(Bloomberg Opinion) — El Salvador President Nayib Bukele may have found the best description for Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s new approach to dictatorial regimes: a laughing emoji.
After a federal district judge ordered the administration to stop a US flight deporting Venezuelans to his country, Bukele wrote on X, after the flight departed: “Oopsie…Too late.’’ He added the symbol known as “face with tears of joy.”
For many who have watched Rubio’s career, it was wildly incongruous to see him snubbing a US court over immigrants expelled to a brutal prison in a country ruled by an authoritarian.
Rubio, a lawyer, built his political career talking about being “the son of immigrants and exiles” and condemning the human rights abuses in countries such as Cuba, which his parents left during the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.
But now, as one of Trump’s top lieutenants, Rubio is not only willing to partner with the aggressive and duplicitous Bukele, he has thrown his full support behind an inhumane purge of immigrants from the US without due process.
That’s quite a shift from the Marco Rubio of 2008, when he was serving as Florida’s House speaker — the first Cuban American to hold that job. Back then, the anti-immigration fervor of the Tea Party was just starting to emerge.
Florida lawmakers from both parties had proposed dozens of bills — ranging from a Democratic lawmaker’s plan to require police to report suspected undocumented immigrants to Republican plans to prohibit government benefits for undocumented adults. But that version of Rubio was much more sensitive to the political repercussions of an immigration crackdown. He refused to give any of the bills a hearing and told legislators he didn’t want to appear “anti-immigrant.”
Four years later, Rubio spoke fondly of his upbringing by immigrant parents as he addressed the Republican National Convention. He extolled the virtues of “American exceptionalism” and the promise of a country “founded on the principle that every person has God-given rights.”
It’s hard to imagine Rubio giving that speech today, especially after a Venezuelan man convicted of killing Georgia nursing student Laken Riley was afforded more due process than the Cuban business owner with no criminal history who was snatched from his driveway by ICE agents in Miami two weeks ago. (The man’s wife said the man had spent years renewing work permits and trying to navigate the labyrinth of bureaucracy to obtain citizenship.)
The deportation tactics of today are also far from the future Rubio imagined in 2013 when, as one of the bi-partisan group of senators known as the “Gang of Eight,” he proposed an immigration reform plan that provided a path to citizenship for 11 million immigrants but was never passed. It was “in our national interest” to bring people “out of the shadows,” Rubio said at the time. “This is who we are. We are the most compassionate nation on earth.”
Three years ago, Rubio was still on the side of compassion and law. He criticized Bukele, who had declared a state of emergency because of widespread gang violence and then used the military to arrest thousands of people without due process. Rubio called it “a really troubling situation” and noted Bukele “very openly criticizes and mocks the US and other Western institutions.”
But Rubio is doing the mocking now. “Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa,” he boasted recently, after cancelling hundreds of visas.
He has ordered his staff to scour the social media accounts of visa applicants and deport anyone guilty of creating a “ruckus.”
It’s true that the State Department has broad authority to revoke a visa from someone they consider a threat. But according to law, it must be for very specific foreign policy reasons.
Many of the foreign students caught up in Rubio’s sweep have been accused of no crime and appear to have been targeted because the administration finds their pro-Palestinian speech objectionable. Some have been imprisoned or denied due process. Some are permanent residents or married to US citizens.
Dario Moreno, a professor of political science at Florida International University in Miami who co-taught many classes with Rubio at the school, said he doesn’t know how Rubio is squaring the contradictions in his positions today with those of the past, but he thinks there is political risk to some of the administration’s immigration policies.
“I don’t think Cuban Americans, or Latinos in South Florida, probably agree with the roundup,” he told me.
“Putting away privileged students at Ivy League universities or people who look like gang members, that doesn’t bother people,” he said. What does upset them is the recent Trump order requiring a half-million people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to leave the US by the end of the month, even though they were given work permits in the US under a Biden-era humanitarian parole program.
Scholars also tell me they see dangerous parallels between the Castro and Trump administration’s policies. They seemed surprised Rubio doesn’t see them, too.
“[Castro’s] discourse was essentially the same as Trump’s, which is, if you don’t agree, get out of this country, and if you’re not the right kind of Cuban then you don’t belong here,” said Lillian Guerra, a professor of Cuban and Caribbean history at the University of Florida. “Unless he knows nothing about the actual factors of the authoritarian state in Cuba, one could not understand how Marco Rubio could be endorsing these policies and be a spokesman for them.”
Eduardo Gamarra, professor of politics and international relations at Florida International University, said Rubio’s about-face stems from political pragmatism and foreign policy realism.
Rubio is unlikely to run for elected office again unless he runs for president, so he has turned his allegiance to Trump. He was appointed to “serve only one person — the president who has cast aside multilateralism and any logic of American pluralism,” Gamarra explained.
And the “realist” school of thought believes a country’s national interests are more important than its ideological underpinnings, he said. The approach allows the US to “expel people to a country that is known for cruel and inhumane treatment,” Gamarra told me. “So Fidel’s torturing is bad, but if Bukele is doing it, it’s good.”
That’s why Rubio and Bukele can now share a laugh. The joke’s on anyone who doesn’t get it.
More From Bloomberg Opinion:
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Mary Ellen Klas is a politics and policy columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former capital bureau chief for the Miami Herald, she has covered politics and government for more than three decades.
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com/opinion