CONCORD, N.C. — Vice President JD Vance’s visit to a sweltering hangar at an airport outside Charlotte on Wednesday provided a campaign-style platform for familiar attacks on Democrats as being “soft on crime,” even as news broke of a deadly shooting at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Dallas.
With a militarized backdrop including SWAT and emergency response vehicles flanked by local law enforcement officers, Vance sought to highlight both the killing of Iryna Zarutska on the Charlotte light-rail last month and the assassination of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk on a college campus in Utah two weeks ago.
But such efforts were somewhat overshadowed by news of the ICE shooting in Dallas, which left one immigrant detainee dead and two critically injured.
Authorities including President Donald Trump were quick to ascribe political motives to the shooter, who FBI Director Kash Patel said appeared to have inscribed anti-ICE messages on ammunition.
In North Carolina, Vance called the Dallas perpetrator a “violent left-wing extremist,” while insisting Democrats refrain from criticizing ICE agents for heavy-handed tactics as they implement Trump’s hardline immigration and deportation agenda.
‘Violent radicals’
Though Vance described Zarutska’s death as the result of “soft-on-crime policies” and a “political leadership that failed,” he did not threaten to impose National Guard troops and federal law enforcement resources on Charlotte, as the Trump administration has in Chicago, Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles, claiming to be tackling runaway crime.
Instead, Vance said that if Charlotte Mayor Vi Lyles and North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein — both Democrats — “ask for our help, we would absolutely send it, because we believe in helping people, regardless of whether they’re Democrats or Republicans.
“We want to go where we can have a real partnership between local law enforcement and the federal officials so that we can root out the crime.”
Without specifying the target of his criticism, Vance charged: “We’ve got a crew of violent radicals in the United States of America who think we ought to make it harder for police to keep us safe than easier for police to keep us safe.”
Vance also repeated an unfounded claim by administration officials that a far-left network was behind the killing of Kirk.
“Over the next couple of years, the Trump administration is going to do everything that we can to dismantle the networks, to destroy the funding and to make it harder for people to kill one another just because they disagree with what somebody says,” Vance said.
Whatley v. Cooper
Republicans have blamed Roy Cooper, the former Democratic governor turned candidate in a contest that could decide control of the U.S. Senate next year, for Zarutska’s shocking death.
“The blood of this innocent woman can literally be seen dripping from the killer’s knife, and now her blood is on the hands of the Democrats who refuse to put bad people in jail, including Former Disgraced Governor and ‘Wannabe Senator’ Roy Cooper,” Trump wrote on TruthSocial this month.
DeCarlos Brown Jr., charged in Zarutska’s murder, received a misdemeanor charge of misusing 911 in January but was released by a magistrate judge on a written promise to appear.
Asked by Raw Story on Wednesday if the Republican-controlled state General Assembly should bear some responsibility for Zarutska’s death, given its role in establishing the law governing pre-trial release, Vance said, “I think every politician who didn’t work hard to keep violent criminals behind bars deserves to have some of the blame, but at the very top of that list is Governor Cooper, because at the time that we were pushing these soft-on-crime policies, Governor Cooper was the man in charge.”
Trump has urged supporters to vote in the forthcoming Senate election for Michael Whatley, a former Republican National Committee chairman.
On Wednesday, speaking before Vance, Whatley attempted to link Zarutska’s death to his opponent by pointing to a 2020 executive order, issued by Cooper as governor, to create a racial equity task force, following the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Whatley claimed the order pledged to “reimagine law enforcement in North Carolina.”
The report released by the task force, an advisory body of which Cooper was not a member, included a section headed, “Reimagining Public Safety,” but those words do not appear in Cooper’s order.
"I don't think we need to reimagine law enforcement," Whatley said. "What we need to do is enforce the law, and back the blue."
A Cooper campaign spokesperson responded: "Roy Cooper is the only candidate who spent his entire career prosecuting violent crimnals and keeping thousands of them behind bars as attorney general, and signing tough on crime laws and stricter bail policy as governor. DC insider and Big Oil lobbyist Michael Whatley is desperate to distract from his support for cuts to law enforcement that make North Carolinians less safe."
Whatley faulted Cooper for briefly marching with Black Lives Matter activists in June 2020, outside the Executive Mansion in Raleigh, a couple days after a protest turned violent and a police station was pelted with projectiles, store windows were smashed and fires started.
“We cannot focus so much on the property damage that we forget why people are in the streets,” Cooper said at the time.
“We have to constructively channel our anger, frustration and sadness to force accountability and action. If we don’t, then we haven’t learned anything. We have to have these conversations, and then move beyond them to do the work of ending racism and building safe, thriving communities for everyone.”
‘Under attack’
During Vance’s visit on Wednesday, the most incendiary comments came from two Republican U.S. House members.
“Western civilization is under attack,” said Rep. Mark Harris, who represents North Carolina’s Eighth District, citing the deaths of Zarutska and Kirk.
“These tragedies are not isolated incidents, but signs of a national epidemic of lawlessness and division that threatens the very fabric of our society. Iryna and Charlie have opened many eyes to the battle being waged against our nation. But this war isn’t just against America — it’s an assault on the entire West.”
Formerly senior pastor at First Baptist Church in Charlotte, Harris declared that “Christ has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of sound mind.”
Rep. Addison McDowell, of the Sixth District, charged that cities across the U.S. were “run by left-wing lunatics who don’t have a spine and would rather coddle the criminals than enforce the law.
“They would rather see the likes of Iryna Zarutska murdered on a light rail on the way to work” than “lock up a dangerous criminal who had been in and out of our system,” McDowell claimed.
“Far-left activists that call themselves judges […] let an unhinged and unstable man out into the community leading to the horrific murder of Iryna that should have never happened,” he said.
This story was updated on Sept. 25, 2025 at 5:09 p.m. ET to include a statement from the Cooper campaign.
