JD Vance Announces Investigation Into Nine Top Universities

Vice President JD Vance announced Thursday that the Trump administration is targeting multiple universities that he claims “bring in foreigners to undercut the wages of American residents.” Vance singled out Yale University, Harvard University, Stanford University, Brown University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California, Davis, the California Institute of Technology, Arizona State University, and the University of Pittsburgh at a press conference, saying that the government would be investigating them. JD Vance: "Some of America's most elite universities bring in foreigners to undercut the wages of American residents. There are 9 universities in particular that we believe merit an investigation. Those are Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Brown, the University of Pittsburg, UC Davis, Cal Tech, Arizona State, and MIT."— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 8, 2026 Vance said the Trump administration believes that these institutions exploit the J-1 visa program, which allows foreign students to work and conduct research in the United States. The investigation will also include a team examining visa fraud. “Something weird is going on at these universities,” Vance said. “They’re using these visas way too much. They’re using them to undercut the wages of American grad students and American researchers, and it simply has to stop.”In the same press conference, Vance defended tech CEO Elon Musk’s contributions to the country as a positive example of a foreign student. Musk came to the U.S. on a J-1 visa as a student, but never enrolled in the Stanford University graduate courses his visa was tied to, instead working illegally on a tech startup. “It’s one thing if you were to bring in a person like Elon Musk. I think 99 percent of American citizens look at somebody like Elon Musk or Lisa Su, the CEO of AMD, and say, obviously, ‘If that person wants to come in and build something great in the US, we support that,’” Vance said, before attacking companies and institutions who hire foreigners as accountants and pay them far less than American citizens. A reporter pressed Vance about Musk, noting that he didn’t build his companies overnight, and asked how the government would determine if a prospective immigrant was the next Musk. “Does the person coming in fill a position that simply cannot be filled by an American worker? That’s question number one,” Vance said. “Question number two, very importantly, is this person a truly elite human being, are they truly bringing in a special set of skills, and abilities, and work ethic, and competence?” Vance seems to be trying to thread a needle by saying some foreign students are okay, but others are not. Musk committed the very fraud the Trump administration claims to be trying to combat. But the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX is the world’s richest man, supports Trump, and has racist ideas about immigration, so he gets a pass. Vice President JD Vance was forced to eat his words in real time, accusing Microsoft of hiring too many foreign workers on the same day President Trump plans to award Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. Vance criticized Microsoft while announcing the tech company would be temporarily suspended from sponsoring H-1B visa workers seeking green cards.“We obviously want you to thrive in the United States of America. We want people to invest in the United States of America. Particularly the American technology sector, we’re the bigger boosters of your industry. We want you to continue to grow and to employ… American workers,” Vance said at his Thursday morning news conference. “So our message to Microsoft is, ‘You’re a great American company, but you’ve got to hire great American workers. You cannot lay off American workers and then replace them with foreign indentured servants.’”This is a common argument against the H-1B work visa program, which allows foreign professionals to work in the United States. Microsoft has abused the US visa program, @VP Vance says. "You bring in indentured servants from outside the country, you lay off American workers, and if you're a corporation, you make a ton of money by undercutting the wages of American workers, replacing them with people who, frankly, shouldn't be in the United States of America to begin with," he said. Vance called for Congress to reform H1B program.— Jennifer Jacobs (@JenniferJJacobs) October 8, 2026 Vance was questioned about the ironic timing of his comment just minutes later, and tried to have it both ways.“You had some harsh words for Microsoft at the top of your speech just then,” a reporter raised. “In that case, why is President Trump awarding the nation’s top technological medal to the CEO of Microsoft this afternoon?”“Microsoft is a great American company, and we have a great relationship with them, they do a lot of important things. They also laid off 6,000 American workers while replacing them with 6,300 H-1Bs,” Vance replied. “And our message to Microsoft is not that we wanna harm your company, it’s that we want your company to thrive, but we want it to thrive by employing and empowering your fellow Americans.” Q: You had some harsh words for Microsoft at the job of your speech, so why is Trump today awarding the nation's top tech medal to Microsoft's CEO? JD VANCE: Microsoft is a great American company. They also laid off 6,000 Americans workers while replacing them with 6,300 H-1Bs. https://t.co/39KwDNTe62— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 8, 2026 The last time Vance waded into the H-1B debate he ended up dragging his wife Usha Vance, the daughter of Indian immigrants, into the fray.“You can believe on the one hand that there’s a lot of fraud in the H-1B system, while also believing that there are people who have come to the United States in the past who have enriched this country. And look, I’m married to the daughter of immigrants from India, and, you know, I love my in-laws.... They’ve been great contributors to the United States of America,” he said at a Turning Point USA event last spring. “But I also think when you become an American citizen … one of the obligations of citizens is that you have to think about the best interest of the country, and not the country you came from before.”Vance seems to have applied that thinking to Microsoft today—perhaps without running it by Trump first.The president is making an enemy out of Fox News.The conservative media behemoth publicly defended its reporting this week, rebuking a wave of Republican backlash that began after host Martha MacCallum interviewed Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed in August.