Would “Little Marco” Recognize Himself from 2010? Probably Not.
The Trump administration is threatening the First Amendment rights and personal freedoms of all Americans and it’s doing so with the signature of Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The brutal targeting of green card-holder Mahmoud Khalil has put this on full display for the nation and the world. As The Washington Post reported, ICE’s effort to deport Khalil rests solely on a determination by Rubio, who is using Cold War-era law as the basis to deport the activist because the Trump administration simply doesn’t agree with his view.
We have known of the authoritarian vision that Trump has had for our nation since he descended the golden escalators of Trump Tower a decade ago this June. But for Rubio – who frequently touted the story of his Cuban exile parents and as a member of the Senate’s 2013 Gang of Eight co-authored a pathway to citizenship for millions of long-settled immigrant contributors – it’s the coda to a career of backsliding and sucking up and spinelessness.
RUBIO SUPPORTED A PATHWAY TO CITIZENSHIP – UNTIL HE DIDN’T
Rubio was a member of the so-called “Gang of Eight,” the bipartisan group of U.S. senators who coauthored the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013 (S. 744), a comprehensive immigration reform package that was by no means perfect but included historic provisions that would have allowed millions of long-settled immigrant contributors to apply for legal status and eventual citizenship. The proposal would have also decreased the U.S. deficit by $175 billion over the next 10 years, and by an additional $700 billion over the next 10 years after that.
S. 744 would pass the chamber by a bipartisan 68 – 32 vote, an impressive margin then, and an impressive one today.
The effort also resulted in major political dividends for Rubio, who used families’ need for permanent relief to propel himself into a legacy media darling. And for a while it seemed to work, with a February 2013 issue of Time magazine dubbing him “The Republican Savior,” the “new voice of the GOP,” and even hailing him as the “Tea Party’s answer to Barack Obama.”
But even though Rubio did end up voting for the bill, in the weeks preceding the vote he’d been teetering on the legislation to the point that a group of concerned immigrant mothers, Dreamers’ Moms, confronted him about his commitment to the proposal. “We are worried because of the suffering of families right now,” one mother said, and began to urge him to commit to the legislation when an incredulous Rubio interrupted the woman. “But what else can I do if I wrote the bill?” he asked. The encounter was captured on video:
They were right. By October of that year, Rubio had thrilled nativists (like then-Jeff Sessions aide Stephen Miller, who had been working to derail a path to citizenship in the Congress) by putting his presidential ambitions first and bailing on his own bill – and the mothers. “Not only is the senator from Florida now telling House Republicans not to pass the Senate legislation he co-sponsored and championed for months — he’s urging them not to negotiate with the Senate at all,” NBC News reported at the time.
‘PLEASE DON’T MESS WITH THE IMMIGRANTS’
Rubio’s betrayal of immigrant communities came despite being the son of Cuban exiles, a history he publicly touted during his first run for U.S. Senate in 2010. “My parents lost everything — their home, family, friends, even their country,” he said in his first ad. “But they found something too, America …” Rubio also capitalized on his family’s immigration history as he was gearing up to pass S. 744, playing a voicemail from his mother, the late Oriales García Rubio, for Time. In the recording, she begged her son to do right by immigrants. “Los pobrecitos,” she pleaded in Spanish. “Poor little ones.” From Time’s report:
“Tony, some loving advice from the person who cares for you most in the world,” she told Rubio. “Don’t mess with the immigrants, my son. Please, don’t mess with them.” She reminded him that undocumented Americans—los pobrecitos, she called them, the poor things—work hard and get treated horribly. “They’re human beings just like us, and they came for the same reasons we came. To work. To improve their lives. So please, don’t mess with them.”
“I am the son of immigrants and exiles, raised by people who know all too well that you can lose your country,” Rubio wrote in a 2011 Politico op-ed that described how his father had been forcibly separated from his birth country by Fidel Castro’s regime. “Separated from his two brothers, who died in Cuba in the 1980s,” Rubio continued. “Unable to show us where he played baseball as a boy. Where he met my mother. Unable to visit his parents’ grave.” Following Castro’s death in 2016, Rubio slammed him as a “dictator” who “inflicted misery and suffering on his own people” and “routinely” imprisoned critics.
