Republican Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance speaks at a rally at the Pima County Fairgrounds on Tuesday, Oct. 22, 2024.
On his second stop in Tucson this month, Republican Vice Presidential nominee JD Vance told the crowd that a second Trump Administration would bring a tough border policy and an end to inflation.
He spoke to a room of about 300 people at the Pima County Fairgrounds Tuesday, repeatedly criticizing Kamala Harris’ record on the Southern Border and blaming migrants for a slew of problems.
“Kamala Harris came into office bragging she wanted to open the American Southern border. She came into office bragging about undoing all of Donald Trump's border policies. You know what Donald Trump thinks you ought to do, build that wall, finish that wall, send illegal aliens back home, not to the United States of America,” Vance said.
At Trump’s last stop in Tucson in September, he said his administration would start the biggest mass deportation in history, a claim that Vance reiterated.
“I think that what we’ve said, and what President Trump has said, is when you’ve got 25 million illegal aliens in this county, you’ve gotta deport a lot of people or you don’t have a border anymore. It’s just that simple,” he said. “We gotta focus on the most hardened criminals. We’ve got 425,000 violent criminal illegal aliens in this country right now. We gotta get those people out of our country and we’ve gotta do it as quickly as humanly possible.”
According to latest available data from the Pew Research Center, the actual number of undocumented immigrants living in the US in 2022 was about 11 million.
While speaking about border security, Vance also said he had met with the family of Nicholas Douglas Quets, a Tucson man who was shot and killed in northwest Sonora.
Vance said Quets was killed by Mexican cartels.
“When we allow these cartels to get rich off of American suffering, then it destabilizes not just our communities. It destabilizes Mexico and the United States together,” said Vance.
The Sonora Attorney General’s Office identified Quets on Oct. 18, according to reporting by the Arizona Daily Star, and that they were currently investigating his death.
“This family lost their son, I believe, four days ago. Have they heard from a single elected official? They haven't, because we're led by incompetent people who don't give a damn about American citizens, and that's going to change,” Vance said.
On the economy, Vance said the Biden Administration’s policy on American energy is to blame for high prices.
“If the truck driver who's bringing the groceries to the grocery store is paying 45% more for diesel, then all of us are paying more for groceries,” he said. “Donald Trump's plan is very simple. Drill, baby. Drill.”
Early voting has been underway in Arizona for about two weeks. Although Vance encouraged the crowd to vote in “whatever way they can,” he also implied concerns about the 2020 election with a joke that everyone in the crowd was going to vote 10 times.
“We’re in Tucson, not Maricopa County,” he said after. “We're gonna vote 10 times the legal way, and that means taking yourself to the polls and get nine of your friends and family.”
Vance has repeatedly refused opportunities to say Trump lost the 2020 election, most notably at the Vice Presidential Debate on Oct. 1.
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