A protester cut through Vice President JD Vance’s remarks with an accusation about Sen. Roger Marshall’s medical practice at a manufacturing plant in Olathe, Kansas, on Monday, September 14, 2026. Vance came back at him with a line about a Mexican flag.
Make America Great Again Inc. (MAGA Inc.), President Donald Trump’s main super PAC, organized the event at Webco Manufacturing. Moments before the interruption, Vance was on the subject of illegal immigration and foreign corporations. “We are not going to stand by as we allow illegal immigrants and foreign corporations to undercut the wages of the people in this factory,” he said.
“He sues his patients!” the man shouted, aiming at the very senator Vance had come to promote. Men in dark red shirts hustled him through the crowd and out the doors, the protester in green all the while, as supporters booed and broke into a chant of “USA.”
The Line About a Mexican Flag
“I see we have a guy who is protesting,” Vance said, repeating the line as the man kept yelling. He then appeared to search for something else to say, and the crowd filled the silence with chants of “USA.”
“You know, the last time I gave a speech and we had a guy who was interrupting, he had the common courtesy to bring a Mexican flag so we knew where he stood,” he continued.
The heckler had raised Marshall’s history of hauling patients into court over unpaid medical bills — a subject with no bearing on Mexico or immigration. Vance’s comeback instead reached back to the Republican midterm convention in Dallas on September 10, where a protester interrupted his keynote address while waving a Mexican flag.
“Well, my friend, if you love Mexico so much, get your a— over there. I’ll buy you the plane ticket,” Vance said at the time, according to The Post Millennial.
Hundreds of supporters turned out in Olathe, some of them lining up hours before Vance arrived. “We’re going to build more factories. We’re going to invest more in the United States of America,” he told them, adding, “We’re going to create new jobs, and we’re going to create more and more promotions for the workers like Braden, who are working their tail off every single day.”
Vance also told the Olathe crowd that the man “decided to come in and lie about my very dear friend, Doc Marshall.” He then defended the senator’s record: “Doc Marshall has stood up for everyday Americans every single day he’s been in the United States Senate,” he said.
At a Kansas campaign rally, Vance also attacked an LGBTQ+ charity, misnaming the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, distorting the group’s work and twisting the sermons of Democratic Senate candidate Adam Hamilton, according to reporting published September 16.
The Lawsuits Behind the Shout
The senator’s own camp has acknowledged the accusation the vice president waved off as a lie. An obstetrician-gynecologist before he entered politics, Marshall took more than 700 patients to court over outstanding medical bills; 81 of them were ultimately arrested after missing court dates over the debt, according to reporting that put the filings between 2003 and 2015. That same reporting found collection efforts on some of the debts continuing between 2017 and 2021, after he had reached Congress. Marshall and his office have both confirmed that he sued patients.
Two days earlier, a debate moderator put the lawsuits to him directly, and Marshall said he had used “common business practices.” The hospital did not move quickly on unpaid accounts, he told the audience: “We would go a year before we would ever send somebody over.” Debts as small as $101 drew legal action from the practice, the same reporting found, and patients were charged 18 percent annual interest on overdue bills.
That debate, at the Kansas State Fair, went badly for the incumbent, as the audience booed and heckled him while he tried to speak. Hamilton, the megachurch pastor challenging him, hammered him over the lawsuits. He pointed to what he said were 2,000 Bible verses about caring for the poor.
A Tightening Race in Kansas
Republicans once treated this contest as an afterthought, and the medical-debt story has now landed in the middle of it. The Cook Political Report now rates the Kansas Senate seat “likely R,” down from “solid R.” That downgrade helps explain why the vice president spent a Monday afternoon in an Olathe factory.
No Democrat has won a U.S. Senate seat in Kansas since 1932. The party does not face uniformly hostile territory there, though: voters elected Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly in 2018 and returned her to office in 2022.
Ahead of the visit, Marshall said he looked forward to “sharing the manufacturing renaissance happening across our state.” Vance’s swing through the Kansas City metro area took in new anti-fraud operations as well as the boost for the senator. An audience of more than 93,000 watched the Olathe appearance live on LiveNOW from Fox, which carried it as it happened.
Once the protester was gone and the chanting died down, Vance turned to credit card swipe fees — what retailers are charged when customers pay with a card. The two of them had teamed up on the matter back when he was a senator himself, he told the crowd, describing Marshall as the one who spearheaded the push to force Wall Street to lower the charges.
Vance widened the pitch this week on the “All-In” podcast, in comments reported September 18, asking voters to keep Republicans in control of Congress. “There’s a lot of good that’s been done, but there’s a lot of work left to do,” he said, adding, “Don’t give power to the people who cause the problems that we’re fixing.” He also said: “Give us another chance, or give us another couple of years, to continue to work on the amazing things that we’ve been doing for the past two years.”
