“I think we’ll certainly see some people who get deported on student visas if we determine that it’s not in the best interest of the United States to have them in our country.”
Vice President JD Vance has said that he expects that there will be a rise in deportations among student visa holders that are "pro-Hamas" at different colleges in the wake of ICE detaining Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil after he helped to lead protests that were derided as antisemitic at the college.
Vance sat down for an interview with Laura Ingram on the "Ingrahm Angle" on Fox News, where he made the comments about expecting more deportations of student visa holders. He said that the Trump administration has been planning for deportations "sequentially," and that the border must be secure for wider deportation efforts. He also touched on the topic of tariffs, a major discussion point for the Trump administration.
“We’ve almost accomplished complete border security,” Vance said about immigration, adding that there has been a "well over 95 percent" in border encounters since Trump took office on January 20. "So once you get operative control of the border, now you have to ramp up deportations."
Vance argued that during former President Joe Biden's term, immigration detention facilities were "underfunded" and that the amount of illegal immigration "destroyed" ICE. He added that it was as if Biden left the Trump administration with “a hole that we have to dig out of.”
“We’re building that capacity up,” he said. “I do think that you’re going to see those deportation numbers rise.”
When he was asked about the arrest of Khalil specifically, Vance responded, “This is not fundamentally about free speech, and to me, yes, it’s about national security, but it’s also more importantly about who do we as an American public decide gets to join our national community?”
Some Democrats have been critical of the move by the Trump administration to detain Khalil, citing free speech, but Vance disagreed, and said that it was an issue of national security.
Vance continued, “And if the secretary of state and the president decide this person shouldn’t be in America, and they have no legal right to stay here, it’s as simple as that. I think we’ll certainly see some people who get deported on student visas if we determine that it’s not in the best interest of the United States to have them in our country."
The vice president did not know what the number of deportations of student visa holders would look like, but added "you’re going to see more people" deported.
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