Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday defended the Trump administration’s agenda of deporting undocumented immigrants but said that “of course” all people in the U.S. are entitled to due process.
“Yes, of course,” Rubio told NBC News’ “Meet the Press” when asked whether citizens and noncitizens in the U.S. are entitled to due process.
His comments come as the Trump administration has pressed the courts to allow the immediate deportations of immigrants it accuses of being members of the Tren de Aragua gang under the Alien Enemies Act without giving them a chance to plead their case before a judge.
Last week, the Supreme Court asked the administration to pause deportations of some Venezuelan men based in Texas who the Trump administration said were members of Tren de Aragua, with attorneys for the immigrants asking for them not to be deported “before the American judicial system can afford them due process.”
That decision came after the Supreme Court in early April allowed the Trump administration to move forward with some deportations under the AEA as long as detainees “receive notice after the date of this order that they are subject to removal under the Act.”
“The notice must be afforded within a reasonable time and in such a manner as will allow them to actually seek habeas relief in the proper venue before such removal occurs,” the Supreme Court justices added.
On Sunday, the secretary of state defended the Trump administration’s deportation efforts, which have included deporting three children who are U.S. citizens — ages 2, 4 and 7 — alongside their mothers, according to The Washington Post.
“Their mothers, who were illegally in this country, were deported. The children went with their mothers,” Rubio told moderator Kristen Welker.
“If those children are U.S. citizens, they can come back into the United States if there’s their father or someone here who wants to assume them. But ultimately, who was deported was their mother, their mothers who were here illegally. The children just went with their mothers,” the secretary of state added.
Rubio called the story “misleading,” saying that “you guys make it sound like ICE agents kicked down the door and grabbed the 2-year-old and threw him on an airplane.”
According to the Washington Post, attorneys for the deported mothers were not given an opportunity to contact their lawyers or their families while in custody in the U.S.
In a December interview with “Meet the Press,” then-President-elect Donald Trump previewed his approach to deportations involving mixed-status families, or those where some family members are in the U.S. legally and others aren’t.
“I don’t want to be breaking up families, so the only way you don’t break up the family is you keep them together and you have to send them all back,” Trump told Welker at the time.
Rubio also defended the Trump administration’s broader approach to deporting undocumented immigrants, calling the strategy a departure from decadeslong norms in the U.S. that allowed undocumented migrants to remain in the country while pursuing asylum claims.
“Once you come into our country illegally, it triggers all kinds of rights that can keep you here indefinitely. That’s why we were being flooded at the border, and we’ve ended that,” Rubio said.
He also spoke about the ongoing negotiations to reach a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine, just one day after Trump met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on the sidelines of Pope Francis’ funeral in Rome.
Rubio said the deal was “closer in general than they’ve been any time in the last three years, but it’s still not there.”
Speaking about the state of negotiations, the secretary of state told Welker, “There are reasons to be optimistic and there are also reasons to be concerned.”
“If this was an easy war to end, it would have been ended by someone else a long time ago,” Rubio added.
