Vice President-elect J.D. Vance is trying to rewrite the narrative on the term “family separation.”
In an interview with Fox News on Sunday, the relatively mum MAGA official candidly brushed off criticisms that Donald Trump’s aggressive immigration policies are needlessly cruel, claiming instead that the language used by opponents to the highly controversial program is “dishonest.”
“This term is something you’re gonna hear a lot in the next couple of months, the next couple of years, Shannon: ‘family separation,’” Vance told host Shannon Bream. “I think it’s important—that’s a euphemism, that is a dishonest term to hide behind the fact that Joe Biden has not done border enforcement.”
JD Vance: “This term is something you’re gonna hear a lot in the next couple of months, the next couple of years — family separation.” pic.twitter.com/FyK9R7OriC
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 12, 2025
Vance then went on to disingenuously liken family separation to a program that only jails violent offenders, thereby separating convicted criminals from their families ipso facto. But that’s not what family separation does. Instead, the immigration deterrence program (launched by Trump during his first administration) instituted a “zero tolerance” policy at the U.S.-Mexico border, targeting immigrants attempting to enter the country. At the time, Attorney General Jeff Sessions directed the Justice Department to prosecute every adult who entered the United States irregularly.
It was made possible by the vicious combination of two federal laws. First, the government prosecuted immigrants with minor federal charges for improper entry. Officials then transferred them from U.S. Customs and Border Protection to the U.S. Marshals Service during their court hearings, labeling their children as unaccompanied throughout the process. U.S. Customs and Border Protection then used a different law to send the children to a subsidiary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that was responsible for handling unaccompanied children.
The program separated more than 4,600 children from their parents before it was ended in 2021. As of December, 1,360 children remain unaccounted for, according to a report by Human Rights Watch, which said the practice met the definition for “enforced disappearance,” amounted to “torture,” and was a “crime under international law.”
“If you come into this country illegally, you need to go back home,” Vance told Fox. “And what the Democrats are going to do is they’re going to hide behind this. They’re going to say this is all about compassion for families.”
But experts who have sized up the scope and devastation of Trump’s family separation policies don’t agree.
“It’s chilling to see, in document after document, the calculated cruelty that went into the forcible family separation policy,” Michael Garcia Bochenek, senior children’s rights counsel at Human Rights Watch and an author of the December report, told the international organization. “A government should never target children to send a message to parents.”
Read more about immigration:
Republican leadership continues to use one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history as political leverage.
On Monday, House Speaker Mike Johnson told CNN’s Manu Raju that there should be “conditions” on the proposed federal aid to California in the wake of the deadly wildfires in Los Angeles County.
“It appears to us that state and local leaders were derelict in their duty in many respects, so that’s something that has to be factored in. I think there should probably be conditions on that aid.”
Asked whether he planned on conditioning the aid to debt ceiling negotiations, Johnson said that option is on the table. “There’s some discussion about that, but we’ll see where it goes.”
Nearly 200,000 L.A. residents have been placed under evacuation order, and many won’t have homes to return to. Over 12,000 buildings—including a public library, a medical center, a church, a synagogue, and large swaths of a predominantly Black neighborhood—have been destroyed so far in the wildfires. At least 24 are dead, and likely counting. The total land burned in these Los Angeles wildfires is bigger than Paris.
In short, the wildfires are a devastating national catastrophe. For Johnson to so casually suggest that there should be any conditions at all on aid to the affected areas of California is absolutely cruel and unusual.
Johnson isn’t the only one. Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso told Face the Nation on Sunday that he expected “there will be strings attached to money that is ultimately approved, and it has to do with being ready the next time, because this was a gross failure this time.” He thinks that because the “policies of the liberal administration” had “made these fires worse,” the people of that administration should suffer too.
On Monday, Senator Ron Johnson told Wake Up America that he wouldn’t vote for any aid to California “unless we see a dramatic change in how they’re gonna be handling these things in the future.… These are decisions Californian Democrats have made.… It’s their fault.”
At the time of this writing, the fires continue to burn through Los Angeles County.
