Vice President J.D. Vance delivered a long-overdue takedown of the Biden administration’s warped use of asylum rules — and he hit one of the most politically painful truths for the open-borders crowd: when everyone can claim asylum, nobody actually enforces immigration law.
In a recent exchange with Democratic Rep. Seth Magaziner (RI-2), Vance didn’t mince words about how previous asylum policies were exploited to let people stay indefinitely — not because they feared persecution, but because the system lacked real enforcement. That’s not “legal immigration” — it’s an invitation to bypass the law entirely.
The exchange centered on the now-infamous case of five-year-old Liam Ramos, a story the media rushed to exploit before bothering with the facts.
Agents went to arrest the child’s father. The father fled.
At that point, ICE faced a basic, unavoidable responsibility: they were not going to abandon a five-year-old child in the cold while pursuing a fleeing suspect. When the father was later apprehended, the child remained with his father, not separated, not detained alone, and certainly not “targeted.”
But facts didn’t matter. The media had a storyline to sell. Here’s more of the story:
Representatives for Liam and his father said the family is from Ecuador and that they entered the U.S. in 2024 under a now-defunct Biden-era system that allowed asylum-seekers to use a phone app to schedule an appointment to be processed at an official border entry.
The DHS, which oversees ICE, has said that it has no record of the family using that app, formerly known as CBP One.
Magaziner repeated the claim that they “presented at a port of entry, requested asylum and were waiting for their hearing” while not mentioning a thing about what DHS said about the case.
The VP then went to town on the broader point of how asylum was misused under Biden, and how that essentially translated to an open border:
This reminds me of when Margaret Brennan “fact checked” me at the VP debate.
If your position is that a person can claim asylum after traversing eight countries, and they are therefore “legal immigrants” because the president ignores the law and allows them to stay, then you’re advocating for an open border.
The Biden-Harris administration literally created an app (CBPOne) to digitize the violation of federal immigration law and allow anyone who claimed asylum to stay indefinitely. This is illegitimate, illegal, and the American people rejected it.
The bottom line is that the asylum claim system under Biden has become completely distorted, with anyone and everyone attempting to use it. Asylum has a specific definition, and economic migrants simply do not qualify. There must be a credible claim of fear, rather than just a desire to improve one’s financial situation in the United States. When anyone can make an asylum claim and it takes years for these cases to be resolved, it’s clear that a significant problem exists.
President Donald Trump halted the CBP One app and repurposed it to facilitate self-deportation.
It seems that Democrats struggle to accept the fact that the Trump-Vance administration has successfully reformed the system and secured the border. And oh, by the way, the vast majority of Americans are behind Trump on his immigration and deportation policies, not Democrats.