By New York Post (Politics) | Created at 2025-01-30 05:26:23 | Updated at 2025-01-30 17:30:38
12 hours ago
Vice President JD Vance claimed Wednesday that the Biden administration was aware of the names and addresses of violent criminals in the country illegally but took no action.
Vance, 40, described it as “one of the craziest things of the last week” to learn the previous administration knew the whereabouts of some of the criminal migrants recently taken into federal custody as part of President Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration.
“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,” the vice president told Fox News host Sean Hannity Wednesday night.
Vance fumed that federal officials “haven’t done anything until about eight days ago, when Donald Trump became the president of the United States” to apprehend known gang leaders and other violent offenders — many of whom illegally came into the country under former President Joe Biden’s watch.
“It really should shock the conscience of the American people,” the vice president argued.
Vance noted that on the campaign trail, critics of Trump’s pledge to deport criminal migrants often noted that one major hurdle would be that “we don’t know where they are.”
“It turns out we actually do know where a lot of them are. We just haven’t had immigration enforcement. And that’s what’s changed,” he said.
Vance touted Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration, and his flurry of executive actions, as signs that the new administration has accomplished “more in eight days than the entire Biden administration accomplished in four years.”
“And of course, the things that we’re accomplishing are actually good things,” he argued.
Vance also pointed to recent exchanges in gunfire between Border Patrol agents and Mexican drug cartel members as an indicator that the Trump administration is being proactive about border security.
“Why wasn’t that happening a couple of years ago? Because they weren’t empowered to do their job,” Vance said of Border Patrol agents. “The border has become so lawless that we’re actually engaging in military style engagements just to regain control of our southern border.”
Vance, the third-youngest vice president in US history, also told Hannity about a prank Trump, 78, pulled on him, involving his famous Oval Office Diet Coke button, during a recent meeting with House and Senate leaders
“He screwed with me about that,” Vance said. “So we were just mid-conversation – I think we were with [Senate Majority Leader John Thune and House Speaker Mike Johnson] – and he has this sort of beautiful, ornate wooden box on his desk with a red button, and he presses it and he just kind of looks over at me.”
Vance, who apparently didn’t know what the button was for, said he responded by asking the president, “Sir, is that … did something bad just happen?”
“And he’s like, ‘No, I just ordered a Diet Coke.’”
Vance said a Diet Coke was promptly brought in for Trump during the meeting.
