Who is President Donald Trump’s most dangerous enabler? As his second term got underway, it initially appeared that this coveted title might fall to FBI Director Kash Patel, who’d vowed to investigate Trump’s enemies. Or maybe it would be Attorney General Pam Bondi, who’d appeared willing to carry out Trump’s most corrupt designs at the Justice Department.
Or what about immigration advisers Stephen Miller and Tom Homan, who were beside themselves with excitement over the opportunity to carry out mass removals of millions via the most draconian, punitive means available? All these worthies have made an aggressive bid for Trump’s most craven enabler.
And yet, due to quirks in how Trump has pursued some of his most malicious and destructive initiatives, it turns out that Secretary of State Marco Rubio is playing an unexpectedly critical role in a surprising number of them. And this is unfolding often in violation of Rubio’s own once-cherished principles. Here’s a rundown.
Abducted Ukrainian children. As we’ve reported, the State Department recently terminated a contract funding a program devoted to locating and identifying Ukrainian children abducted by Russia. Rubio, to my knowledge, has not commented on this decision. But he owns it from top to bottom.
The program, run by the Yale School of Public Health’s Humanitarian Research Lab, had led to the identification of thousands of kids. And it identified extensive grounds for believing Russia committed war crimes in connection with the kidnapping and “reeducation” of the children.
But the evidence and data underlying those conclusions must still be transferred to Europol, the European Union’s law enforcement arm, to facilitate the continued tracking—and potential return—of these kids. Termination of the contract disrupted that transfer.
Rubio is hiding in the shadows here. Under pressure from reporters, a State Department spokesperson has vaguely justified this by insisting the program doesn’t serve “America’s interests.” The department has also admitted that this data and evidence is now held by an unnamed subcontractor connected with the contract. When the issue came up on Face the Nation on Sunday, Trump’s national security adviser refused to explain the decision.
Given that this data still exists, why won’t the State Department allow the contract to continue so its transfer to our European allies can proceed? Rubio—who has the authority to make this happen—won’t say. Ukraine wants the return of kidnapped children to be part of any peace talks over the Russia-Ukraine war, and that’s now harder to accomplish.
In short, Rubio is quietly but directly enabling the Trump administration’s apparent effort to suppress evidence of potential Russian war crimes on Russia’s behalf.
Lawless deportations. Rubio is also key to Trump’s deportations of scores of Venezuelans to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act. While the Department of Homeland Security carried out the operation, Rubio negotiated the deal with El Salvador’s authoritarian president, Nayib Bukele, that made it possible.
Legal experts have widely argued that using this law to deport suspected members of the Tren de Aragua gang is absurd, as this gang’s activities do not constitute war against—or invasion of—our country by a hostile foreign nation. What’s more, the administration has presented little evidence that the deportees even are gang members: In one case, the basis for this was a tattoo that was actually a soccer-themed image.
Gallingly, the U.S. government is paying El Salvador $6 million to imprison these deportees, something Rubio helped negotiate. Yet not only were these men plainly denied basic due process; they were sent to a Salvadoran prison whose reputation for cruelty has raised alarms among human rights advocates, a place where people untraceably disappear for years.
What’s more, the deportations to this prison appear to violate the internationally recognized “non-refoulement” principle, which prohibits removals to places where people might suffer severe abuses, as Rebecca Ingber and Scott Roehm detail at Just Security. Yet Rubio has claimed our $6 million payment for this is a “fair” price for U.S. taxpayers, and described the Salvadoran prisons as “very good jails.”
Rubio has thus given his own seal of approval to—and has had a central role in executing—potentially serious human rights violations on Trump’s part.
Evidence-free arrests. What about the arrests of Mahmoud Khalil and Badar Khan Suri, who were both legally present in the U.S. and were apparently targeted for their political views and affiliations? Rubio is the key enabler here too.
Khalil, a pro-Palestinian Columbia student and green card holder, and Suri, a scholar at Georgetown here on a student visa, are both married to U.S. citizens. But both are set to be deported by the Department of Homeland Security.
Crucially, Rubio may be personally responsible for wildly stretching—and perhaps breaking—the law to facilitate this. Both are being deported under an obscure statute that allows the Secretary of State to determine that a person’s continued presence in the country would have serious foreign policy consequences.
