What we know from Senator JD Vance’s legislative actions on criminal justice issues

In January, days after a Supreme Court ruling authorized the U.S. Border Patrol to remove razor wire erected by the Texas National Guard along the U.S.-Mexico border, Republican Senator JD Vance of Ohio introduced a bill that would prohibit federal agents from even tampering with the fence.

Since he entered the Senate last year, none of Vance’s three dozen bills and resolutions, including his State Border Security Act, have received a full vote, let alone become law. But his legislative efforts to restrict immigration, reform police and criminalize gender-equitable health care and campus protests indicate his policy priorities as a 2024 vice presidential candidate running alongside former President Donald Trump.

In a third of the bills he has introduced and about a dozen others he has co-sponsored, Vance calls for tough penalties for individuals and financial sanctions for communities that disagree with his positions on the border, policing, reproductive health care or whether and where protesters can legally exercise their free speech.

When his hard-hitting memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, was published in 2016, Vance called himself a “Never Trumper,” but he did a U-turn ahead of his 2022 campaign for a vacant Senate seat in Ohio. Since winning Trump’s endorsement and that campaign, Vance has become a leading critic of federal and state officials who are impeaching Trump for alleged criminal acts in office. In the Senate, Vance articulates Trump’s tough stance on crime and immigration.

He is a “loyal foot soldier” with a penchant for channeling national controversies into legislation that is at the heart of Trump’s campaign platform, says César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a law professor at Ohio State University who specializes in criminal law, civil liberties, policing and immigration.

“Whether it’s the murder of Laken Riley,” an Augusta University student whose alleged killer crossed the border illegally, “or the standoff between the Border Patrol and the Texas National Guard, he’s very good at seizing on an event and using it to galvanize the Republican Party base,” García Hernández said. And he’s proven that he “will support the Republican Party and the previous Trump administration’s tough approach to immigration policy and criminal justice in general.”

Vance, a military veteran who turns 40 in August, has authored or sponsored a bill that would toughen up campus and climate change protests while loosening restrictions on protesting abortion clinics.

His Encampments or Endowments Act would block federal funding for universities that fail to dismantle protest camps. He signed Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton’s No Bailouts for Campus Criminals Act, which would bar college students convicted of crimes during protests on campus from having their debt forgiven.

He is co-sponsor of Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah’s Restoring the First Amendment and Right to Peaceful Civil Disobedience Act of 2023, which would repeal a 1994 law protecting patients from harassment by protesters outside clinics. He is also co-sponsor of Senate Bill 204 by Republican Senator John Thune of South Dakota, which would sentence doctors to up to five years in prison if they fail to provide medical treatment to children born after an attempted abortion. Vance’s Consequences for Climate Vandals Act would double the maximum penalty for property damage caused by protests at the National Gallery of Art from five to ten years in prison.

In 2023, Vance and Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia introduced bills that would penalize anyone involved in the gender reassignment care of a minor.

Greene’s bill would allow people who received gender reassignment surgery as minors to sue anyone who performed hormone treatments or surgery on them. Vance’s bill would go further and make gender reassignment surgery on minors a federal crime punishable by up to 12 years in prison.

In addition to the State Border Security Act, Vance’s No Community Development Block Grants for Sanctuary Cities Act would cut federal funding to local communities that do not cooperate with federal immigration authorities. Senate Bill 3516, which Vance introduced in late 2023, would impose a 10 percent tax on money transfers to people outside the United States, with the proceeds deposited by the U.S. Treasury into a Border Enforcement Trust Fund.

He also signed Republican U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee’s PRINTS Act, which requires fingerprinting and reporting to federal authorities when minors cross the border in suspected human trafficking. The law would criminalize adults “using unrelated minors to enter the United States” with a penalty of up to 10 years in prison.

Vance is a co-sponsor of Republican Texas Senator John Cornyn’s Back the Blue Act of 2023, which would increase minimum and maximum penalties for assaulting or killing police officers, up to life in prison or death. Vance has also introduced resolutions expressing support for law enforcement and condemning the District of Columbia’s Comprehensive Policing and Justice Reform Amendment Act of 2022.

While Vance’s Senate resolution condemning the DC Council legislation did not leave committee, a companion bill in the House passed both chambers. President Joe Biden vetoed the bill, and Congress did not override that veto.

“While I do not support every provision of the Comprehensive Policing and Justice Reform Amendment Act of 2022,” President Biden wrote in his veto message, “this resolution by Republicans in Congress would undermine common sense police reforms, such as: banning chokeholds, establishing important limits on the use of force and deadly force, improving access to body-worn camera recordings, and requiring officers to undergo de-escalation and use-of-force training.”

In his remarks on the House resolution, which was passed with six Democrats in the Senate, Vance criticized police reform in Washington for endangering the safety of officers by limiting the use of riot gear and the ability to pursue violent offenders, and for imposing “these ridiculous fatigue requirements that allow them to use deadly force to protect themselves and those around them.”