JD Vance: I worry that
unless the Supreme Court steps in here, or unless the District Courts
exercise a little bit more discretion, we are running into a real
conflict between two important principles in the United States.
Principle
1 of course is that courts interpret the law. Principle 2 is that the
American people decide how they’re governed. That’s the fundamental
small-d democratic principle that’s at the heart of the American
project. I think that you are seeing, and I know this is inflammatory,
but I think you are seeing an effort by the courts to quite literally
overturn the will of the American people. To be clear, it’s not most
courts. But I saw an interview with Chief Justice Roberts recently where
he said the role of the court is to check the excesses of the
executive. I thought that was a profoundly wrong sentiment. That’s
one-half of his job. The other half of his job is to
check the excesses of his own branch. You cannot have a country where
the American people keep on electing immigration enforcement and the
courts tell the American people they’re not allowed to have what they
voted for. That’s where we are right now.
While in Rome to meet the new pope, America's vice-president also joined 
Ross Douthat at the U.S. Embassy in Rome for the columnist's New York Times podcast, which led to a lengthy talk about JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies. (The two Catholics kind of look — and sound — alike; video at the hyperlink.)
JD Vance: I’ve talked to a lot of cardinals this weekend, just because there are a
lot of cardinals here in Rome, and one of the arguments that I’ve made,
very respectfully — I’ve had a lot of good, respectful conversations,
including with cardinals who very strongly disagree with my views on
migration — is that it’s easy to get locked in left versus right; the
left respects the dignity of migrants and the right is motivated by
hatred. Obviously, that’s not my view, but I think some liberal
immigration advocates get locked in the view that the only reason JD
Vance wants to enforce the borders more stridently is because he is
motivated by some kind of hatred or some kind of grievance.
… I really do think that social solidarity is destroyed when you have too much migration too quickly.
That’s
not because I hate the migrants or I’m motivated by grievance. That’s
because I’m trying to preserve something in my own country where we are a
unified nation. And I don’t think that can happen if you have too much
immigration too quickly.
… Ross Douthat: The
Trump administration, while running for president, made two promises:
We’re going to secure the border and we’re going to deport a substantial
number of the people who entered illegally under the previous
administration.
I would say that you
have been more successful than I expected at swiftly securing the
border. On deportations, it seems like the actual process is not moving
that quickly, and there’s a lot of debates in the courts and elsewhere
about relatively small numbers of potential deportees.
Vance: Sure.
Douthat: So, looking ahead four years from now, what would constitute success in immigration policy at the end of this term?
Vance:
Well, not to pat ourselves on the back too much, but I do think the
most important success is stopping the flow of illegal migration to
begin with. And I think that the president has succeeded wildly on that.
I agree, it’s been greater than my expectations, and I had high
expectations. We’ve done a very good job there, and I think the
president deserves a great deal of credit.
On
the deportation question, first, this is just a minor wonky point that
kind of bothers me in the way this is reported in the media. Sometimes
you will hear people say that deportations in the Trump administration
are down relative to the Biden administration. That is in fact an
artifact of the fact that the Biden border was effectively wide open. In
other words, if somebody comes across the border illegally and you
immediately turn them around, or you schedule a deportation hearing and
say, come back for your hearing, a lot of both of those would get
counted as deportation.
So you can
have a lot of deportations when you have quite literally millions of
people per year walking across the border. That’s low-hanging fruit in
terms of deportation. So just a point of clarification there.
Douthat:
That’s completely fair. But at the current pace of deportations, you
would be deporting numbers commensurate with prior presidents and not
commensurate with the numbers who entered.
Vance: That’s right.
I’m
sure New York Times listeners are going to be scandalized by this line
of argumentation, but I think it’s really important. In some ways, the
deportation infrastructure that is developed in the United States is not
adequate to the task, given what Joe Biden left us.
There
are different estimates of how many illegal immigrants came in under
the Biden administration. Was it 12 million? Was it 20 million? It’s
hard to count this stuff because you have known got-aways, you have
unknown got-aways. You have the people that we never even saw cross the
border. So there’s a little bit of guesswork in all this.
I actually think the number is much closer to 20 million than to 12 million ——
Douthat:
Just to pause there, one of the most hard-core, critical of illegal
immigration think tanks, when I looked into this, had its estimate in
the 10 million to 12 million range.
Vance:
That’s right. They did. And I think they’re undercounting it, because I
think they’re counting the people that we were aware of. I don’t think
they were counting that estimate of unknown got-aways. They weren’t
counting certain classes of asylum seekers, of temporary protected
status seekers. So they were answering a question as honestly as they
could. But I think, if you look at the grand scheme of it, it’s higher.