But in both cases, the administration has been grotesquely underhanded about its grounds for concluding this. In Khalil’s case, the administration has claimed pro-Hamas propaganda was circulated at a protest he’d organized, but has not provided evidence to back this up.
Suri, meanwhile, is accused of spreading pro-Hamas materials and of having “close connections” to a “suspected terrorist” because his wife’s father has been identified as an adviser to Hamas leadership. But the father says he left that role a decade ago, and regardless, this is naked guilt by association.
Suri’s lawyer, Hassan Ahmad, tells me Rubio’s office has not supplied its written determination explaining the decision or evidence backing up the assertions behind it. “They’ve given us nothing,” Ahmad told me. “Not a shred of evidence.”
Rubio owns all this. As immigration lawyer David Leopold notes, the legislative history of the provision Rubio is invoking clearly demonstrates that Congress intended it to be used “sparingly,” and not primarily to punish political viewpoints. Yet the White House says more deportations on these grounds are coming, a clear violation of those notions. By all indications Rubio will keep invoking this statute to carry that out.
Let’s stress that even if we ultimately learn bad things about these defendants, this already constitutes a serious affront to the rule of law. Here Rubio is a fully complicit agent in Trump’s escalating assaults on it.
Decimating USAID. Elon Musk has been rightly described as the driver of the destruction of the U.S. Agency for International Development. But the central role played by Rubio—and the sheer deceitfulness and moral cowardice of his involvement—remains underappreciated.
Recall that when Musk began this assault, Rubio personally vowed that critical lifesaving humanitarian programs would be preserved. That turned out to be flatly false as many such programs actually were sabotaged by Musk’s cuts.
Also remember that Rubio had a major private blow-up with Musk, in which Rubio vented over Musk’s cuts to USAID and Musk savaged him for not firing State Department employees recklessly enough. Yet this didn’t translate into any effort by Rubio to limit the damage. Indeed, only a few days later, Rubio obsequiously and enthusiastically embraced Musk’s mission, tweeting that he’d agreed to shutter 83 percent of programs in keeping with “core national interests.”
It’s hard to overstate how depraved this is. First, it’s unclear Rubio has the authority to shut down virtually all of this congressionally created agency’s programs. Second, the idea that this serves our national interests represents a wholesale abandonment of principles Rubio had long espoused: that such programs provide major soft-power benefits and do so at a tiny percentage of our budget, making them more than worth the cost. Now he’s actively propping up Musk’s degenerate propaganda about them.
Third, the shuttered programs mean more of the world’s poorest children are already dying, and many more people will perish in very large numbers, as Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times demonstrates. Rubio’s initial promise to preserve humanitarian programs now looks like a sick, sad joke.
Taken all together, these examples represent an extraordinary and comprehensive selling out of principles Rubio once professed to stand for.
Rubio was first elected as a Tea Party candidate back in 2010, and while he’s been reliably conservative, he has had his good moments—but now he’s quickly erasing all of them. A dozen years ago, Rubio showed extraordinary courage in advocating for humane immigration reform and spoke powerfully about the plight of migrants; now he’s helping execute the most lawless of Trump’s deportations. Rubio has long staunchly defended Ukraine’s sovereignty and sharply criticized Russia’s quasi-genocidal conquest of that country; now his State Department has terminated a program seeking accountability for potential Russian crimes against humanity. Rubio once admirably defended foreign aid programs; now he’s presiding over their destruction.
A charitable interpretation of Rubio’s moves is that he’s trying to slake the Trump-Musk thirst for horrors in minimal ways while maneuvering to bring about decent outcomes in spite of it. For instance, Rubio appears to genuinely believe that the only potential resolution to the Russia-Ukraine war is a negotiated settlement. Perhaps he’ll help bring one about that doesn’t treacherously sell out Ukraine, despite his apologetics for Trump’s abandonment of our ally.
But even if that is his hope, the termination of the program tracking Ukrainian children remains indefensible. As long as that posture continues—and as long as he keeps facilitating lawless arrests and deportations and the comprehensive destruction of lifesaving foreign aid programs—any sort of charitable interpretation of his conduct will be very hard to sustain.
Trump’s efforts to dismantle the rule of law, his deliberate betrayal of our alliances, his destruction of American soft power, and his seeming attempt to realign the United States with Russia by helping it paper over its potential war crimes—as of right now, Rubio has an active hand in all of it.