Rubio added that Castro’s death did not mean justice “for the democratic activists, religious leaders, and political opponents he and his brother have jailed and persecuted.”
Khalil, who has described himself as a “political prisoner” and is now at risk of missing the birth of his first child simply because Rubio and Trump don’t like his views, would likely have a word to say about this. In a new op-ed published at In These Times, Khalil wrote that his captivity by Rubio and the Trump administration is “part of a broader strategy to suppress dissent. Visa-holders, green-card carriers, and citizens alike will all be targeted for their political beliefs … stake are not just our voices, but the fundamental civil liberties of all.”
Despite Rubio’s condemnation of dictatorial abuse that personally affected his family members, he knew exactly what he was doing by again supporting Trump in 2024 and then agreeing to become his Secretary of State. During the 2024 campaign, Trump promised to be a dictator “on day one,” and drew comparisons in the media to Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini through his vile use of “poisoning the blood” and “vermin” rhetoric. Through his infringement on the rights of Khalil, Rubio is doing more than cowering to Trump. He’s complicit.
A MAN WHO STANDS FOR NOTHING – NOT EVEN HIMSELF
For a fleeting moment in time, Rubio did offer some public pushback on Trump’s nativist vision, notably his obsession with mass abducting millions of immigrant neighbors who have lived here and contributed for years (but don’t give him too much credit, Rubio was still trying to appeal to the GOP base by attacking the popular and successful DACA program). “I don’t think it’s reasonable to round up and deport 11 million people,” Rubio said during the 2016 race. “I don’t think it’s a plan that works … I don’t think that’s a realistic policy.”
Rubio also criticized him as a “con man,” “the most vulgar person” to ever seek the presidency, and asserted that Trump was a weakling and nepo-baby who had no interest in looking out for working Americans struggling to pay their bills.
“He runs on this idea he is fighting for the little guy, but he has spent his entire career sticking it to the little guy — his entire career,” Rubio said during a rally in support of his doomed presidential campaign in Feb. 2016. “He’s going to Americans that are struggling, that are hurting, and he’s implying, ‘I’m fighting for you because I’m a tough guy,’ A tough guy? This guy inherited $200 million. He’s never faced any struggle. The other day, he told a protester, ‘I’m going to punch you in the face.’ Donald Trump has never punched anyone in the face. Donald Trump was the first guy that begged for Secret Service protection.”
Just days before he suspended his 2016 presidential campaign after placing second in his home state of Florida, Rubio warned that “for years to come, there are many people on the right, in the media and voters at large, that are going to be having to explain and justify how they fell into this trap of supporting Donald Trump.” You first, Mr. Secretary. Following the publishing of the Access Hollywood tape where Trump bragged about committing sexual assault, Rubio reaffirmed his support. And by the time that the 2024 election rolled around, he was relying on deadly white nationalist conspiracy theory in order to endorse mass deportation.
Now as Trump’s Secretary of State, Rubio is a key player in the plan to use immigration as the vehicle in the goal of suppressing our personal freedoms. As Ramya Krishnan, a senior staff attorney at Columbia’s Knight First Amendment Institute, told Politico: “the ‘political deportation’ hearkens back to ‘repressive moments in America’s history,’ such as the McCarthy era.” At the same time, Rubio was spineless when Trump and JD Vance shamefully berated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, instead staying silent as he sank into an Oval Office couch.
“After locking him up and surreptitiously spiriting him off to a remote Louisiana prison, ICE finally revealed they’ve charged Mahmoud Khalil under INA 237(a)(4)(C), the Cold War era foreign policy deportation provision which requires only that Secretary of State Marco Rubio unilaterally determine Khalil’s presence would have ‘potentially adverse foreign policy consequences,’” said America’s Voice Legal Advisor David Leopold. “No judge. No jury. Just Marco Rubio.”
