Now hostile to immigrants, this Marco Rubio is unrecognizable – The Mercury News

The president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, may have found the best description for the new approach of the Secretary of State for Marco Rubio for dictatorial regimes: a smiling emoji.

After a Federal District Judge ordered the Administration to stop a flight from the United States, deporting Venezuelans to their country, Bukele wrote in X, after the flight left: “Oopsie … too late.

Rubio published again.

For many of those who have seen Rubio’s career, it was very incongruous to see him a American court on immigrants expelled to a brutal prison in a country governed by an authoritarian.

Rubio, a lawyer, builds his political career talking about being “son of immigrants and exiles” and condemning human rights abuses in countries like Cuba, that parents last the dictatorship or Fulgencio Batista.

But now, as one of Trump’s main lieutenants, Rubio is not only willing to partner with the aggressive and duplication Bekele, but has supported his full support behind an inhuman purge of immigrants from the United States without due process.

A dramatic change

That is a great change of the 2008 blond frame, when he served as a speaker of the Florida house, the first American Cuban to maintain that job. At that time, the anti -immigration fervor of the tea party just began to emerge.

The Florida legislators of both parties had proposed boxes of bills, ranging from the plan of a Democratic legislator to demand the police to inform undocumented immigrants to republican plans for prospects benefits of the government for undocumented adults. But that version of Rubio was much more sensitive to the political repercussions of an immigration repression. He refused to give an audience to any of the bills and tolerate legislators who did not want to seem “anti -immigrant.”

Four years later, Rubio spoke with love of his education by immigrant parents when he went to the Republican National Convention. Hello, they exalted the virtues of “American exceptionalism” and the promise of a country “founded in the principle that each person has rights given by God.”

It is difficult to imagine that Rubio gave that speech today, especially after a Venezuelan man condemned for killing the Nursing student of Georgia, Laken Riley, received more process because the owner of Cuban businesses without a boomial of the crival who was inactivated inactive to the unattended inatized disabled installation. Inatched Inattched. Two weeks ago. (The man of the man said that the man had spent years renewing work permits and trying to navigate the bureaucracy maze to obtain citizenship).

Today’s deportation tactics are also far from the future that Rubio imagined in 2013, as one of the bipartisan groups of senators known as the “eight gang”, proposed an immigration plan that causes a path to citizens. It was “in our national interest” getting people out of the shadows, “Rubio said at that time. “This is what we are. We are the most compassionate nation of the earth.”

Three years ago, Rubio was still on the side of compassion and law. The criticized Bekele, who had declared an emergency state due to wide violence of gangs and then used the military to judge thousands of people without due process. Rubio called him “a really worrying situation” and pointed out that Bukele “criticizes and mocks the United States and other Western institutions.”

But Rubio is making fun of now. “Every time I find one of these crazy people, I take off the visa,” he recently boasted, after canceling hundreds of visas.

He has ordered his staff to make the social media accounts of visa and sport applicants to anyone guilty of creating a “uproar.”

It is true that the State Department has a wide authority to revoke a visa of someone who considers a threat. But in accordance with the law, it must be for very specific foreign policy reasons.

Many of the foreign students trapped in the sweeping of Rubios have not been accused of any crime and seem to have been attacked because the administration considers that their pro-palestinian speech is objectable. Some have imprisoned or denied due process. Some are permanent or married residents with American citizens.

Political risk

Dario Moreno, professor of Political Science at Florida International University in Miami, who co-worked many classes with Rubio at school, said it can’t not do not.

“I don’t think US Cubans, or Latinos in southern Florida, probably agree with the summary,” he told me.

“Save privileged students in universities of the Ivy League or people who look like gang members, that does not bother people,” he said. What makes them upset is the recent request of the Trump order, half a million people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to leave the United States at the end of the month, they were even given work permits in the United States under a human of the era of the era.

Academics also tell me that they see dangerous parallels between the policies of the Castro and Trump administration. They seemed surprised that Rubio does not see them too.

“The speech (from Castro) was essentially the same as Trump’s, which is, if he does not agree, leave this country, and if you are not Cuban’s right son, then you do not belong here,” said Lillian Guerra, a professor of Cuban. “Unless I don’t know anything about the real factors of the authoritarian state in Cuba, one could not understand how Marco Rubio could be supporting these policies and being a spokesman.”