“I’m not happy that this woman lost her life,” Vance said of Renee Nicole Good, the 37-year-old woman who was shot and killed during a clash with ICE officers on Wednesday. “I’m not happy that this woman was there at a protest violating the law by interfering with the law enforcement action.”
Vance’s remarks were part of a broader defense of President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement agenda, which includes ramping up deportations of illegal immigrants, and a condemnation of left-wing anti-ICE protests throughout the country. He maintained that Good was “part of a broader left-wing network to attack, to dox, to assault and to make it impossible for our ICE officers to do their job.”
Vance has been deployed to put out fires and amplify Trump’s messaging in hostile environments before. It’s not uncommon for vice presidents to act as attack dogs on behalf of their president, but it is a job former President Joe Biden seldom trusted former Vice President Kamala Harris to perform.
Last year, Vance joined White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt in the briefing room to point out that Senate Democrats were contradicting their party’s line on government shutdowns dating back to Bill Clinton’s administration when they blocked a clean federal funding bill the administration supported.
“For years, every single one of us, we can remember Barack Obama on the White House lawn, we can remember Chuck Schumer, we can remember Nancy Pelosi for years, in Chuck Schumer’s case for literally decades, we’ve heard them say you don’t shut the government down over policy disagreement,” Vance told reporters. “For the first time since the Democrats have been in politics, they are now saying that unless we get every policy item that we demand, we’re going to shut down the people’s government. They’re trying to take a hostage. We’re not gonna let them.”
The end result was the longest government shutdown in history, but Democrats ultimately relented, and Trump signed the bill into law without any major policy changes.
Vance has also participated in Trump’s affordability tour, as polls and last year’s election results showed voters were still angry about inflation and the cost of living. “When I hear the Democrats talk about the affordability crisis that they created, it’s a little bit like, you know, Charles Manson criticizing violent crime,” he told a crowd in the battleground state of Pennsylvania. “Look in the mirror, my friend. You are the cause of the problem, and Donald J. Trump’s administration is the solution to the problem that you created.”
Since joining the ticket in 2024, Vance has often sparred with the media. “I don’t really care, Margaret,” he memorably told CBS News’s Margaret Brennan in a viral exchange about problems vetting refugees.
Trump praised Vance’s ability to handle confrontational interviews during his victory speech after they won the 2024 election. “He and I have said, go into the enemy camp, and, you know, the enemy camp is certain networks, and a lot of people don’t like to, sir, do I have to do that? He just goes, OK, which ones, CNN, MSDNC, he’ll say, all right, thank you very much, he actually looks like, he’s like the only guy I’ve ever seen, he really looks forward to it,” Trump said. “And then he just goes and absolutely obliterates them.”
Vance reprised this role on Thursday, hitting press coverage of the Minneapolis shooting and anti-ICE protests more generally.
“If the media wants to tell the truth,” he said, “they ought to tell the truth that a group of left-wing radicals have been working tirelessly, sometimes using domestic terror techniques to try to make it impossible for the president of the United States to do what the American people elected him to do, which is enforce our immigration laws.”
The incident was captured on video by eyewitnesses, but viewers have diverged sharply on whether they claim to see an unjustified shooting or an act of self-defense to prevent Good from ramming the officer with her vehicle.
Voters are similarly split on ICE’s presence in heavily Democratic cities. Polls showed heightened support for mass deportations during the 2024 campaign, and the public generally approves of Trump’s successful efforts to secure the border. But his progress on the border after record illegal immigration during the Biden administration seems to have eroded support for deportations, and Americans are more ambivalent about interior immigration enforcement measures.
Progressives and some Democratic elected officials have painted ICE officers as Trump’s masked secret police.
Vance sought to combat these perceptions and the anti-ICE activism they have inspired.
THE ICE SHOOTING COULD LEAD DEMOCRATS BACK TO SUMMER OF 2020 POLITICS
“This was an attack on law and order. This was an attack on the American people. The way that the media, by and large, has reported this story has been an absolute disgrace, and it puts our law enforcement officers at risk every single day,” he said.
If Secretary of State Marco Rubio has left a larger imprint on Trump’s foreign policy recently, Vance remains the face of the president’s domestic policy in a crucial election year.