“Someone didn’t necessarily like that,” Fox News Media President Jay Wallace told Axios Thursday, seemingly referring to Donald Trump. “But that’s what we do.”For years, Fox News blurred the line between legitimate news coverage and conservative entertainment. The network veered towards sycophancy once Trump entered office the first time, offering buddy-buddy interviews to the presidential Cabinet while dampening the reach of critical stories such as the Epstein files. (Fox News mentioned the prolific child sex trafficker hundreds of times fewer than its major broadcast competitors.)But apparently, Republicans got too comfortable with Fox’s bent knee. Once network executives decided to air interviews with Democratic competitors—such as El-Sayed—the floodgates opened.First, the outcry was private. White House aides put in calls to the network, complaining that Fox’s angle on El-Sayed would only help him in the tight Michigan race.But the fury bubbled to the public sphere this week, when Trump decided to take the issue to Truth Social.“FoxNews spends more time covering the Jihadist and Dumocrat candidates than they do the good old fashioned Republicans, the people that have saved America, and are making it great again,” Trump posted on Truth Social Tuesday.Trump further claimed that MacCallum had offered El-Sayed a “softball interview.”“She never interviews me like that. They don’t show my record breaking Rallies the morning after, but others do, and that’s what MAGA is watching. Fox is promoting the Dumocrats, not the Republicans and MAGA. They have totally lost their way!” he added.Republican strategists also chimed in. Jason Roe, a Michigan-based GOP operative, told Axios that the network was doing El-Sayed a “favor.”“It’s only helping him reach center-right voters,” Roe said. “But they are in business to make money, and he attracts eyeballs.”In another post Wednesday evening, Trump went full Islamophobe, referring to El-Sayed as “Mohammed” (the candidate’s full first name is Abdulrahman) and deriding him as a “Terrorist Sympathizer.”El-Sayed responded to the attack Thursday morning, arguing that Trump is “not just attacking me.” “He’s attacking all of us. He thinks so low of us. He thinks he can use my name and my faith to distract us from the suffering his policies are inflicting on us at the pump, at the grocery store, and at the doctor’s office. He thinks we don’t know any better,” El-Sayed wrote on X. “It’s time for change.”Immigration and Customs Enforcement has quietly launched a 45-day immigration crackdown in California ahead of the midterm elections, instructing its officers to “go after anybody.”The so-called “Operation Safe California” has not been formally announced yet, but two sources told the Washington Examiner Wednesday that operations have been underway for several days.One source told the outlet that officers were “told to go after anybody, they can pick up anybody.” The Examiner suggested that means that federal agents will target any undocumented immigrants, not just people with criminal records. There is no evidence to suggest that ICE has ever been so discerning. News of this secret operation comes as early voting began this week in California, which has been a consistent target for punishment by the Trump administration. Voting rights groups cited an ICE detention that took place in Santa Maria, California, on Monday in the same area that voters had to pass through to reach a ballot drop box. This latest surge of ICE activity comes more than a year after federal agents descended on Los Angeles in June 2025, which led to widespread protests and violent encounters with law enforcement. Of the hundreds of people detained as part of those raids, seven in 10 people had no criminal convictions. A second source told the Examiner that “management want numbers.” Last year, White House deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller instructed ICE to arrest 3,000 immigrants a day, a demand that has overwhelmed the agency and resulted in inhumane and degrading detention practices. Now it seems, the Trump administration plans to turn up the temperature. American diplomats are supposed to represent the interests of the U.S. above everything else.David Milstein, an aide to U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, was running cover for the Israeli government, suppressing reports critical of Israeli actions, The New York Times reports. Milstein, according to several unnamed sources, quashed reports from the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem documenting Israeli settler violence in the occupied West Bank—including against Americans.Milstein sent a cable from the embassy to Washington praising Israel for cracking down on Israeli settler violence, when in reality, embassy staff had drafted a report saying that the Israeli government wasn’t taking action. After Congress raised concerns about how Israeli authorities and settlers have killed nine American citizens, Milstein suppressed another embassy report, hindering lawmakers from investigating further.Milstein also demanded any communications from the embassy’s section on Palestinian affairs go through him. This led to the embassy’s cables dropping from several per week to only a few per month, sources told the Times. They said that this kind of intervention is unprecedented for the embassy, and is preventing the U.S. government from getting accurate information about Israel from diplomatic channels.Trump has rarely criticized Israel or Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his second term as president, and he chose to appoint Huckabee, a Christian Zionist and staunch supporter of Israel, as ambassador. It’s not clear if Milstein’s actions have Huckabee’s blessing, but human rights groups and U.S. allies have raised concerns about all of these issues.Last month, Canada, France, and the U.K. announced sanctions on Israeli settlements in the West Bank. That’s unlikely to happen in the U.S. anytime soon—and in fact the U.S. has threatened tariffs in response to the sanctions—but one would still expect U.S. diplomats to accurately document what is happening where they are stationed. In the case of Israel, however, the truth is actively being hidden.