play

Vice President JD Vance discussed immigration, faith and the impact of AI in a recent interview.Vance defended the Trump administration’s immigration policies, emphasizing border security.Vance disagreed with Chief Justice John Roberts’ view on the role of courts in checking executive power.

Vice President JD Vance had immigration, faith and American families on his mind after visiting the new pope.

The Ohio native spoke to New York Times conservative columnist Ross Douthat for his “Interesting Times” podcast while in Rome.

Pope Leo XIV, who clashed with Vance over theology and immigration earlier this year, met privately with the vice president at the Vatican. The Chicago-born pontiff officially assumed his role with an inaugural Mass on May 18.

Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019, was one of the last people to meet with Pope Francis before he died. On Douthat’s podcast, Vance said he was wearing the tie that Pope Francis gifted him.

Here are five things Vance told Douthat during their roughly one-hour interview.

Vance pushed back on administration’s deportation numbers

During his campaign, President Donald Trump promised to deport “millions and millions” of people living in the United States without legal status. That goal is off to a slow start ‒ Immigration and Customs Enforcement data from February reported by NBC showed Trump’s deportation numbers were slightly below those under President Joe Biden.

Vance pushed back on this by saying the “Biden border was effectively wide open,” and so more people were arrested at the border, resulting in more deportations. The ICE data reported by NBC, comparing February 2024 and February 2025 numbers, supports this: most people deported last February were arrested at the border.

Vance also said that while deportation numbers are slightly lower, border security is up under Trump.

Deportation infrastructure is administration’s larger goal

Looking beyond early deportation numbers, Vance said the administration’s overall goal is to create a lasting deportation infrastructure that’s upheld by the courts and allows the government to deport “large numbers” of people.

The root of Vance’s stance on migration? Large numbers of people have migrated to the United States in recent years, and the vice president said this can erode the country’s sense of social cohesion.

“I really do think that social solidarity is destroyed when you have too much migration too quickly,” he told Douthat.

Chief Justice Roberts ‘wrong,’ courts should be ‘deferential’

The Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts have repeatedly hit legal challenges. Earlier this month, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts said courts should check the excesses of Congress and the executive branch.

“I thought that was a profoundly wrong sentiment,” Vance told Douthat. “That’s one-half of his job. The other half of his job is to check the excesses of his own branch. 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. That’s where we are right now.”

Instead, Vance said, the courts should be “extremely deferential to these questions of political judgment made by the people’s elected president of the United States.”

Immigration policy sometimes conflicts with Vance’s faith

Vance admitted to Douthat, a fellow Catholic, that he has grappled with one big risk of mass deportation ‒ that some people will be wrongfully deported.

“I’m not going to pretend that I haven’t struggled with some of this, that I haven’t thought about whether we’re doing the precisely right thing,” he said.

But Vance stood firm on the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident wrongly deported to a prison in El Salvador who the Trump administration says is a MS-13 gang member.

“I think this guy was not just a gang member, but a reasonably high-level gang member in MS-13,” he said. “I think he had engaged in some pretty ugly conduct. Legally, he had multiple hearings before an immigration judge. He had a valid deportation order.”

Abrego Garcia and his attorneys say he is not a gang member.

The Supreme Court ordered Trump to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States. But the administration has argued it doesn’t have the authority to bring him back, and the president of El Salvador won’t release him.

“And our attitude was: OK, what are we really going to do?” Vance said. “Are we going to exert extraordinary diplomatic pressure to bring a guy back to the United States who’s a citizen of a foreign country who we had a valid deportation order with?”

Vance hopes Pope Leo will be moral steward of AI

Elsewhere in the interview, Vance and Douthat discussed their concerns about artificial intelligence. The vice president said he’s most worried about how AI could change how people interact with each other, leading to more loneliness, less dating and fewer families.

“I don’t think it’ll mean 3 million truck drivers are out of a job. I certainly hope it doesn’t mean that,” he said about AI. “But what I do really worry about is does it mean that there are millions of American teenagers talking to chatbots who don’t have their best interests at heart?”

Vance said he spoke to Pope Leo about artificial intelligence during their visit.

“The American government is not equipped to provide moral leadership, at least full-scale moral leadership, in the wake of all the changes that are going to come along with AI. I think the church is,” he said. “This is the sort of thing the church is very good at. This is what the institution was built for in many ways, and I hope that they really do play a very positive role. I suspect that they will.”