JD Vance Rushes to Exploit ICE Shooting Before Knowing Any Details

Top officials in the Trump administration rushed Wednesday to claim that a shooting at the Dallas Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office was part of a wider trend of violence targeting law enforcement.

It’s still unclear what the shooter’s motive was, or their intended target, but none of the victims of this shooting were ICE personnel. All three people injured were immigrant detainees who were being processed at the field office, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Two of those victims have died, and the shooter died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, according to NBC.

Without knowing any information about the shooter, and with no acknowledgment that the victims weren’t actually law enforcement, officials quickly painted a picture.

“While we don’t know motive yet, we know that our ICE law enforcement is facing unprecedented violence against them. It must stop,” wrote Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on X. “Please pray for the victims and their families.”

Vice President JD Vance echoed Noem’s attempt to tie the incident to a wider trend. “The obsessive attack on law enforcement, particularly ICE, must stop. I’m praying for everyone hurt in this attack and for their families,” he wrote on X.

These officials’ statements are just the latest in a series of attempts by the Trump administration to craft a narrative that law enforcement officers are under a broader attack.

Immigration authorities have put forward inconsistent claims about the rising rate of assault against ICE officers. In July, DHS claimed a nearly 700 percent increase in assaults against ICE officers—which is technically true, but raw data showed that was the result of low overall numbers. There were just 79 assaults against immigration enforcement agents between January 21 and June 30, up from 10 during the same period last year.

The actual figure wasn’t all that terrifying, especially when considering ICE’s embrace of warrantless arrests, masked agents, and aggressive policing tactics as part of its sweeping immigration raids. It’s also unclear whether this figure includes patently phony allegations of assault, which have become all too common. Across the country, Trump’s Department of Justice has repeatedly struggled to secure indictments against protesters accused of assaulting immigration officials.

Fox News’s Jesse Watters joined the MAGA outrage Tuesday over a mishap that occurred during Donald Trump’s arrival at the United Nations earlier that day. Watters mused about the appropriate response to an escalator halting as the president stepped onto it, in a joke that didn’t land quite well among his co-hosts on The Five.

Watters claimed that the international body had “sabotaged” the president. “And they could’ve hurt the first lady. Trump would’ve fallen and gotten back up,” he marveled, before decrying another malfunction, in which the president’s teleprompter failed during the beginning of his address before the U.N. General Assembly.

“I mean this is an insurrection,” Watters said, “and what we need to do is either leave the U.N., or we need to bomb it.”

The joke didn’t quite land. After a momentary silence, co-host Greg Gutfeld hemmed. “Interesting,” he said, laughing.

“It is in New York though, right? Could be some fallout there,” Watters jokingly conceded, winning some laughter from another co-host, before doubling down. “Maybe gas it?”

His co-hosts could be heard squirming off-screen.

“No—” one of them said.

“Don’t gas it, OK,” Watters replied.

“Let’s not do that,” said Dana Perino.

“Oh my goodness,” said Fox contributor Emily Compagno. “He’s kidding, he’s kidding.”

Watters tripled down. “But we need to destroy it. Can we demolish the building? Have everybody leave, and then we’ll demolish the building.”

The host went on to get somewhat more serious, saying, “No, this is absolutely unacceptable, and I hope they get to the bottom of it. And I hope they really injure, emotionally, the people that did it.”

But he was, apparently, unknowingly wishing ill on Trump’s own team. In a statement Tuesday, a U.N. spokesperson said the escalator stoppage was due to a safety mechanism, likely triggered by a cameraman with the president’s delegation, who ascended the elevator before him. Trump’s team was also responsible for the teleprompter issues the president complained about, per a U.N. official who told ABC the White House was operating it.

The Trump administration is begging General Service Administration employees fired by DOGE and Elon Musk to come back.

The GSA is a logistics-focused branch that acquires and oversees federal workplaces both physically and virtually. In March, Musk pushed thousands of GSA employees to either resign or retire early, and outright fired hundreds of others. Those who were fired by DOGE are now being given until the end of the week to decide whether to return to their jobs. If they accept, they will come back to work on October 6.

Musk’s impact on the agency has been debilitating. Headquarters staff was cut by nearly 80 percent, portfolio managers cut by 65 percent, and facility managers cut by 35 percent, according to an official who spoke with the Associated Press.

DOGE also planned to cancel more than half of the GSA’s 7,500 leases and sell hundreds of government-owned buildings. It’s clear now that it seriously overreached, with 131 leases expiring before employees actually moved out of the buildings.

