In a wide-ranging interview on Sunday, Vice President JD Vance defended a variety of plans set in motion by President Trump during the first week of his term, including the beginnings of a promised crackdown on migrants living in the United States and an effort to supercharge oil and gas production.
Appearing on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Mr. Vance backed a number of policies set forth in the many executive actions that Mr. Trump signed immediately upon taking office, including several aimed at hastening the pace of deportations and ending birthright citizenship.
But even as he offered an endorsement of the Trump administration’s first week, Mr. Vance grew defensive when asked to speak about previous statements that conflicted with his current ones.
After saying earlier this month that anyone who engaged in violence on Jan. 6 “obviously” should not receive a pardon, Mr. Vance backtracked on Sunday, saying that Mr. Trump’s decision to issue blanket pardons, even for people convicted of assaulting police officers and seditious conspiracy in connection with the riot, was “the right decision.”
He also appeared reluctant to fully embrace Mr. Trump’s proposal earlier this week to eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA. While he harshly criticized the agency’s response to wildfires in California and to hurricanes in North Carolina, he said that FEMA had been hamstrung by “bureaucratic red tape and garbage” and that the proposal was mainly intended to “encourage us to reform the way that we deliver emergency response.”
For the most part, though, there was little space between Mr. Vance’s views and the president’s.
When pressed about how aggressively deportation campaigns should unfold, Mr. Vance showed little appetite for restrictions, appearing to support Mr. Trump’s decision to end a longstanding policy that prevented immigration agents from entering schools and churches to arrest people.
“Of course, if you have a person who is convicted of a violent crime, whether they’re an illegal immigrant or a non-illegal immigrant, you have to go and get that person to protect the public safety,” he said. “That’s not unique to immigration.”
He also fired back at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which condemned the executive order that overturned the policy.
“I think the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has, frankly, not been a good partner in common sense immigration enforcement that the American people voted for,” he said. “And I hope, again, as a devout Catholic, that they’ll do better.”
Mr. Vance also addressed an order by a federal judge that temporarily blocked Mr. Trump’s proposal to end automatic citizenship for babies born to some immigrants. He said the issue boiled down to whether the parents of those children planned to stay in the United States, waving off the notion that the proposal violated the 14th Amendment, as the judge found on Thursday.
“Temporary residents, people who come in here, whether legally or illegally, and don’t plan to stay: their children shouldn’t become American citizens,” he said.
When asked how the administration would lower consumer prices, Mr. Vance repeated Mr. Trump’s dubious assertion that oil and gas companies, which are already producing and exporting at record levels, could bring down energy prices through even greater production, easing the cost of consumer goods across the economy in the process. That is a notion that economists and energy experts have dismissed as unrealistic.
He also blamed gas and diesel prices, which are down significantly from a peak in 2022, for driving up the cost of groceries such as bacon.
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