What To Know
- Bill Maher confronted Vice President JD Vance about the Trump administration’s ICE raids.
- Vance defended the administration’s actions, arguing that law enforcement deportations are inherently difficult.
- Maher advocated for a more balanced approach to immigration policy.
Bill Maher sent a direct message to Vice President JD Vance about President Donald Trump‘s ICE raids that “went too far.”
On Friday, June 26, the Real Time With Bill Maher host, 70, sat down with Vance, 41, to ask the VP tough questions about some of the more controversial aspects of Trump’s presidency. Among the topics they addressed was immigration.
“We like it that you closed the border. That needed to be done,” Maher conceded, before offering his sharp criticism. “The people who were here, they way you treated — I’m talking about your administration, you were not there yourself — but ICE, all that s***. Too rough, too mean, too unnecessary.”
The stand-up comedian added, “You’d go a long way to toward getting people who are just completely shut the door to you and your administration if you’d just own that. You guys went too far. You went too far, and you should own it like you did childless cat ladies.”
To that, Vance replied, “Here is the basic problem with that, Bill, is you cannot do any deportations without law enforcement. And you can’t do a law enforcement operation like that without having some situations that don’t look good when they’re recorded like that.”
The vice president continued, “If you take a guy that’s committed murder, and you go and arrest that guy, sometimes that person is going to resist arrest. Sometimes, if you take a video of it and it’s out of context and you don’t appreciate why that person is being arrested in the first place, it looks pretty icky if you take that out-of-context video clip. What I worry about is when people say you can’t ever do immigration enforcement if it produces a bad video clip, what they’re really saying is you can’t ever actually do immigration enforcement.”
Vance admitted, “Law enforcement deporting people is never an easy process, so I appreciate your argument that we’ve gone too far, but we couldn’t do nothing. And I don’t think there was an easy way to do this.”
However, Maher pointed out, “There’s a middle ground. The other thing that bothers us about stuff like that is that nothing ever lands in the middle, which is what I’m always trying to get people to do.”
After the VP joked, “I thought you were a crazy liberal,” the late-night host replied, “‘Cause you don’t watch the show.”
“I actually do watch the show,” Vance insisted. “I laughed my a** off backstage, that was a good monologue. Even though you were making fun of me, I liked it.”
That’s when Maher quipped, of Trump, “I know someone in your administration who watches the show. Because I always hear about it.”
Real Time With Bill Maher, Fridays at 10/9c, HBO