Republican vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) sharply criticized Vice President Harris over immigration and public safety in a Wisconsin rally Tuesday afternoon.
Speaking to a crowd in Eau Claire, Wisc., Vance said Harris has taken away an American “birthright,” which is public safety. “It’s time to give it back” to people, he said.
Vance told a story about Anne Fundner, a mother who spoke at the Republican National Convention in July after losing her 15-year-old son to fentanyl, which she blamed on the Biden administration’s border policies.
“Don’t all of us want to raise our children in communities where they can make childhood mistakes and not have it claim their life?” Vance said.
He added that he’s a father to three young children, who will likely grow up to “do something that really pisses me off.”
“But, I want them to grow up in a country where the streets are safe enough, where they can make a mistake and learn from it, rather than have it take their life,” Vance said. “And that is what we need. We got to get back to public safety in this country now.”
The Ohio senator and Trump have been criticized by a father whose son was killed in a bus crash last year. He called for them to stop using his son’s death as “a political too” to spread “hate” against immigrants.
Vance turned his focus to a more local angle, about “Mexican drug cartel members” being arrested outside of Milwaukee.
The issue of immigration is not limited to the country’s southwest, he argued, because “every community is a border community” due to the “problems that Kamala Harris has imported.”
“Now, I think the contrast here … between President Trump’s policies and Kamala Harris’s policies, it’s really just unbelievable. Kamala Harris wants to suspend deportations. Donald Trump wants to re-implement deportations,” Vance said.
He argued that migrants who arrive in the country illegally and commit crimes should never have been in the United States to begin with.
“And when Donald J. Trump is president, all of them are going home,” Vance said. “We’re going to deport the criminal migrants from this country … it’s just so simple. This is not rocket science.”
America’s immigration system has been a huge focus of this campaign cycle. Republicans are seeking to hit both President Biden and Harris over the fentanyl crisis, migrant crime and the influx of migrants arriving at the southern border, though border crossings have been down.
Vance has come under fire recently for amplifying a false claim about Haitian migrants eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio. During the presidential debate last week, Trump also spread the false claim. The city has seen fallout in the days since, including a bomb threat with harmful messaging toward migrants and school evacuations.
Harris said it was a “crying shame” that Vance and Trump amplified the fake comments about migrants in Springfield. She added that they were leaning into racist tropes.
The Eau Claire rally was Vance’s second stop of the day. Earlier Tuesday in Michigan, he addressed the apparent assassination attempt on Trump, citing Democrats and the media for the uptick in security issues for the former president.
The Hill has reached out to the Harris campaign for comment.
