This Marco Rubio is unrecognizable

(Opinion of Bloomberg) – The president of Salvador El Nayib Bukele may have found the best description of the new approach of the Secretary of State Marco Rubio to dictatorial diets: a riant emoji.

After a judge of the federal district ordered the administration to arrest an American flight expelling the Venezuelans in his country, Bukele wrote on X, after the departure of the flight: “Oopsy … too late”. He added the symbol known as “face with tears of joy”.

For many of those who watched Rubio’s career, he was extremely incongruous to see him snubbed an American court on immigrants expelled to a brutal prison in an authority governed by an authoritarian.

Rubio, a lawyer, built his political career by speaking of being “the son of immigrants and exiles” and condemning human rights violations in countries like Cuba, which his parents left during the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.

But now, as one of Trump’s best lieutenants, Rubio is not only willing to associate with the Aggressive Bukele and Duplicite, he threw his full support for an inhuman purge of immigrants from the United States without regular procedure.

This is a whole change compared to Marco Rubio in 2008, while he was a speaker of the Florida Chamber – the first Cuban to occupy this position. At the time, the anti-immigration fervor of the Tea Party began to emerge.

Florida legislators of the two parties had proposed dozens of bills – ranging from the plan of a democratic legislator to demand that the police report undoubtedly suspected immigrants with republican plans to prohibit government benefits for undocumented adults. But this version of Rubio was much more sensitive to the political repercussions of a repression of immigration. He refused to give one of the bills a hearing and told legislators that he did not want to appear “anti-immigrant”.

Four years later, Rubio spoke with tenderness of his education by immigrant parents when he addressed the National Republican Convention. He praised the virtues of “American exceptionalism” and the promise of a country “based on the principle according to which each person has rights given by God”.

It is difficult to imagine that Rubio gives this speech today, especially after a Venezuelan found guilty of having killed the nursing student in Georgia, Laken Riley, received more regular procedures than the owner of the Cuban company without criminals who were torn from his entry by ice agents in Miami two weeks ago. (Man’s wife said that the man had spent years renewing work permits and trying to sail in the bureaucracy labyrinth to obtain citizenship.)

Today’s expulsion tactics are also far from the future Rubio imagined in 2013 when, as one of the bipartite groups of senators known as “eight gang”, he proposed an immigration reform plan which provided a path to citizenship for 11 million immigrants but has never been adopted. It was “in our national interest” to bring people out “in the shadows”, said Rubio at the time. “It is who we are. We are the most compassionate nation of the earth. ”

Three years ago, Rubio was still on the side of compassion and the law. He criticized Bukele, who had declared the state of emergency due to the generalized violence of the gangs, then used the army to stop thousands of people without regular procedure. Rubio called him “a really disturbing situation” and noted that Bukele “criticizes and criticizes the United States very openly and other Western institutions”.

But Rubio laughs now. “Whenever I find one of these crazy people, I remove their visa,” he boasted recently, after canceling hundreds of visas.

He ordered his staff to browse the social media accounts of the Visa candidates and to expel any person guilty of creating a “heckling”.

It is true that the State Department has the power to revoke a visa of someone that it considers a threat. But according to the law, it must be for very specific foreign policy reasons.

Many foreign students caught in Rubio’s sweep have been accused of any crime and seem to have been targeted because the administration finds their pro-Palestinian discourse reprehensible. Some have been imprisoned or refused to a regular procedure. Some are permanent or married residents to American citizens.

Dario Moreno, professor of political science at the Florida International University in Miami, who co-formed many courses with Rubio at school, said that he did not know how Rubio has square the contradictions in his positions today with those of the past, but he thinks that there is a political risk for some of the administration’s immigration policies.

“I don’t think the American Cubanans, or Latinos in southern Florida, probably agree with the Roundup,” he told me.

“Ranging privileged students in the universities of Ivy League or people who look like gang members, that doesn’t bother people,” he said. What upsets them is the recent order of Trump demanding that a half-million people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela leave the United States by the end of the month, even if they have received work permits in the United States as part of a humanitarian humanitarian release program.

The researchers also tell me that they see dangerous parallels between the policies of the Castro and Trump administration. They seemed surprised that Rubio did not see them either.

“The speech (from Castro) was essentially the same as that of Trump, which is, if you do not agree, get out of this country, and if you are not the right type of Cuban, you do not belong here,” said Lillian Guerra, professor of Cuban history and the Caribbean at the University of Florida. “Unless he knows nothing about the real factors of the authoritarian state in Cuba, one could not understand how Marco Rubio could approve these policies and be a spokesperson for them.”

Eduardo Gamarra, professor of politics and international relations at Florida International University, said that Rubio on the face comes from political pragmatism and the realism of foreign policy.

Rubio is unlikely to stand in elections unless he presents himself to the presidency, so he turned his allegiance to Trump. He was appointed to “serve only one person – the president who put aside multilateralism and logic of American pluralism,” said Gamarra.

And the “realistic” school of thought thinks that the national interests of a country are more important than its ideological foundations, he said. The approach allows the United States to “expel people to a country known for cruel and inhuman treatment,” said Gamarra. “So, Fidel’s torture is bad, but if Bukele does, that’s good.”

This is why Rubio and Bukele can now share a laugh. The joke is on anyone who does not understand.

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Mary Ellen Klas is a political and political columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. Former capital of capital of Miami Herald, she covered politics and the government for more than three decades.

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