
JD Vance uses Jack Nicholson meme in apparent threatening deportation post
Users on X tagged Vance under the man's post in an apparent attempt to get the menswear influencer deported from the United States, a country the man says he's been in since he was a "baby"
Vice President JD Vance appeared to threaten to deport a man who runs a popular social media account focused on menswear after the user shared a post detailing his experience living as an undocumented immigrant in the United States.
On X (formerly Twitter), the user, known as "Derek guy," posted a lengthy message encouraging people not to view undocumented immigrants as "MS-13 members", as the Trump administration has often tried to characterize them, but rather see them as "neighbors" such as himself.
In response to this, users on X tagged Vance, telling the vice president he has the "opportunity to do the funniest thing ever," suggesting that he work to deport the "derek guy."
Vance responded with a meme of actor Jack Nicholson from the movie Anger Management shaking his head, saying, "Yes," menacingly.
"Derek guy," also known as "menswear guy," largely uses his account to share his thoughts on current pop culture and clothing trends. He has previously taken shots at Vance over his clothing choices, including saying that his pants are "too slim," jackets that "don't hug him very well," and a tie that was "a distraction."
But on Monday, "Derek guy" broke from his usual content to recount his own experiences living as an undocumented immigrant in the U.S., saying that his mother brought him to the country from Canada when he was a "baby."
He said that his parents fled their home in Vietnam after the Tet Offensive during the Vietnam War. The family first came to Canada, but his father ultimately sought work in the U.S., with him and his mother following behind him shortly after.
"Since I came here without legal documentation, I eventually fell into the category of being an undocumented immigrant. Yet, I've been in the United States since I was a baby. My identity and roots are very much based in this country, no different from anyone else," the menswear guru wrote on X.
"The lack of legal immigration has totally shaped my life. It has made every interaction with the law much scarier. It has shaped which opportunities I could or could not get. It has taken an emotional toll, as this legal issue hangs over your head like a black cloud," he added.
His comments come amid the ongoing protests and ICE raids in Southern California, as Los Angeles moves into a fourth night of protests, with the Trump administration deploying 4,000 National Guardsmen and 700 active duty Marines to the city.
"Derek guy" called the current immigration sweeps "inhumane" and encouraged those in opposition to them to do more to support pro-immigration groups.

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


RTÉ News
a day ago
- RTÉ News
Belarus opposition leader Tikhanovsky freed from jail
Belarus opposition leader Sergei Tikhanovsky has been released from jail after being pardoned, Belarusian human rights group Viasna has said. His wife Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who took over the opposition cause after his jailing, shared a video of him smiling and embracing her after his release with the caption: "FREE". Mr Tikhanovsky, 46, had been imprisoned for more than five years. He planned to run against incumbent Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko in the August 2020 presidential election, but was arrested and detained weeks before the vote. His wife Svetlana - a political novice at the time of his arrest - took his place in the polls. He was sentenced in 2021 to 18 years in prison for "organising riots" and "inciting hatred" and then to 18 months extra for "insubordination". Belarus, governed by Mr Lukashenko since 1994, has outlawed all opposition movements and is the only European country to retain the death penalty as a punishment. There are more than 1,000 political prisoners in the country, according to Viasna. Ms Tikhanovskaya said that officials from the United States had helped secure the release of her husband. "It's hard to describe the joy in my heart," she said in a post on X, formerly Twitter, thanking US President Donald Trump, US envoy Keith Kellogg and European allies.


