Vice President JD Vance on Wednesday condemned the deadly shootings that occurred earlier in the day at a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Dallas, urging Americans to reject political violence and calling on Democrat leaders to take responsibility for divisive rhetoric.
“We’ve got to stop it. We’ve got to condemn it. And that starts, unfortunately, at the very top of the Democratic Party,” Vance said in remarks delivered alongside law enforcement officers in Concord, North Carolina.
“If you want to stop political violence, stop attacking our law enforcement as the Gestapo,” he added. “If you want to stop political violence, stop telling your supporters that everybody who disagrees with you is a Nazi. If you want to stop political violence, look in the mirror.”
Earlier on Wednesday, a shooter opened fire from a nearby roof on to an ICE location in Dallas, killing two detainees and wounding another before taking his own life, authorities said.
Vance stressed that even though the administration does not support “illegal aliens, we don’t want them to be executed by violent assassins engaged in political violence either. We’re praying both for our ICE agents but also for everybody who’s affected by this terrible attack.”
Vance linked the violence to what he described as a climate of hostility toward police dating back to the nationwide protests of 2020.
“You take a thousand police officers, you find one person who didn’t do something perfect and use that one guy to tarnish the other 999 police officers,” he said. “Can we all just agree that our police officers are heroes, that they are public servants and that the first and most important step of keeping all of us safe is to keep our police officers safe because they are the thin blue line between civilization and chaos?”
Vance also criticized efforts in Congress to eliminate qualified immunity protections for police, calling the proposals “one of the most disgraceful and worst ideas I have ever seen.”
He argued that undermining officers would make it harder to reduce violent crime in U.S. cities.
“Our police officers are being assaulted and attacked far too often,” Vance said. “It happens way too much. And it happens because too many of our political leaders have encouraged it.”
Vance also argued that efforts to weaken police have coincided with rising crime, saying U.S. cities are now seeing homicide levels that surpass some of the most dangerous places in the world.
“Some of America’s cities today have worse murder rates than the very worst third world cities all over the world,” Vance said. “That’s not a joke. You go to Port-au-Prince, Haiti, or you go to some of the poorest countries all over the world. Even those countries have a better murder rate than Washington, D.C.”
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