Vice President J.D. Vance criticized Chief Justice John Roberts’ recent statement that the judiciary’s role is to serve as a check on the executive branch, calling it a “profoundly wrong sentiment,” adding that courts should be “deferential” to the president, especially in matters related to immigration policy.
“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. And 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,” Vance told New York Times opinion columnist Ross Douthat on the “Interesting Times” podcast earlier this week.
Vance responded to Roberts’ remarks during an event in Buffalo, New York, where the chief justice emphasized the importance of judicial independence.
“The judiciary is a coequal branch of government, separate from the others with the authority to interpret the Constitution as law, and strike down, obviously, acts of Congress or acts of the president,” Roberts said at the event.
Roberts added that the Judicial Branch’s role is to “decide cases but, in the course of that, check the excesses of Congress or of the Executive and that does require a degree of independence.”
Though the vice president said he thinks the administration has “an obligation to treat people humanely,” he also believes it’s an “open question” how much due process is “due” to undocumented immigrants.
“I’ve obviously expressed public frustration on this, which is yes, illegal immigrants, by virtue of being in the United States, are entitled to some due process,” Vance said. “But the amount of process that is due and how you enforce those legislative standards and how you actually bring them to bear is, I think, very much an open question.”
On Friday, the Supreme Court halted President Donald Trump from deporting a group of immigrants in northern Texas under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act—a victory for the Venezuelan nationals who feared removal under the centuries-old wartime authority.
Douthat asked Vance about the administration’s justification for using those authorities to mass deport people in the country illegally. The VP conceded that “we don’t have 5 million uniform combatants,” but he did mention thousands of migrants who “intentionally came to the United States to cause violence.” He also argued that federal courts must be deferential to the president when it comes to a “public safety” issue.
“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,” Vance said. “People underappreciate the level of public safety stress that we’re under when the president talks about how bad crime is.”
Asked what success looks like regarding immigration by the end of Trump’s term, Vance once again referenced the courts.
“Success, to me, is not so much a number, though, obviously I’d love to see the gross majority of the illegal immigrants who came in under Biden deported,” Vance said. “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 to do that, allows us to deport large numbers of illegal aliens when large numbers of illegal aliens come into the country.”
He also said that at times, he has to reconcile his faith with the administration’s actions.
“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 a very dangerous people – that you’re enforcing the law consistent with, you know, the Catholic Church’s moral dictates and so forth,” he said.