Vance said ICE will go ‘door-to-door’ to check immigration status

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On Jan. 7, 2026, U.S. Vice President JD Vance appeared on Fox News to discuss Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents deportation actions, among other issues. Numerous listeners claimed Vance proposed that ICE would go “door-to-door” to determine the immigration status of people across the country.

The claim spread on Instagram, Reddit, and other social media outlets, and numerous Snopes readers asked us to confirm that Vance made such a statement. According to the rumor, Vance said ICE agents would decide whom to deport after going “door-to-door” to check documentation. 

(Facebook user Jim Fairchild)

Vance did indeed make the above statement in an interview with Fox News host Jesse Watters. Footage of Vance on Fox News shows him responding to a question from Watters about how President Donald Trump’s administration would speed up deportations of immigrants in the country illegally, to which Vance said ICE agents would be going “door-to-door” to check documentation. As such, we rate this claim a correct attribution.

Watters asked Vance, “Are we getting these illegals out fast enough?” Vance responded (at 14:19, emphasis ours):

We always want to get them out faster. A lot of the ICE agents that we have hired in the past six months, they’re not even done with training. So all of the big investments that we’ve made in border security, what we’ve done is actually gotten 2½ million illegal aliens out without any of the really big marquee things that we’ve been working on. That was just simple willpower and the president of the United States coming in and saying, “This is done.” 

I think we’re going to see those deportation numbers ramp up as we get more and more people online, working for ICE, going door-to-door and making sure that if you’re an illegal alien, you’ve got to get out of this country and if you want to come back, apply through the proper channels. 

For further reading, Snopes has reported previously on an image that purportedly showed Renee Nicole Good’s vehicle aimed at an ICE agent in Minneapolis just before the officer fatally shot her. Vance has claimed that Good tried to ram the agent and that the agent’s own video shows this, while multiple credible analyses of videos from the shooting contradict the vice president’s claim.