What Is ‘Shocking’ to J.D. Vance Should Shock – and Anger – You, Too

Vice President J.D. Vance appeared on Fox News on January 29 and made a simple yet profound point about the aliens whom ICE is now actively arresting: “What is shocking to me is that many of these violent criminals — we knew their addresses, we knew their names. We just needed to send somebody to go to their house and get them the hell out of the country.” It should shock — and anger — all law-abiding people who pay their taxes and care about their neighbors and their own personal safety.

A Brief Recap of Biden-Harris Enforcement Restrictions. Throughout the Biden-Harris administration, I wrote extensively about the restrictions it had placed on immigration enforcement agents, and ICE officers in particular.

Here’s a brief recap in case you’ve forgotten.

As soon as President Biden was sworn in on January 20, 2021, Acting DHS Secretary David Pekoske issued a memo that (1) placed a 100-day hold on nearly all removals and (2) limited immigration enforcement to three specified “priorities”: spies, terrorists, and other threats to national security; aliens who entered illegally on or after November 1, 2020; and aliens convicted of aggravated felonies (as defined in section 101(a)(43) of the Immigration and Nationality Act or “INA”).

But not all aggravated felons — only criminal aliens convicted of aggravated felonies and released after the date of that memo, and who were “determined pose a threat to public safety”, were subject to arrest, detention, and prosecution. I guess the rest could just take a breather.

One month later, then-Acting ICE Director Tae Johnson issued a new memo that ever-so-slightly expanded the class of aliens deemed priorities for ICE enforcement under the Pekoske memo.

Threats to national security and border security were still priorities, but the Johnson memo also included non-detained aggravated felons and certain gang members, provided they “pose[] a risk to public safety” (though it is hard to imagine many who don’t).

Seven months later, in September 2021, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas issued a memo that again placed restrictions on ICE’s ability to investigate, arrest, detain, prosecute, and remove criminal aliens.

Relying on what the memo described as DHS’s “prosecutorial discretion”, the Mayorkas memo directed ICE officers and attorneys to consider certain “aggravating” and “mitigating” factors before taking any enforcement action, with limited exceptions.

The aggravating factors are general and objective, relating to aliens’ criminal offenses and prior criminal history.

The mitigating factors, on the other hand, are more individualized and subjective, having to do with the alien’s age, health, eligibility for relief from removal, and — interestingly — whether any of the alien’s family members were in the military or worked for the government.

Respectfully, reading that memo and its two predecessors should have made objective observers in the media, in politics, and in the public as a whole question whose side DHS leadership was on — the American people’s or the criminal subclass in the immigrant community?

Watershed Moments. There are certain watershed moments in history when dangerous crackpot movements inevitably smack up against reality and have their pretensions exposed for the nonsense that they are.

For example, as Penn Today explained in March 2022:

The last of the Salem witch trials was held in May of 1693. In total, between 144 and 185 people were accused of witchcraft. Fifty-four confessed —”if you confessed, you could save your life”. … Nineteen people were executed, 14 women and five men. An 81-year-old man was accidentally killed, pressed to death by stones during torture. All the accused were pardoned by the end of 1693.

With due respect, the “81-year-old man” in question — Giles Corey — wasn’t “accidentally killed”; he refused to confess to false charges and had increasingly heavier stones placed on his chest over three excruciating days in September 1692. It took a few months for the hysteria to die down, but Corey’s well-publicized and gruesome demise was when the fever started to break.

Similarly, the Reign of Terror in revolutionary France had been raging for nine months and racked up 17,000 victims when soldiers arrested the “Carmelites of Compiègne”, 16 nuns who refused to renounce their vows, and executed them by guillotine at the Place de la Nation in Paris on July 17, 1794.

Beheading nuns proved too much for even Paris mobs to take, and 10 days later Maximilien Robespierre, driving force of the Terror, was arrested and summarily executed, effectively ending one of the darkest periods in French history.

Laken Riley. Which brings me to Laken Riley.

On the morning of February 22, 2024, Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student at Augusta University in Athens, Ga., went out for a run on the nearby University of Georgia campus.

While on that run, she was attacked and beaten to death in broad daylight by Jose Ibarra, a Venezuelan migrant who entered illegally in September 2022. Ibarra had been apprehended at the border and released, and in his short stay in the United States had already been arrested at least twice as of the day of that attack.

Less than a week after Riley’s murder, I expressed my concern that her senseless and avoidable killing would be ignored by a media that had shown little concern for other migrant crimes. I could not have been more wrong.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) quickly took President Joe Biden to task about the murder during his March 7, 2024, State of the Union address, challenging him to “say her name”. When Biden misidentified Riley, it only made things worse.

Still, Biden managed to dig himself in deeper, abasing himself as he later apologized for referring to then-suspect Ibarra as “an illegal”, a move that placated no one on the other side of the aisle.

There were more victims of migrant crimes — Rachel Morin in Maryland and Jocelyn Nungaray in Houston to name just two — and even the most Biden-friendly media was forced to report on the issue.

Democrats, most prominently Vice President (and then-Democratic presidential candidate) Kamala Harris, had little to offer in response to claims that they were abetting this violence by releasing millions of unvetted migrants into the United States aside from blaming Trump for scuttling largely ineffective border legislation.

Trump was undeterred, and hammered Biden and then Harris over migrant crime on the campaign trail, and once Vance joined the ticket, the then-senator from Ohio piled on too.

Remember in October, when Vance appeared on ABC News’ “This Week” program and host Martha Raddatz complained that Trump and Vance were overstating the threat posed to residents of Aurora, Colo., by Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan criminal cartel that came here during the migrant surge?

Here’s an excerpt from the transcript:

Raddatz: Senator Vance, I’m going to stop you because I know exactly what happened. I’m going to stop you. The incidents were limited to a handful of apartment complex — apartment complexes and the mayor [of Aurora] said our dedicated police officers have acted on those concerns. A handful of problems.

Vance: Only — Martha, do you hear yourself? Only a handful of apartment complexes in America were taken over by Venezuelan gangs, and Donald Trump is the problem, and not Kamala Harris’s open border?

Missed Opportunities. At any point during the 2024 campaign, Biden — and then Harris — could have potentially flipped the script and salvaged their respective sinking campaigns by rescinding the Mayorkas memo and freeing ICE officers to pick up high-profile criminal migrants and deport them.

But that didn’t happen.

Perhaps Biden and Harris misread the electorate’s mood or were too beholden to their base, but regardless, there is not one criminal who Border Czar Tom Homan and countless federal agents have targeted and arrested since January 20 that Mayorkas and the rest were not aware of on January 19 — and few they didn’t know about on November 4, or on February 22 for that matter.

In FY 2024, ICE had a budget of nearly $9 billion, or roughly $58.52 per U.S. taxpayer. That’s real money in my household, but what good did it do when officers knew criminal aliens’ names, knew where they lived, but the DHS secretary had forbidden those officers from arresting them?

Vance is right: The prior administration knew who the criminal aliens ICE has arrested over the past two weeks were and where they lived, but it allowed then to roam free by actively barring immigration officers from taking them off the streets. That’s the biggest unreported story of the second Trump administration, and it should both shock and anger Americans.