Secretary of State Marco Rubio told foreigners who may be “afraid” of visiting the U.S. amid ramped-up deportation efforts that they have “nothing to worry about” if they do not “join a Hamas protest” or “stir up conflict.”
While giving remarks at the NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, on Friday, Rubio answered a question from a reporter who asked about potential concerns from tourists and visitors:
Mr. Secretary, what’s your message to foreign citizens who may be afraid to come to the United States because they’re concerned about potentially being detained over some minor administrative error or because they might have something on their phone – like criticism of the President or of the Israel-Gaza conflict—
The secretary announced late last month that as many as 300 foreign students have had their visas revoked due to President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, stemming from a January 20 executive order that states:
It is the policy of the United States to protect its citizens from aliens who intend to commit terrorist attacks, threaten our national security, espouse hateful ideology, or otherwise exploit the immigration laws for malevolent purposes.
Rubio replied to the reporter, “No, no, no, no… First of all, those — people that have their phones looked at and so forth, and you’ll have to — I’ll refer you to CBP to go through their processes.”
“But generally, it’s people that have been flagged coming in for a reason,” he continued. “I would say that if you’re not coming to the United States to join a Hamas protest or to come here and tell us about how right Hamas is or to tell us about — stir up conflict on our campuses and create riots in our street and vandalize our universities, then you have nothing to worry about.”
He added that “thousands” of people come into the U.S. every day without a problem, and argued that “if you’re coming here to create problems, you’re probably going to have a problem.”
“We’re not going to continue to be stupid enough to let people into our country who are coming here to tear things up. Not going [to] happen,” the former Florida senator concluded.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials have been detaining foreign college students for deportation for aligning themselves with the extreme Islamist group, Breitbart News reported.
In the case of Rumesya Ozturk, a Turkish national and Tufts University graduate student who was taken into custody by plainclothes ICE officers while she walked down the street near the Massachusetts campus in a now-viral video, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said she was “engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans.”
Olivia Rondeau is a politics reporter for Breitbart News based in Washington, D.C. Find her on X/Twitter and Instagram.