The chaos DOGE caused—and the backtracking it’s doing now—shows that the federal bureaucracy is not as wasteful, fraudulent, and abusive as the world’s richest man constantly claimed it to be. DOGE’s “Wall of Receipts” pledged to save the United States $460 million just through lease cancellations. It didn’t even get close, as the savings are at an estimated $140 million.

“Ultimately, the outcome was the agency was left broken and understaffed,” former GSA real estate staffer Chad Becker, told the Associated Press. “They didn’t have the people they needed to carry out basic functions.”

GSA isn’t the only federal agency being negatively impacted by the cuts that were supposed to save it. From the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to the Social Security Administration, DOGE has absolutely failed to make anything more efficient, leaving only more mess behind.

Senator Lindsey Graham said he hopes the president runs for an illegal third term.

Speaking on Fox New’s Hannity Tuesday night, the South Carolina Republican fawned over Donald Trump’s supposedly tough talk at the United Nations General Assembly.

“Trump 2028. I hope this never ends,” Graham said.

Graham was practically giddy as he recounted Trump’s surprising admission during a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy that NATO countries should feel free to shoot down Russian jets if they enter foreign airspace, following apparent incursions in Poland, Estonia, Norway, and most recently, Denmark.

“He’s tried to go out of his way to get [Vladimir] Putin to the table. We don’t want to humiliate Russia, we just want to end the war,” Graham said. In reality, Trump refused to say whether he still trusted Putin, granting Moscow yet another month to make progress on a deal with Kiev.

But Graham was mostly excited about Trump’s promise to supply weapons to NATO “for NATO to do what they want with them.” Russia would now face “high-end American weapons sold to NATO for the benefit of Ukraine, and this war is coming to your backyard here with no limitations like Biden,” Graham said.

“He’s everything Biden wasn’t. He stood up to the U.N. in the U.N. and called them out for who they are,” Graham said. Unlike Biden, Trump has figured out how to make a buck off the endless war, instead of sending military aid to finish it.

Graham wasn’t done singing Trump’s praises. “This guy is a cross between PT Barnum and Ronald Reagan,” he said. “He’s got—he’s in everybody’s head.”

The senator also applauded Trump for mocking Europe’s reliance on Russian oil. “We don’t have to live with a Europe that’s buying Russian oil at the time we’re all trying to stop the war with Russia and Ukraine. So I hope he runs again,” Graham said.

Again, the South Carolina Republican seems not to care that Trump’s remarks are part of his own plan for American energy expansion—though the Kremlin certainly saw it that way. Or maybe that’s what the fascism fanboy likes about the circus showman president: finding creative ways to make a dollar.

It’s not clear that Trump, who hocks “Trump 2028” hats, sees himself as constrained by the Twenty-Second Amendment—not to mention the Constitution in general. In March, he told NBC’s Kristen Welker that he was “not joking” about considering a third term, claiming that there were “methods” by which he could remain in the White House.

Donald Trump’s flubdub at the United Nations is apparently going to get people fired.

The president and his administration are still fuming over two technical difficulties that Trump experienced at the U.N.’s New York City headquarters, including a teleprompter error and a “broken” escalator that left his posse stunned and confused about how to advance up the static staircase.

Speaking with Fox News Tuesday evening, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt stated that the mistakes appeared to be “sabotage” and that the administration would sic the Secret Service on the individuals responsible.

“It does appear to be sabotage with the escalator and the teleprompter,” said host Jesse Watters. “What is the White House going to do about that?”

“Well Jesse, that’s definitely what it appears to be to me,” Leavitt responded. “There was some concerning reporting from the London Times, as you pointed out that U.N. globalist staffers were basically plotting to set up the president of the United States.”

Leavitt was referring to an article in The Times that reported U.N. workers had been overheard joking about shutting the escalator down on Trump, though no evidence has emerged indicating that they followed through on the joke.

Leavitt further accused the U.N. of lowering the president’s audio during his speech, highlighting the paranoia rampant amongst the MAGA elite.

“First it was the escalator, then it was the teleprompter.… The audio inside of the room was much lower and different for the president of the United States than for the previous speaker,” Leavitt said.

“When you put all of this together, it doesn’t look like a coincidence to me,” she continued. “And if we find that these were U.N. staffers who were purposefully trying to trip up, literally trip up, the president and the first lady of the United States, well, there better be accountability for those people, and I will personally see to it, Jesse.”

Trump warned in real time that whoever was behind the teleprompter fiasco would have to face the fire for troubling the start of his speech.

“I can only say that whoever’s operating this teleprompter is in big trouble,” the president said, drawing laughs from the audience.

But as it later turned out, the problems likely stemmed from his own team. According to a U.N. official, Trump staffers were in charge of operating his teleprompter and had also accidentally triggered a stop mechanism on the escalator ahead of the president’s ascent.