Donald Trump has nothing but nice things to say about Senator John Fetterman after he went all the way to Mar-a-Lago to visit him over the weekend.
The Pennsylvania senator and Democrat said last week that Trump invited him for a meeting, and apparently the president-elect was impressed after an hour-long conversation with the man he once accused of abusing heroin, cocaine, crystal meth, and fentanyl.
“It was a totally fascinating meeting. He’s a fascinating man, and his wife is lovely. They were both up, and I couldn’t be more impressed,” Trump said to the Washington Examiner, referring to Fetterman and his wife, Gisele. “He’s a commonsense person. He’s not liberal or conservative. He’s just a commonsense person, which is beautiful.”
Fetterman has taken a major shift in his political ideology to the right in the last two years, particularly with his full-throated support for Israel’s ongoing massacre in Gaza. He’s lost a lot of Democratic support as a result, and even seemed OK with Trump’s crazy idea to annex Greenland, recently comparing it to the Louisiana Purchase.
Fetterman’s wife, Gisele, was once an undocumented immigrant, and has advocated for immigrant rights and the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, whose beneficiaries are called Dreamers. The Examiner didn’t mention if immigration was a topic of discussion during Trump and Fetterman’s meeting, but one wonders if she had anything to say on the topic.
The Pennsylvania senator has co-sponsored the Laken Riley Act, an extreme bill that would allow for the detention of undocumented immigrants merely accused of a nonviolent crime. The bill right now does not include any exceptions or protections for Dreamers. Has Fetterman turned so far to the right that he’s ignoring his own wife’s story—and is Trump secretly applauding him for it?
More on whatever the hell Fetterman is doing:
Some unexpected musicians are slated to perform at Donald Trump’s inauguration next week, including some with long histories of beefing with the president-elect.
So far, country singer-songwriter Carrie Underwood and disco group the Village People have agreed to perform at the forty-seventh president’s inaugural ceremony.
“We are announcing today that VILLAGE PEOPLE have accepted an invitation from President Elect Trump’s campaign to participate in inaugural activities, including at least one event with President Elect Trump,” Victor Willis, a founding member of the group, wrote on Facebook, arguing that the event would be an opportunity to bring the country together. “We know this wont make some of you happy to hear, however we believe that music is to be performed without regard to politics.”
That is in spite of the group’s legal history with the former president. Willis himself issued a cease and desist letter to Trump in 2020 after the Republican presidential candidate refused to stop playing “Macho Man” and the “Y.M.C.A.,” calling Trump’s repeated use of the song a “nuisance.” (Willis later defended Trump’s use of the song, claiming he didn’t “have the heart” to tell Trump to stop dancing to “Y.M.C.A.”)
The Village People were among dozens of artists who sued Trump for playing their music without permission (or compensation) at his campaign rallies. Other offended artists included Sinéad O’Connor, The Beatles, Adele, Bruce Springsteen, Elton John, Guns N’ Roses, Leonard Cohen, Queen, Prince, Pharrell, the Rolling Stones, The Smiths’ Johnny Marr, Rihanna, Neil Young, Linkin Park, the late Tom Petty, and Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler.
Underwood, meanwhile, is expected to sing a rendition of “America the Beautiful” at Trump’s ceremony. The country music star has skirted political labels for years, but in 2017, she took an open jab at Trump during the Country Music Awards, parodying her song “Before He Cheats” to include a controversial line about Trump’s incendiary social media habits.
“And it’s fun to watch, yeah, that’s for sure/’til little Rocket Man starts a nuclear war … and then maybe next time, he’ll think before he tweets,” Underwood sang alongside Brad Paisley.
Still, in an interview with The Guardian in 2019, Underwood attempted to claim that her politics were undefined.
“I feel like more people try to pin me places politically,” she said at the time. “Everybody tries to sum everything up and put a bow on it, like it’s black and white. And it’s not like that.”
Trump struggled to find musicians to perform at his last inauguration, with reports circulating that some of his favorites—Céline Dion, Andrea Bocelli, Garth Brooks, and Sir Elton John—roundly rejected the invites.