his conservative political views,” the lawsuit states. It also claims that JPMorgan never stated why it was closing Trump’s accounts.

Trump and his businesses “learned that they were debanked as a result of political discrimination against President Trump, the Trump Organization, its affiliated entities, and/or the Trump family,” the lawsuit states, though it does not explain how Trump and his businesses deduced this.

In a statement to CNBC, JPMorgan said, “While we regret President Trump has sued us, we believe the suit has no merit.”

“JPMC does not close accounts for political or religious reasons,” said spokesperson Pamela Wexler. “We do close accounts because they create legal or regulatory risk for the company. We regret having to do so but often rules and regulatory expectations lead us to do so.”

The lawsuit follows a threat from Trump on his Truth Social account on Saturday to sue JPMorgan Chase “for incorrectly and inappropriately DEBANKING me after the January 6th Protest, a protest that turned out to be correct for those doing the protesting – The Election was RIGGED!”

Trump already sued Capital One last year for dropping his accounts, and has joined his fellow conservatives in complaining about “debanking,” signing an executive order in September “guaranteeing fair banking for all Americans.” But the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has only received 35 total complaints related to political debanking since 2012, raising the question of whether Trump and the right are trying to force banks into submission.

The White House has called for a review of federal funding to more than a dozen Democrat-led states.

The Office of Management and Budget issued a data request Tuesday seeking information on funding to 13 blue states as well as Washington, D.C., in an attempt to “facilitate efforts to reduce the improper and fraudulent use of those funds,” according to a copy of the memo obtained by CNN.

The memo specifies that the info pull is simply a “data-gathering exercise” and “does not involve withholding funds.” But the initiative is eerily reminiscent of other recent attempts to punish the home states of sanctuary cities that have not supported Donald Trump’s political aspirations or immigration agenda.

The affected states are California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington state.

“We are moving forward with taking fraud seriously,” an OMB spokesperson told The Washington Post.

Earlier this month, the Department of Health and Human Services cut off $10 billion in funding for social services such as childcare and aid for poor families in five blue states—California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota, and New York—over unsupported claims that the funds had been subject to fraud. Those funds were ordered to resume after a judge issued a temporary restraining order just two days later.

HHS also attacked millions in federal childcare credits for Minnesotans after 23-year-old right-wing YouTuber Nick Shirley alleged there was a sprawling fraud scheme taking federal funds from Minnesota-based, Somali-owned day care facilities. Shirley’s report was riddled with problems, however—in no small part due to the fact that the results were skewed by which day cares granted him and another lone white man unannounced admittance to their premises. (Viewed another way, what well-reputed day care would willingly shuttle complete strangers into a facility full of children?)

The Trump administration, in turn, embraced the report, using it as leverage to usher a scourge of ICE agents upon Minneapolis, where their violent presence has only caused more problems, such as the killing of a 37-year-old mother, Renee Nicole Good. The video also offered fodder for a fresh wave of racism against the city’s Somali community, which the president has utilized to clamp down on immigration from East Africa.

Trump has long scorned sanctuary cities, ruing the fact that they have opposed ICE and his federal deportation mandates in favor of their local immigrant communities. Though he has tried several times to cut funding to such cities, the efforts have been routinely blocked by the nations’ courts.

But last week, the president decided he’d try again.

“Starting February 1, we’re not making any payments to sanctuary cities or states having sanctuary cities, because they do everything possible to protect criminals at the expense of American citizens,” Trump said while delivering a speech in Detroit. “And it breeds fraud and crime and all of the other problems that come with it.”

Vice President JD Vance thinks the infamously doomed Titanic is an apt metaphor for the United States.

“The Democrats talk a lot about the affordability crisis in the United States of America. And yes, there is an affordability crisis—one created by Joe Biden’s policies,” Vance said on Thursday, speaking at a rally in Toledo. “You don’t turn the Titanic around overnight. It takes time to fix what was broken.”

This is ironically a very Trumpian gaffe for Vance. The Titanic was lauded as an “unsinkable” ship, something so grand and so technologically advanced that it was simply too big to fail—until it ran right into an iceberg on April 15, 1912. Over 1,500 people died in the dark, icy ocean, and its name has now become synonymous with failure. Vance should’ve probably picked a ship with a better ending to compare to the U.S. economy.

“Does... does he know what happened to the Titanic?” Brian Tyler Cohen wrote on X.

And for what it’s worth, Americans are getting tired of listening to the Trump administration blame former President Biden for the current economic problems, while telling them to simply grin and bear it. A recent New York Times/Siena University poll shows that 56 percent of the country disapproves of Trump right now—and 58 percent of all of the poll’s respondents disapprove of his handling of the economy.

“At least he’s admitting what ship we are on,” another user said.