JD Vance on his faith and Trump’s most controversial policies

Recently I interviewed the vice president of the United States, JD Vance. He offered me an interview while he was in Rome leading a U.S. delegation to the inaugural Mass of Pope Leo XIV, and our conversation took place in the U.S. Embassy to the Vatican, after Vance’s private audience with the first American pope. We began by talking about Catholicism and politics, which led to a lively conversation about border security, the courts and the president’s power.

Below is an excerpt of our conversation, recorded for my podcast, “Interesting Times.”

Ross Douthat: The Trump administration made two promises: We’re going to secure the border, and we’re going to deport a substantial number of the people who entered illegally under the previous administration. I would say that you have been more successful than I expected at swiftly securing the border. On deportations, it seems like the actual process is not moving that quickly, and there’s a lot of debates in the courts about relatively small numbers of potential deportees.

Looking ahead four years from now, what would constitute success in immigration policy at the end of this term?

JD Vance: Not to pat ourselves on the back too much, but I do think the most important success is stopping the flow of illegal migration to begin with. And I think that the president has succeeded wildly on that. On the deportation question, sometimes you will hear people say that deportations in the Trump administration are down relative to the Biden administration. That is an artifact of the fact that the Biden border was effectively wide open. In some ways, the deportation infrastructure that is developed in the United States is not adequate to the task, given what Joe Biden left us.

There are different estimates of how many illegal immigrants came in under the Biden administration. Was it 12 million? Was it 20 million? So there’s a little bit of guesswork in all this. I actually think the number is much closer to 20 million than to 12 million ...

Douthat: Just to pause there, one of the most hard-core, critical-of-illegal-immigration think tanks had its estimate in the 10 million to 12 million range.

Vance: They did. And I think they’re undercounting it, because I think they’re counting the people that we were aware of. But look, whether it’s 12 million or whether it’s 20 million, it’s a lot. That’s a lot of work ahead of us, and here are two things that we can do. The first thing is you just have to have the actual law enforcement infrastructure to make this possible. I think that we should treat people humanely, but I do think that a lot of these illegal immigrants have to go back to where they came from. That requires more of the basic nuts and bolts of how you run a law enforcement regime in the context of deportation. A much more difficult question is, yes, illegal immigrants, by virtue of being in the United States, are entitled to some due process. But the due process ...

Douthat: To be clear, this is based on a legislative standard. It’s not based on the judges who are making these decisions inventing this standard.

Vance: But the amount of process that is due, how you enforce those legislative standards and how you actually bring them to bear is, I think, very much an open question. What we’re finding is that a small but substantial number of courts are making it very, very hard for us to deport illegal aliens.

And there is, candidly, frustration on the White House side that we think that the law is very clear. We think the president has extraordinary plenary power. You need some process to confirm that these illegal aliens are, in fact, illegal aliens and not American citizens. But it’s not like we’re just throwing that process out. We’re trying to comply with it as much as possible and actually do the job that we were left ...

Douthat: OK, but ...

Vance: Let me just make one final philosophical point here. I worry that unless the Supreme Court steps in here, or unless the district courts exercise a little bit more discretion, we are running into a real conflict between two important principles in the United States.

Principle 1, of course, is that courts interpret the law. Principle 2 is that the American people decide how they’re governed. I know this is inflammatory, but I think you are seeing an effort by the courts to quite literally overturn the will of the American people. To be clear, it’s not most courts. But I saw an interview with Chief Justice Roberts recently where he said the role of the court is to check the excesses of the executive. I thought that was a profoundly wrong sentiment. That’s one-half of his job.

The other half of his job is to check the excesses of his own branch. You cannot have a country where the American people keep on electing immigration enforcement and the courts tell the American people they’re not allowed to have what they voted for. We’re going to keep working it through the immigration court process, through the Supreme Court as much as possible. And success to me is that we have established a set of rules and principles that the courts are comfortable with, and that we have the infrastructure that allows us to deport large numbers of illegal aliens when they come into the country.

But I think whether we’re able to get there is a function, of course, of our efforts, but also the courts themselves.

Douthat: It seems like the stable way to a settlement that would outlast your own administration would involve a combination of Supreme Court rulings with perhaps a recognition that maybe the legislative setup around this issue is out of date.

Vance: That’s certainly true.

Douthat: So there you have two tracks. You have the effort to get Supreme Court rulings that vindicate your interpretation of the law, and you have potentially legislative efforts where the existing law needs to be revised. But your administration ...

Vance: There’s a third track, too, which is using existing legal authorities that haven’t been used in the past but we think are there.

Douthat: This is what I’m asking about. The legal authorities that you guys have tried to use, the particular one is the Alien Enemies Act, which is an extremely aggressive claim about wartime powers that, as far as I can tell, even under the most aggressive interpretation is likely to apply only to an incredibly small number of migrants. The claim is not actually that 5 million migrants here illegally are in a state of war against the United States. Or is that the claim?

Vance: No, it’s not that 5 million are engaged in military conflict. If you look at the history and the context of those laws, I don’t think the supposition is that for something to be an invasion, you have to have 5 million uniformed combatants.

