WASHINGTON – Vice President JD Vance defended the Justice Department’s arrest of former CNN anchor Don Lemon during an interview with SiriusXM host Megyn Kelly, while revealing that the administration’s immigration enforcement capabilities are still ramping up with most newly hired officers yet to hit the streets.
Vance didn’t mince words about Lemon in the interview aired Wednesday, calling him “the dumbest man in television,” while rejecting characterizations of his arrest as an attack on press freedom. Instead, he framed it as enforcement of federal law protecting religious worship.
“No one’s objecting to you standing outside of the church and protesting,” Vance told Kelly. “What you cannot do is go into somebody’s house of worship and prevent them from exercising their First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion.”
Lemon was arrested last week, charged with conspiracy to deprive rights and violating federal law prohibiting interference with religious services. The charges stem from his coverage of a Jan. 18 protest that interrupted Sunday services at a St. Paul, Minnesota, church whose pastor also worked as an ICE field director.
Lemon has maintained he was simply doing journalism, repeatedly identifying himself as a reporter during the incident.
Vance described Lemon’s infraction as a “rock solid violation” of a law called the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE Act), which “prohibits the use or threat of force and physical obstruction that injures, intimidates, or interferes with a person seeking to obtain or provide reproductive health services or to exercise the First Amendment right of religious freedom at a place of religious worship.”
Vance said Lemon stuck a microphone in the face of a minister during a church service while the people he was with kept people from leaving.
Immigration enforcement still scaling up
Vance told Kelly the administration’s deportation capabilities are still ramping up and he expects them to accelerate.
“All of the immigration enforcement officers that we hired because Biden gutted immigration enforcement, most of them are in training right now,” said Vance. “Most of them have not even hit the streets.”
The administration says it has overseen approximately 675,000 deportations and 2.2 million self-deportations in its first year, totaling roughly 3 million departures. But Vance suggested the pace would quicken as legal challenges are resolved and new officers complete training.
“We’ll probably be in a better position to do it a year from now than we are today,” he said, noting that several cases are currently before the Supreme Court.
Vance said that the recent removal of 700 federal immigration enforcement officers from Minneapolis after fatal shootings of two protestors was not a retreat.
“Most of the people that we have in Minneapolis, they’re not doing immigration enforcement,” he said. “They’re protecting the immigration officers from the mob that’s forming around them.”
He said the drawdown became possible as Minnesota authorities began cooperating more with federal immigration enforcement.
“The president has been very clear, we’re not going to stop enforcing our immigration policies,” said Vance.
Crime statistics and media criticism
The vice president also defended the administration’s broader record on public safety, pushing back on what he characterized as media reluctance to credit Trump’s policies for measurable improvements.
When Kelly noted confusion in the media about “the lowest crime rate in 125 years,” Vance seized on the statistic to criticize press coverage.
“There are many, many dozens of people in most of America’s major cities who are walking around right now who get to go home to their kids, who get to play with their dog, because we have actually brought some common sense back to our crime policies,” he said.
He attributed the drop in crime partly to deportations: “We’ve deported a lot of criminals in the United States that should have never been here in the first place because they were illegal aliens.”
But Vance said the media “cannot even express an ounce of nuance” on the issue.
He said the media can’t “tell the truth about the fact that there are Americans who are alive today because of Donald Trump’s crime and immigration policies.”
“It’s always just shouting, angry all the time,” he said. “‘You’re Gestapo, you’re the fascist.’ And it’s just crazy, and it does the American people a real disservice.”