There are 34 days until Election Day and the vice presidential debate Tuesday night happened on two levels. There was the level of policy talk and personal stories, and there was a meta level in which the Democratic candidate Gov. Tim Walz continually tried to comment on the debate itself and in real time educate, dispel misinformation, and show the distance between clever rhetoric and truth.
The platform was an avenue for the two candidates, Ohio Republican Sen. JD Vance and Minnesota’s Democratic Gov. Walz, to explain and justify their policy positions on their respective tickets. In many of the debate’s key points, Walz and Vance were in agreement. However, on topics such as immigration, they starkly disagreed.
CBS co-moderator Margaret Brennan asked Vance to be more specific about how, if elected, his administration under former president Donald Trump would carry out the largest mass deportation plan in American history and use the U.S. military to do so, and if Vance will deport undocumented parents in the U.S. and separate them from any of their children who were born on U.S. soil. In answering the question, Vance accused the Biden-Harris administration of starting a humanitarian immigration crisis. But it began long before their administration’s tenure.
Vance added that the opioid crisis in the U.S. was a result of an increase in asylees coming through the U.S. border — a claim that’s been invalidated as the Drug Enforcement Agency reports that the overwhelming majority of fentanyl that’s being seized happens at legal ports of entry primarily from U.S. citizens or people with lawful status who are entering the U.S. and bringing it in.
Vance then said the Biden-Harris administration’s undoing of policies Trump put in place at the border has also led to suspending the deportations of immigrants within the U.S. and at the border. As Documented has reported in the past, the Biden administration has deported more migrants from the U.S. than any previous administration, and left policies Trump implemented in place during their administration. Nearly 2.5 million Title 42 expulsions occurred during Biden’s term, far greater than the number of people placed in the Remain in Mexico program under Trump. The Biden administration also restarted deportation flights to Venezuela, persuaded Mexico to accept Venezuelan, Cuban, Haitian, and Nicaraguan migrants, increased ICE detention numbers, and returned tens of thousands of Haitians to Haiti.
Vance did not respond to the question about family separation. Instead, he widely misquoted recent data from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). “Right now in this country,” he said, “We have 320,000 children that the Department of Homeland Security has effectively lost.” The statistic he attempted to refer to is a recent report from the the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General (DHS OIG) which showed that ICE reported more than 32,000 unaccompanied minors failed to appear for their immigration court hearings from Fiscal Years 2019 to 2023. As a result of the children — who are subject to the actions of adult sponsors who may fail to take them to their hearings — not appearing in court, amongst other factors indicated in the report, ICE is unable to monitor the migrant children. Despite the efforts of organizations like The Door and the Safe Passage Project, a shortage of lawyers and guardians for children with valid claims to Special Immigrant Juvenile Status (SIJS) persists.
Further in the Debate, Gov. Walz responded to Vance’s points concerning opioid deaths in the U.S. using Ohio as an example. “The good news on this is the last twelve months saw the largest decrease in opioid deaths in our nation’s history, 30% decrease in Ohio. But there’s still more work to do,” Walz said, highlighting Harris’ record when she was the attorney general in California. “She’s the only person in this race who prosecuted transnational gangs for human trafficking and drug interventions,” he said.
Walz then delved into the failure of congress to pass the bipartisan border policy which Trump advised his GOP allies in congress to not pass — a strategy that Democrats in congress say the GOP did so as to continue exploiting the matter during this election. Immigration lawyers and industry professionals have said while the bill does contain some needed solutions, it is not a fix to other issues that persist in the U.S. immigration system.
Responding to Vance’s statement, “Build the wall,” three words that have long been central to Trump’s messaging against immigration in the U.S., Walz said: “Donald Trump had four years…to do this, and he promised you, America, how easy it would be. I’ll build you a big, beautiful wall, and Mexico will pay for it. Let’s say 2% of that wall got built, and Mexico didn’t pay a dime.”
One of the most eye opening parts of the debate was both parties’ talking points about the Haitians in Springfield Ohio. Walz criticized Vance for saying that he’d “create stories to bring attention” to Haitian immigrants in Springfield Ohio.
Walz said, “That vilified a large number of people who were here legally in the community of Springfield… and the consequences in Springfield were the governor had to send state law enforcement to expert kindergarteners to school.”
The debate was an opportunity for Vance to rectify the claims he helped spread about Springfield, which has caused havoc in Ohio, leading the state’s governor to even write a recent piece for the Times. But instead, Vance doubled down on the false claims saying during the debate that “illegal” immigrants in the U.S. and Springfield Ohio are overwhelming communities. “The people that I’m most worried about in Springfield Ohio are the American citizens who have had their lives destroyed by Kamala Harris’s open border.”
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When the CBS News moderator corrected Vance’ claims, saying “Just to clarify for our viewers, Springfield, Ohio does have a large number of Haitian migrants who have legal status, Temporary Protected Status,” Vance complained. “The rules were that you guys were not going to fact check.”
Vance then fought against the moderators’ fact check saying he would like to talk about the CBP One App. The Border Patrol’s CBP One App is a mobile application which migrants use from their home countries to submit biometric information to CBP as part of the process to apply for travel authorization and obtain parole through special programs for those nationalities. Vance said, during the debate, that the Biden-Harris administration built the app, whereas the CBP One app was launched in October 2020 during former President Trump’s administration. Biden didn’t take office until 2021.
One of Vance’ major campaign positions is to cut back on immigration, which he says pushes up the prices of homes. However, economists say the correlation is a dangerous oversimplification that ignores fundamental issues such as insufficient housing construction, zoning restrictions, labor shortages, material costs and rising interest rates amongst other factors.
A version of this article was first featured in Documented’s Early Arrival newsletter. You can subscribe to receive it in your inbox three times per week here.
