Vance says admin. must take action when ICE agents “screw up”

Washington — Vice President JD Vance acknowledged Thursday that there are some federal immigration officers “who really screw up” and said the Trump administration has a responsibility to take action against those who do.

Vance sat down with “CBS Evening News” anchor Tony Dokoupil for a one-hour town hall in Michigan, which will air Saturday. Michigan is home to one of the closely watched Senate races between Republican Mike Rogers and Democrat Abdul El-Sayed.

During an exchange about immigration, Vance drew comparisons between law enforcement officers and members of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.

“Most of them are amazing people who are patriots and they wanna do a good job protecting their country. Sometimes you have some people who make mistakes. Sometimes you have some people who really screw up,” Vance said. “And obviously, we have a responsibility to prosecute, investigate when people do screw up.”

Dokoupil pressed the vice president on some of those instances, noting that in some cases, “people talk about them before they’re investigated,” and he asked Vance about the biggest mistakes involving ICE’s immigration actions. Vance declined to single out any incidents but said the Trump administration has responded when officers have been accused of misconduct.

“There are a number of cases where we’ve investigated and either provided further training, or sometimes even provided disciplinary situations within ICE,” the vice president said. “We don’t always advertise that stuff, as you know, Tony, because we believe that people have to be judged in a court of law and through a normal investigatory process.”

Since the Trump administration has ramped up immigration enforcement actions as part of President Trump’s immigration crackdown, officers with ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection have come under criticism for their use-of-force practices.

Two Americans, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were shot and killed by immigration authorities during protests in Minnesota earlier this year. The ICE officer who fatally shot Good, Jonathan Ross, was placed on administrative leave shortly after the shooting. In May, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul questioned whether Ross had been reassigned to her state. The Department of Homeland Security declined to say at the time where Ross was working.

No criminal charges have been filed in either case. The Justice Department opened an investigation into Pretti’s shooting earlier this year. 

There have since been a series of incidents involving immigration officers during targeted enforcement operations. 

An ICE officer in May fatally shot a 25-year-old Colombian man in his car in Maine in July, and in September, an immigration officer shot a Venezuelan man in the back in Austin, Texas.

Earlier this month, ICE agents shot a man in New York during a targeted enforcement operation, striking him in the neck. The agents were trying to arrest the man, Oscar Belgal, who is from the Dominican Republic, with a 5-year-old boy in the back seat.

Then, a vehicle driven by ICE agents hit and injured a man near Houston.