JD Vance goes all in on immigrant fraud hoax

JD Vance goes all in on immigrant fraud hoax
The vice president and Stephen Miller hope Nick Shirley's dubious "exposés" will distract from Trump's failures

By Amanda Marcotte
Senior Writer
Published June 5, 2026 6:45AM (EDT)


(Salon) These days, it’s hard to tell if Donald Trump is mocking JD Vance again, or if the president is just sleepy. “He looks like Eliot Ness,” the president declared of his veep in a televised Cabinet meeting in May while high-level administration officials pretended to laugh. “You ever see Eliot Ness,” Trump continued, saying Vance’s posture “looks like a movie.” It appears the nearly 80-year-old president confused the infamous Prohibition agent with Kevin Costner’s portrayal of Ness in the 1987 film “The Untouchables.”

Trump, who is reportedly growing ever more impatient with the vice president, was probably taunting Vance with such an implausible comparison. Still, the reference to 1930s-era Chicago law enforcement was apt, because it was an era of police lawlessness, where unconstitutional practices like the third-degree were justified as necessary to stopping organized crime. Vance, along with White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, are similarly embracing the view that law, morality and ethics should not get in the way of their radical political agenda. But unlike Ness, who did have real crime to deal with, the justifications Vance and Miller deploy are baseless nonsense.

The duo’s latest tough-guy act is built around elaborate accusations that immigrants are defrauding the government on a scale that, if true, would rate as one of the worst corruption scandals in history. In late May, the Vance and Miller helmed a public meeting — really, a press stunt — for an alleged “task force” charged with looking into the purported fraud. But the biggest charlatans were Vance and Miller themselves, with their false claims that immigrants are becoming unbelievably wealthy by stealing from the government.

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Since this accusation came from the same group who spread the lie that Haitian refugees steal people’s pets and eat them, it should be self-evident that Miller was lying. Indeed, fact checkers showed that to be the case, noting that the federal government’s budget deficit in 2025 was $1.8 trillion, and fraud is, even with the most generous estimates, only a small fraction of that number. To give a sense of how ridiculous Miller’s claim is: There are approximately 52 million immigrants living in the U.S. To reach $1.8 trillion, every single one would have to be stealing nearly $35,000 a year from government coffers. .......................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2026/06/05/jd-vance-goes-all-in-on-immigrant-fraud-hoax/