Vice President JD Vance is being trashed on social media for calling a wrongly deported father from Maryland a “convicted” gang member—and then linking to a legal document that says no such thing.
Asked by former Obama aide and Pod Save America host Jon Favreau to comment on the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran man with protected status who the Trump administration admitted it deported because of an “administrative error,” Vance replied in a social media post.
“My comment is that according to the court document you apparently didn’t read he was a convicted MS-13 gang member with no legal right to be here,” he said on X.
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The Yale-educated lawyer then shared a link to the government’s filing in which it admitted the error. The filing, however, only said that a confidential informant had accused Abrego Garcia of being an MS-13 gang member in 2019. A judge found otherwise and granted him protected status.
“Vance here, mocking [Favreau] for not reading the court filing, says the deported man was a ‘convicted’ gang member,” Politico reporter Kyle Cheney wrote on X. “The court filing does not say that. It says he was denied bond in 2019 over an informant’s claim he was in MS-13. That’s not a conviction.”
“Your comment, @JDVance, is a lie,” conservator author Bill Kristol wrote.
“Why did the administration itself admit the deportation was an error if the new line is to defend it (with an error itself, the guy was not convicted of a crime),” another user asked.
“Now that you’ve been shown proof that everything you said is a lie, what are you going to do about this? You’ve committed a crime against humanity,” Meidas Touch co-founder Brett Meiselas added.
Vance, however, refused to back down from his claim that, “An immigration judge determined [Abrego Garcia] was a member of MS-13 gang.”
He also wrote that the immigration judge in question was a “Biden admin” judge before correcting his post to reflect that Trump was actually the president in 2019.
“Whatever ‘due process’ he was entitled to, he received,” Vance wrote, even though—again—the judge in his case found that he wasn’t a gang member and would be persecuted if he returned to El Salvador.
“The vice president, an attorney, appears not to know what the word ‘convicted’ means,” senior legal affairs reporter John Gerstein wrote.
“You can say it, Josh. The vice president is a liar,” a user said in response to his post.
Addressing Vance, another user wrote, “With all due respect from someone who supports you, what you said in your other tweet this man was a convicted gang member. There is no conviction, but you graduated from Yale Law and passed a bar exam, and should know that’s Defamation per se.”