Irish Times
2 days ago
- Irish Times
Mahmoud Khalil released after US judge says standards for detention ‘clearly not met'
Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil was released from US immigration detention, where he had been held for more than three months over his activism against Israel's war on Gaza . Khalil, the most high profile of the students to be arrested by the Trump administration for their pro-Palestinian activism, and the last of them still in detention, was ordered to be released by a federal judge on Friday afternoon from an Ice facility in Jena, Louisiana, where he had been held since shortly after plainclothes immigration agents detained him in early March in the lobby of his Columbia building. The 30-year-old emerged from the remote detention centre just after 6.30pm local time, walking through two towering gates topped with razor wire and accompanied by two attorneys into the late afternoon sun and intense humidity. He briefly addressed the small group of media assembled outside. READ MORE 'Although justice prevailed it's very long overdue and this shouldn't have taken three months,' he said. 'I leave some incredible men behind me, over 1,000 people behind me, in a place where they shouldn't have been.' Asked to respond to allegations made by the Trump administration, which has fought for months to keep him detained, that his pro-Palestinian organising constituted a national security threat, he said: 'Trump and his administration, they chose the wrong person for this. That doesn't mean there is a right person for this. There is no right person who should be detained for actually protesting a genocide.' Khalil told reporters he was looking forward to returning home to spend time with his infant son, who was born while his father was detained. 'I can actually hug him,' Khalil said. The federal judge, Michael Farbiarz, said during the hearing on Friday that Khalil is not a flight risk, and 'is not a danger to the community. Period, full stop.' 'It is highly, highly unusual to be seeking detention of a petitioner given the factual record of today,' Farbiarz also said during the hearing. Farbiarz said that the government had 'clearly not met' the standards for detention. Later on Friday, Khalil was ordered to surrender his passport and green card to Ice officials in Jena as part of his conditional release. The order also stipulated that Khalil's travel be limited to a handful of US states, including New York, as Louisiana, Michigan and New Jersey for court appearances. Khalil's arrest was widely decried as a dangerous escalation in the Trump administration's campaign against speech protected by the first amendment to the US constitution. Khalil has not been charged with a crime. His detention was the first in a series of arrests of international student activists, and his release marks the latest in a series of defeats for the administration, which had promised to deport pro-Palestinian international students en masse. Three other students detained on similar grounds – Rümeysa Öztürk, Badar Khan Suri and Mohsen Mahdawi – were previously released while their immigration cases are pending. A number of others voluntarily left the country after deportation proceedings against them were opened; another is in hiding as she fights her case. Farbiarz, of the federal district court in Newark, New Jersey, had previously found that the law invoked to detain Khalil – a rarely used immigration provision allowing the secretary of state to order the deportation of anyone found to have an adverse effect on US foreign policy – is probably unconstitutional. Government officials had accused Khalil of anti-Semitism and of pro-Hamas advocacy, without providing any evidence. Jewish students and faculty had submitted court documents on Khalil's behalf, and he was quoted last year on CNN saying that 'the liberation of the Palestinian people and the Jewish people are intertwined and go hand-by-hand, and you cannot achieve one without the other'. Farbiaz ordered Khalil's release in his federal court case, which was brought to challenge his detention. His immigration case will proceed on a separate track. While the government has suffered setbacks to its foreign policy argument in multiple courts, it is likely to continue arguing that its efforts to deport Khalil are also supported by alleged omissions in his green card application – arguments it brought several weeks after he was first detained, and which his attorneys have rejected. Khalil is married to a US citizen, Noor Abdallah, who gave birth to their first child during her husband's detention. 'I fight for you, and for every Palestinian child whose life deserves safety, tenderness and freedom,' Khalil wrote to his newborn son, Deen, last month. 'I hope one day you will stand tall knowing your father was not absent out of apathy, but out of conviction.' In a statement provided by Khalil's lawyers, Abdalla said she can finally 'breathe a sigh of relief' after the ruling. 'We know this ruling does not begin to address the injustices the Trump administration has brought upon our family, and so many others, but today we are celebrating Mahmoud coming back to New York to be reunited with our little family.' In response to the news that the judge had ordered Khalil to be released on Friday, Amnesty International USA celebrated the decision, calling it 'overdue' and called on the Trump administration to 'immediately comply with this order'. - Guardian

Irish Times
2 days ago
- Irish Times
Europe without Borders: a detailed history of the Schengen system - Skilful account of a tense balancing of freedoms
Europe without Borders, A History Author : Isaac Stanley-Becker ISBN-13 : 978-0691261768 Publisher : Princeton University Press Guideline Price : £30 The Schengen system of free movement across borders for nationals of its 29 member-states symbolises the promise of liberal internationalism in Europe after its long history of conflicts and war. Originating in an interstate treaty signed in 1985 between France, West Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands, it went public in 1990 after intense negotiation between state officials just after the Berlin Wall fell. Over the following decades it embraced most states and more than 450 million people. Ireland and Cyprus are its only EU non-members. Ireland preferred to maintain the similar Common Travel Area with Britain, which never joined Schengen. This book by a US journalist and academic is a detailed history of how the Schengen system was created. Based on extensive archival research it has an acute sense of the system's humanist and cosmopolitan promise alongside market and border limits. READ MORE It breaks new ground by revealing the abiding tensions in Schengen's construction and operation: between freedom of movement for people and citizens compared with market freedom for capital and workers – and between the rights conferred on nationals of its member-states and strict restrictions on outsiders. Stanley-Becker skilfully relates these tensions to the politics of immigration in Europe after decolonisation. Schengen 'was a laboratory of free movement always meant to join Euro-nationalist rules of exclusion with neoliberal principles of market freedom', he writes. Two contrasting protests frame his study: one by lorry drivers against long border queues, which pushed Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand into their Saarbrucken initiative in 1984 to ease Franco-German border controls by sharing them with other countries, in the name of a Citizen's Europe. And then, in 1996 and after, came protests by sans-papiers immigrants in favour of free movement as a human right. The contrast is inherent in the racial hierarchies that defined nationals of these former colonies as 'undesirables' in secret police lists. The book is strong on the legal and philosophical history and political arguments surrounding these Schengen rights, much less so on the huge everyday freedoms they gave to the many European citizens and workers who have benefitted from them and value them highly. These hard-won freedoms are now severely challenged by the new right-wing politics of immigration and identity on the continent.