But look, whether it’s 12 million or whether it’s 20 million, it’s a lot. That’s a lot of work ahead of us,
and here are two things that we can do. I think one thing is a little
bit easier and one thing is a little bit harder. The first thing is you
just have to have the actual law enforcement infrastructure to make this
possible. And again, I think that we should treat people humanely. I
think we have an obligation to treat people humanely, but I do think
that a lot of these illegal immigrants have to go back to where they
came from. That requires more law enforcement officers. It requires more
beds at deportation facilities. It just requires more of the basic nuts
and bolts of how you run a law enforcement regime in the context of
deportation. And that’s one of the main things in the big, beautiful
bill that is moving through Congress right now: more money for
immigration enforcement. That’s what that money is for, to facilitate
that deportation infrastructure.
There’s
also a much more difficult question, and I think you see the
president’s frustration and I’ve obviously expressed public frustration
on this, which is, yes, illegal immigrants, by virtue of being in the
United States, are entitled to some due process. But the due process ——
Douthat:
To be clear, this is based on legislation. It’s not based on the judges
who are making these decisions inventing this standard. It is a
legislative standard.
Vance:
But the amount of process that is due, how you enforce those
legislative standards and how you actually bring them to bear, is, I
think, very much an open question.
… A lot of very well-funded NGOs went about the process of making it much
harder to deport illegal aliens. In the year of our Lord 2025, we
inherited a whole host of legal rules, and in some cases not even legal
rules, and in some cases not even legal rules as much as arguments that
had been made by left-wing NGOs that hadn’t actually been ruled on by
the courts yet. And what we’re finding, of course, is that a small but
substantial number of courts are making it very, very hard for us to
deport illegal aliens.
Stephen Miller, our immigration czar in the White House, a good friend
of mine, is thinking of all of these different and new statutory
authorities, because there are a lot of different statutory authorities
the president has to enforce the nation’s immigration laws. And there
is, candidly, frustration on the White House side that we think that the
law is very clear. We think the president has extraordinary plenary
power. You need some process to confirm that these illegal aliens are,
in fact, illegal aliens and not American citizens. But it’s not like
we’re just throwing that process out. We’re trying to comply with it as
much as possible and actually do the job that we were left ——
Douthat: OK, but ——
Vance:
Let me just make one final philosophical point here. I worry that
unless the Supreme Court steps in here, or unless the District Courts
exercise a little bit more discretion, we are running into a real
conflict between two important principles in the United States.
Principle
1 of course is that courts interpret the law. Principle 2 is that the
American people decide how they’re governed. That’s the fundamental
small-d democratic principle that’s at the heart of the American
project. I think that you are seeing, and I know this is inflammatory,
but I think you are seeing an effort by the courts to quite literally
overturn the will of the American people. To be clear, it’s not most
courts. But I saw an interview with Chief Justice Roberts recently where
he said the role of the court is to check the excesses of the
executive. I thought that was a profoundly wrong sentiment. That’s
one-half of his job. The other half of his job is to
check the excesses of his own branch. You cannot have a country where
the American people keep on electing immigration enforcement and the
courts tell the American people they’re not allowed to have what they
voted for. That’s where we are right now.
We’re going to keep working it through the immigration court process, through the Supreme Court as much as possible.
… Douthat:
… The legal authorities that you guys
have tried to use, the particular one is the Alien Enemies Act, which is
an extremely aggressive claim about wartime powers that, as far as I
can tell, even under the most aggressive interpretation is likely to
apply only to an incredibly small number of migrants. The claim is not
actually that five million migrants here illegally are in a state of war
against the United States. Or is that the claim?
Vance: No,
it’s not that five million are engaged in military conflict. I take
issue that it’s an aggressive interpretation. Let me back up and take
some issue with that premise. I don’t think that the supposition, if you
look at the history and the context of those laws, is that for
something to be an invasion you have to have five million uniformed
combatants.
We don’t have five million
uniformed combatants. I think I have to be careful here because some of
this information is classified. How to put this point? I think that the
courts need to be somewhat deferential. In fact, I think the design is
that they should be extremely deferential to these questions of
political judgment made by the people’s elected president of the United
States.
Because when you say there
aren’t five million people who are waging war, OK, but are there
thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people? And then when you take
their extended family, their networks, is it much larger than that? Who
are quite dangerous people who I think very intentionally came to the
United States to cause violence, or to at least profit from violence,
and they’re fine if violence is an incidental effect of it? Yeah. I do,
man. And I think people underappreciate the level of public safety
stress that we’re under when the president talks about how bad crime is.
You know, the one thing I’d love for the American media to do a little
bit more is really go to a migrant community where you have, say, 60
percent legal immigrants and 40 percent illegal immigrants. The level of
chaos, the level of violence, the level of I think truly premodern
brutality that some of these communities have gotten used to. Whatever
law was written, I think it vests us with the power to take very serious
action against this. It’s bad. It’s worse than people appreciate, and
it’s not Donald Trump.