We don’t have 5 million uniformed combatants. I think I have to be careful here because some of this information is classified. How to put this point? I think that the courts need to be somewhat deferential. In fact, I think the design is that they should be extremely deferential to these questions of political judgment made by the people’s elected president of the United States.

Because when you say there aren’t 5 million people who are waging war, OK, but are there thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people? And then when you take their extended family, their networks, is it much larger than that? Who are quite dangerous people who I think very intentionally came to the United States to cause violence, or to at least profit from violence? Yeah. I do, man. And I think people underappreciate the level of public safety stress that we’re under when the president talks about how bad crime is — the level of chaos, the level of violence, the level of I think truly premodern brutality that some of these communities have gotten used to. Whatever law was written, I think it vests us with the power to take very serious action against this.

Douthat: Shouldn’t this barbaric medieval landscape that you’re describing show up in violent crime statistics?

Vance: Sometimes no, because the people who are most victimized by this, they’re not running to the FBI; they’re not running to the local police. I really think that we underappreciate just how violent these cartels are and how much they’ve made life pretty unbearable for, frankly, a lot of native-born American citizens, but also a lot of legal American migrants, especially those along the southern border.

Douthat: You and I both lived through the Bush presidency. There are elements of what you might call a kind of war-on-terror mentality that you’re taking vis-à-vis the cartels, or people allegedly associated with gangs and cartels, that seems to me similar to the approach taken to anyone associated with Islamic terrorism in the aftermath of Sept. 11. You and I remember that in more than a few cases, this ended up with situations where the U.S. was taking people into custody and remanding them to black sites, who turned out unsurprisingly not to be No. 1 al-Qaida terrorists.

It just seems like this system is ripe for war-on-terror-style abuses where you are going to be sending people to a prison in El Salvador that advertises itself as a terrible place, and some of those people are probably going to be innocent. And that just seems like you are creating a context where injustice is inevitable, even if your intentions are just to bring peace and order.

Vance: Well, look, I understand your point, and making these judgments, if you take the teachings of our faith seriously, they are hard. I’m not going to pretend that I haven’t struggled with some of this, that I haven’t thought about whether we’re doing the precisely right thing. So it’s a fair point, and I know that you think you’ve got me trapped here ...

Douthat: I’m not interested in having you trapped here.

Vance: No, I know.

Douthat: I’m interested in what politics does to your soul.

Vance: Yes, of course. So, the concern that you raise is fair. There has to be some way in which you’re asking yourself, as you go about enforcing the law, even, to your point, against some very dangerous people, that you’re doing so consistent with the Catholic church’s moral dictates and so forth. A lot of times, I’ll read about these cases, and I’ll try to find out what exactly is going on. The one that I’ve spent the most time understanding is the one of the Maryland father.

What I found so bizarre about that case is that the American media took one line, and I forget what line it was, but it acknowledged some error had happened in a Department of Justice filing without actually asking the two most important questions: What is the nature of the error? And much more importantly, what is the remedy for an error?

I think this guy was not just a gang member, but a reasonably high-level gang member in MS-13. Legally, he had multiple hearings before an immigration judge. He had a valid deportation order. What he also had was a sort of exception, what’s called a withholding order, that basically said: Yes, you can deport this guy, but you can’t deport this guy to El Salvador because of particular conditions that obtained, I believe, in 2019, when his case was adjudicated.

So you fast-forward to 2025. We deport this guy, the courts hold that we’ve made a mistake, and then eventually it gets to the Supreme Court. And I believe the court term is you must “facilitate” his return. And I sat in lunch with Bukele, the leader of El Salvador, with the president of the United States and with others, and talked about this case.

And Bukele basically said, “I don’t want to send this guy back. I think he’s a bad guy. He’s my citizen. He’s in a prison in El Salvador, and I think that’s where he belongs.” And our attitude was: OK, what are we really going to do? Are we going to exert extraordinary diplomatic pressure to bring a guy back to the United States who’s a citizen of a foreign country who we had a valid deportation order with?

Douthat: In that meeting, the other thing that Trump said was that he aspired to a situation where he could potentially send American citizens to El Salvador’s prisons. The worst of the worst.

Vance: He’s also said explicitly he would follow the law and he would follow American courts on this. So I don’t think it’s unreasonable for the president to say: Here’s this thing I’d like to do, so long as it’s consistent with the law.

Douthat: I think that you should be able to see, though, why, in the context of sending illegal immigrants to a Salvadoran prison and claiming to be unable for diplomatic reasons to bring them back, the prospect of then saying we’d like to send U.S. citizens to that prison would raise some concerns. It just seems like you are setting up a machinery that people of good faith who are not hostile to your policies would reasonably regard as dangerous to particular people who are caught up in the system.

Vance: I understand the point. But I’m going to defend my boss here. What did he say? I’m going to think about doing this only in cases of the very, very worst people, and only if it’s consistent with American law. I think that if that was the headline that was reproduced — the president is considering sending the very worst violent gang members in America to a foreign prison, so long as that is a legal thing to do — I don’t think that would inspire so much passionate resistance.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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