Vice President JD Vance called a brown man at his rally an “illegal immigrant” because he interrupted his rally to demand the release of the Epstein files.
“[The] corrupt, far-left cartel has subjected this country—” Vance was saying at his North Carolina rally, before the protester stood up directly behind him.
“God bless our children!” the man in the crowd yelled. “Release the Epstein files!”
Chants of “USA” began to drown him out as he was removed from the rally by security.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I’m gonna have to amend something I said earlier. I said that we have had zero illegal border crossings in the United States of America,” Vance said with a smile, implying that the protester was not a U.S. citizen. “But one isn’t bad, right?”
Vance’s response was lambasted by those to his left, as many saw his response to another call to release the Epstein files—something Trump himself campaigned on—as contradictory.
“They’re kicking people out of Republican rallies for shouting the same things they’ve been shouting at Republican rallies for years,” Puerto Rican journalist Benjamín Torres Gotay wrote on X.
“It’s insulting to suggest only ‘illegal immigrants’ care about justice for victims and accountability for perpetrators,” California Governor Gavin Newsom’s press office posted. “Most American citizens do too!”
The Trump administration promised its supporters a full release of the Epstein files that would expose the “deep state” and bring justice to survivors. Instead it has continued to obscure information and avoid transparency, with Attorney General Todd Blanche refusing to seriously meet with survivors, survivors getting kicked out of the GOP midterm convention, and now Vance’s assumption that a nonwhite individual calling for justice must be some kind of illegal alien.