… This is not sustainable. And it’s not just unsustainable, like, oh, this
is more immigrants than we used to have. This is a level of invasion
that I think we already have laws to help us deal with. I wish the
courts were more deferential. We’re very early innings in the court
process, and even some of the capital-W worst Supreme Court decisions
that have been made, the media says: Oh, this is a big blow to the
administration. A lot of these things are very narrow procedural
rulings. I think that we’re very early innings here on what the court is
going to interpret the law to mean.
… Typically, what I find when I look at the
worst cases — I mean, the ones that the media seems so preoccupied with
— I’m going to make a couple of observations about it. No. 1, it is
hard to take seriously — now, this doesn’t absolve me from doing my duty
as an American leader and hopefully as a Christian leader, too — but it
is hard to take seriously the extraordinarily emotive condemnations of
people who don’t care about the problem that I’m trying to solve and
that the president is trying to solve.
That’s
not you. It’s why I actually take your concerns seriously. I listen to
most of your podcasts. I read most of your columns. So when I see people
who for legitimately four years told me that I was a xenophobe for
thinking that what Joe Biden was doing at the border was a serious
problem, I am less willing — there’s a witness element to this — and I’m
less willing to believe the witness of people who are now saying that
this MS-13 gang member, and we’ll talk about that case in a second, this
guy is somehow a very sympathetic person and you violated his civil
rights, et cetera, et cetera.
… I understand there may be disagreements about the judgments that
we made here, but there’s just something that it’s hard to take serious
when so many of the people who are saying we made a terrible error here
are the same people who made no protests about how this guy got into
the country in the first place, or what Joe Biden did for four years to
the American Southern border.
… There are two things about my boss — and I
never reveal private conversations — there are two things about the
president of the United States that I am extremely fascinated by. One is
he has better instincts about human beings than anybody that I’ve ever
met. Just almost a bizarre level of intuition about people.
Second,
which I think is very underappreciated and it motivates the foreign
policy in Ukraine and Russia, it motivates the things that he said about
the Middle East, it motivates really a lot of them, is he has this sort
of humanitarian impulse. And I’ve heard the president say: Maybe if we
sent the very worst people to different places, then American prisons
would be a little less violent. Because as you know, American prisons
are not a good place. They’re not very good at rehabilitation.
… Douthat: … When I look at
the big, beautiful bill working its way through the House and Senate, I
see very conventional, small government Republican policymaking.
Certainly not a kind of new industrial policy for the 21st century. So is that out there as a possibility for the administration?
Vance:
So, yes. But I think you’re underweighting how much there’s both a
carrot and stick element to this and the Trump administration. Again,
you see traditional Republicans, small government, blah, blah, blah,
blah. OK, but we’re talking about no tax on overtime, no tax on tips.
These are things that give domestic consumers more money. And if you
combine giving domestic consumers more money with making it easier and
cheaper to produce in America and more expensive to produce overseas,
then that is, in our view, at least a form of industrial policy.
… Douthat: Is there a legislative vision after the tax bill passes?
Vance:
You know, you have to bite off only so much at a time, Ross, and I
think that it’s not just a tax bill, of course, it’s an immigration
bill. There are a lot of other parts of the policy agenda that matter.
There’s a lot of regulatory relief in this bill. This bill is what we’re
focused on. And then, yes, once we get this bill passed, we’re going to
think about other legislative priorities.
… Douthat:
So, a couple of times in this interview, you’ve said something to me to
the effect of: I know New York Times readers hate me, I know New York
Times readers don’t like me and so on.
Vance: [Laughs.]
Douthat:
But here’s the reality of the last couple of years as I experienced it
as a New York Times conservative. The Trump-Vance ticket won a
constituency you didn’t have before, that Trump didn’t have before in
2016.
Vance: Sure.
Douthat: That included the kind of people who read The New York Times. People who were exhausted by wokeness ——
Vance: Yes. And by the way, if they don’t like me, I still love them.
I’m just trying to acknowledge that a point that I make may not land particularly well, but go ahead.
… Douthat: … There’s
a group of people who, it’s not millions and millions of people, but
it’s a real and substantial constituency that voted for you guys, to
their own surprise. Or even if they didn’t vote for you, they woke up
the day after the election — I heard a lot of people say this — and
said: You know, in the end, I was glad they won.
… So then, generally, you’re going to face the voters by proxy in the midterms.
You may face the voters personally in some future.
But
to this constituency that was pro-Trump — again, maybe it’s to its own
surprise, but has found itself sort of shocked at various points in the
first few months — what is your pitch to them right now?
Vance:
I guess my pitch to them would be: We came into the administration with
what we believe was a mandate from the American people to make
government more responsive to the elected will of the people and less
responsive to bureaucratic intransigence.
… I think that if in two years you look at the past two years, or in four
years you look at the past four years, what I hope to be able to say and
what I think is true today and will still be true then is that we
actually have done, with some bumps, we’ve done a good job at making the
government more responsive. More efficient to the cabinet secretaries
or the deputy secretaries in those departments. And that this sort of
feeling of shock, I don’t dismiss it or diminish it, but I think that
the system actually needed some pretty significant reform.
