Deputy prime minister rebukes JD Vance over immigration blame after student death

Britain’s deputy prime minister said he confronted JD Vance after the U.S. vice president blamed migration for the killing of Henry Nowak, the 18-year-old university student who was stabbed in Southampton and left handcuffed as he lay dying. David Lammy said the issue was not political theatre but the facts of the case, which British officials say do not support tying the death to immigration.

Vance escalated the dispute on Friday with a post on social media that framed Nowak’s death as evidence of civilizational decline and of Europe’s failure to stop mass migration. He called for righteous anger and argued that the teenager would still be alive if European leaders had taken a harder line on immigration. That intervention quickly pushed a domestic British criminal case into a broader fight over migration, policing and public safety.

Lammy said he raised the issue in what he described as a robust phone call with Vance on Saturday. He said he wanted to emphasize that the killer was British and is now behind bars, and that the case had nothing to do with mass migration. The call came after Vance’s comments spread through a dispute already inflamed by claims that police had mishandled the scene.

The details of the case are central to the argument. Nowak died in December after being stabbed by Vickrum Digwa, who was convicted of murder and sentenced this week to life in prison with a minimum term of 21 years. Police initially treated the wounded teenager as a suspect after Digwa falsely claimed to have been the victim of a racist attack, then moved to resuscitate Nowak when they realized he had been gravely injured. The Independent Office for Police Conduct is investigating the officers’ actions, while Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s office has warned against efforts to exploit the killing to deepen division.

The episode shows how a violent crime can be recast into a transatlantic political weapon. In Britain, the case has already fed arguments about “two-tier policing,” race and knife crime; with Vance’s comments, it has also become part of a wider right-wing migration narrative that reaches beyond one trial, one city and one country.