Vance in Tucson: Send in U.S. military 'to battle with the Mexican drug cartels'

Ohio Sen. JD Vance said Tuesday in Tucson: "You need to have a president who sends in the U.S. military to battle with the Mexican drug cartels," in response to the killing last week of a Tucson man traveling through a volatile part of Sonora.

"Over the next couple of weeks, we all need to work to apply pressure on the cartels who murdered this innocent, young Marine and try to put pressure on Kamala Harris to do something about it," Vance told a crowd of supporters during the rally at the Pima County Fairgrounds.

"And here's the other thing: I think we've got hundreds of thousands of very fine Marines, soldiers, sailors and airmen, who are pretty pissed off at the Mexican cartels. I think we'll send them in to do battle with the Mexican drug cartels, too," he said.

Nicholas Douglas Quets, 30, a U.S. citizen and Marine Corps veteran, was fatally shot while driving on a highway in Sonora Friday night after he did not stop for an armed group at an "illicit checkpoint," the Arizona Daily Star reported this week, quoting the Sonora Attorney General's Office. The shooting took place just before 8 p.m. near Altar, Sonora, on Federal Highway 2 between Altar and Caborca. On the same highway, two Arizona women were killed in an August shooting and a U.S. resident was killed in December.

Vance, a Marine Corps veteran, said he spoke to Quets' family ahead of his Tuesday rally. The Republican vice presidential candidate said Quets' family hasn't heard "from a single elected official," and he contended that's because federal leadership under Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for president, "doesn't give a damn about American citizens."

Once he and Donald Trump are elected, Vance said, "we're going to stop using the people's Department of Justice against the American citizens" and instead use it "against the Mexican drug cartels."

"Here is my solemn promise to you, while you've been ignored, by your own government in the last four days in the midst of this unbelievable tragedy," Vance told the crowd. "I promise you, the cavalry is coming, and when Donald Trump is president, we're going to kick the cartels' asses and we're going to do it for you and for every person in this room."

It was Vance's second stop in Arizona of the day. Earlier that afternoon he stumped in Peoria before his Tucson stop.

The campaign had said last week in a news release that Vance's stop at the fairgrounds would be on the economic plan that former president Trump and he are proposing “to Make America Affordable again," the Star previously reported. 

"Now the biggest reason that we've got runaway affordability problems is because Kamala Harris has waged war on American energy. Think about this, if the truck driver who's bringing the groceries to the grocery store is paying 45% more for diesel, then all of us are paying more for groceries. If the truck driver who's delivering lumber to the construction site is paying 50% more for gas, then all of us are paying more for housing," he said. "So, Kamala Harris wants to wage war on American energy; Donald Trump's plan is very simple: drill baby drill."

Vance called Harris' economic plan "totally upside down" because he claimed she is "going around, bragging about the fact that she's going to undo the Trump tax cuts and raise taxes by millions and billions of dollars on working families." Harris has said she plans to cut taxes for working- and middle-class taxpayers.

Vance also accused Harris of wanting to "give money to foreign corporations that ship our jobs overseas."

When asked by a reporter about Trump's economic plan to impose high tariffs on countries, and that a number of experts have said this would increase prices back home, Vance responded that "the very same people who said that Donald Trump's tariffs aren't going to work are the very same people that said we should let China into the World Trade Organization."

"In China, they're willing to pay their people, sometimes literal slaves, $3 a day. And you ask yourself, 'well, if they're going to make it for $3 a day and we want to pay our people good middle-class wages, how are we going to fight back against it?" he said. "And the way we fight back against it is to say: 'if you want to bring that slave-labor-made crap into our country you're going to pay a big, fat tariff.' And that's how we're going to protect American businesses and American workers."

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"I think Donald Trump is going to unleash a Golden Age of American prosperity," Vance said.

A tariff is a tax imposed by a government on the importing of goods from other countries. The Cato Institute, a think tank organization based in Washington, D.C., whose mission is in part to move "public policy in the direction of individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace," said in April of this year that tariffs imposed by the Trump administration in 2018 and 2019 "were almost entirely passed onto (U.S.) consumers, resulting in higher prices and reduced export growth."

The majority of Vance's roughly-45 minute speech at the fairgrounds, before he took questions from reporters, had to do with what he called the "border crisis" and drug cartels in Mexico "getting rich off American suffering."

"And perhaps the biggest difference of all is that Kamala Harris came into office bragging that she wanted to open the American southern border. She came into office bragging about undoing all of Donald Trump's border policies," he said. "You know what Donald Trump thinks we ought to do? Build that wall, finish that wall, and send illegal aliens back home, not to the United States of America."

When asked by a reporter about Trump's plan to launch one of the largest mass deportations in history, the crowd erupted into the biggest applause of the night; people stood on their feet, shook their fists and began "USA" chants.

Another local reporter then asked how the federal government should be addressing the fentanyl crisis. Vance said it is a "humanitarian catastrophe that should be the biggest story in every national news media" outlet, but instead "they want to talk about 2020."

"They ought to be talking about the fact that 100,000 of our people, many in the prime of our lives, are dying. It's a disgrace and Donald Trump is going to do everything they can to fight it. That's where we're going to start," Vance said. "The number one reason we have so much fentanyl in the state of Arizona, but also all over our country ... this crap is manufactured in China because it's tough to manufacture, and then it's brought in the United States of America by the Mexican drug cartels."

"You need to have a president that goes to China and tells them what's what, stop manufacturing this crap, and then you need to have a president who sends in the U.S. military to battle with the Mexican drug cartels," he repeated. 

A local TV station reported Vance would be "making at stop" at a south-side restaurant after his event Tuesday afternoon.

This wasn't just Vance's second Arizona rally of the day, it was his second Tucson rally in two weeks' time. Both campaigns have been keying in on Tucson and Southern Arizona ahead of the Nov. 5 election.

Both Vance and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the Democratic candidate for vice president, rallied voters in Tucson on the same day earlier this month. Former President Barack Obama stumped on the University of Arizona campus Friday on behalf of the Harris-Walz campaign.

In September, Trump rallied at the Tucson Convention Center.

Harris' husband, Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, rallied voters in downtown Tucson later that day. Harris held a campaign event in Douglas on Sept. 28, after a visit to the border and the Douglas port of entry, the Star previously reported. Trump had his own stop at the border earlier that month, while Vance visited the border in August.