202501.15
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JD Vance Doesn’t Back Away From ‘Family Separation’ in TV Interview on Mass Deportations

Mathew McDonald. January 14, 2025. National Catholic Register. Original Article.

In statements made earlier this week, Vice President-elect JD Vance offered a preview of how the Trump administration will try to counter criticism of its mass-deportation plans leveled by Democrats — and by U.S. bishops.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ eight-member Committee on Migration published a statement earlier this month criticizing the country’s current limits on legal immigration (arguing that such limits “are no longer responsive to the social, economic, and geopolitical realities of today”) and calling for the federal government to make it easier for foreign-born people in the country without legal residency to gain permanent status.

The bishops’ statement also said that changes in immigration policy should minimize detention, “strengthen families and promote family unity,” and reduce what it called “family separation” — a topic that Fox News Sunday host Shannon Bream raised with Vance during an interview broadcast Sunday.

“What about the critics, who are humanitarian activists and others who are worried about these deportations, saying families are going to be separated, people are going to be put in tents and in terrible conditions?” Bream asked, adding, “They have real concerns about the way you plan to actually mete out those things you’re planning to do.”

Vance, who is Catholic, didn’t back away from the premise of the question, saying he expects Trump opponents will use the term “family separation” frequently over the coming months and years.

“That’s a euphemism. That is a dishonest term to hide behind the fact that Joe Biden has not done border enforcement,” Vance said. “If you say, for example, in the United States, ‘We have a guy who’s convicted of a violent crime and has to go to prison’ — we want that guy to go to prison. But, yes, it does mean that that guy is going to be separated from his family. That is the consequence of committing violence upon your fellow citizens.”

Removing violent criminals who are in the country without legal residency is a must, he said.

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

“It is not compassionate to allow the worst people in the world to send minor children, some of them victims of sex trafficking, into our country,” he added. “That is the real humanitarian crisis at the border. You’re not going to exacerbate it through law enforcement. You’re going to fix it through law enforcement, and that’s what Donald Trump is going to do.”

Vance’s statements echo an argument incoming Trump border czar Tom Homan, a fellow Catholic, made in his 2020 book Defend the Border and Save Lives — that family separation is a necessary if unfortunate byproduct of breaking the law.

Bream suggested Vance was cherry-picking a small portion of illegal immigrants, as opposed to a much larger number who are otherwise law-abiding.

“But fair to say those egregious things that you cite, that I would think all Americans are against, sure,” Bream said. “That’s a small fraction of the millions of people who are here who have built lives. Many of them have been here for decades.”

But Vance said a large number of illegal immigrants have committed violent crimes — “hundreds of thousands, maybe even a million people,” he said.

“And the point is that if you want to fix the overall border crisis, you have to engage in law enforcement,” Vance said. “We can’t buy into this lie that law enforcement at the American southern border is somehow not compassionate to families who want to cross illegally.”

“Our No. 1 responsibility is compassion to our fellow Americans, and that starts with enforcing the southern border,” he said. “You cannot have a country of law and order, of stability, of basic good governance unless you get control of what Biden has left us the American southern border, and President Trump is committed to doing it on Day One.”

Since President-elect Trump is not yet in power, it’s not yet totally clear what his administration will do. But Trump officials are dropping hints, promising multiple executive orders on immigration law enforcement soon after Trump is sworn in this coming Monday — and U.S. Catholic bishops are getting ready.

On Jan. 6, the same day the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops released the statement on immigration, Washington’s incoming archbishop, Cardinal Robert McElroy, when asked where he may differ with the incoming Trump administration, highlighted immigration.

He noted that the Catholic Church “teaches that a country has the right to control its borders” and that doing so “is a legitimate effort,” but he added that “having a wider indiscriminate massive deportation across the country would be something that would be incompatible with Catholic doctrine.”

He said, “So we’ll have to see what emerges in the administration.”