Bari Weiss Let Marco Rubio Off The Hook

This is an extremely serious situation calling for hard-nosed journalism, not friendly deference

Last week Bari Weiss interviewed Secretary of State Marco Rubio and whiffed on a rare opportunity to press him on some exceptionally dark decisions he has made or willingly gone along with — decisions that run directly contrary to what The Free Press itself stands for.

I’ll try not to succumb to unnecessary throat-clearing here. I like The Free Press, am glad it exists, have written for it and would gladly do so again, et cetera. Bari and the others I know at the publication are all kind, warm people, without exception.

But intellectual and journalistic communities where friends aren’t allowed to criticize friends quickly rot from the inside. If anyone else had published this interview, I would have criticized it, and I don’t like the idea of declining to do so just because I like Bari. I don’t think Bari, who values constructive disagreement and has made public debates one pillar of The Free Press model, would want to be let off the hook by a critic just because that critic knew and liked her. (For what it’s worth I emailed Bari on Friday to let her know this piece was coming, just as a courtesy.)

I’m not going to go through the interview line by line and criticize every bit that bothered me. Rather, I want to focus on this exchange, via a transcript of the interview posted on the State Department’s website:

Weiss: One of the things the President and you have done in the past 90-something days — it feels like it’s been a lot longer than that — (laughter) — has been to successfully — I cannot even imagine how long it’s felt for you — has been to successfully close the southern border. And yet, that story has been just totally overtaken with the story of some of these individual deportations that have captured the national conversation and that many people, even people that voted for Trump, are opposed to.

And so I want to just ask you a bigger question, which is: What message is the President trying to send with these deportations? There’s — is it about deterring people from coming? Or is it about terrifying people that have been here for years, that have paid taxes for many, many years, and might even have American children? Should they be scared of deportation? Like what is the message that the President and the State Department is trying to send?

Rubio: Well, so two things. The State Department isn’t involved necessarily in the issue of migratory enforcement. We’re involved in making sure that foreign countries take back the citizens that are in our country illegally of their countries. So I would say two things.

Number one, mass migration is almost entirely based on an incentive system. People were coming to this country under Joe Biden because they knew if they got to the border and claimed asylum, said these magic words, they would be allowed to come in and they would be allowed to stay — almost 90 percent success rate if you said the magic words, so people were coming.

Now they know that if they come they won’t get to stay, and they’ve stopped coming, which is why it’s the most secure border we’ve had in modern history. And in fact, we’ve seen a new phenomenon, which is people that were on their way here sort of do a U-turn and go back. We’ve seen that play out. And that’s an enormous achievement, because it stops the problem.

That still leaves us with a fundamental challenge, and that is that we have in this country millions of people — some who have been here many years, some who have been here for a year and a half or two — who are unlawfully in the United States. And it’s this simple: If you say the speed zone is 70 miles an hour, but people know they’re not going to get a ticket unless they go 90 miles an hour, no one’s going to drive under the speed limit. You have to have laws, and laws have to be enforced. If you don’t enforce your laws, then your laws become meaningless. And that’s what’s happened in this country over the last 20 years. We were not enforcing our immigration laws, and now we are.

Obviously, they’re going to prioritize the most dangerous people, dangerous criminals. If you look at the manifest of these flights of people that are being deported, these are some of the most vile human beings imaginable that we’re getting out of our country — sex offenders, rapists, killers. That’s who we’re prioritizing being sent out.

But let there be no doubt we have immigration laws, and if you are in violation of those immigration laws, you have no right to be in the country. Now, some will choose to leave voluntarily; others may get caught up and be forced to leave. But we are — they are prioritizing the most dangerous.

But that said, you have to have — there’s no point in having immigration laws if you have no intent to enforce them.

Weiss: Okay, let’s talk about Iran. [Pivots to Iran.]

Rubio’s claim that “The State Department isn’t involved necessarily in the issue of migratory enforcement” is wildly disingenuous. Of course it is true that the State Department is not the agency responsible for everyday deportation proceedings. But the entire source of the controversy over the Trump administration’s deportations is that they are anything but everyday.

In fact, Rubio, whether he likes it or not, sits at the center of each of the two most controversial categories of deportations or attempted deportations.

First, the administration has skirted normal removal proceedings while deporting hundreds of undocumented immigrants to the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT), a notorious prison in El Salvador. Then, when it was asked to get one of them back, the administration said it had no jurisdiction over prisoners in a Salvadoran facility.

The administration justified this through an unusual legal claim. Via an executive order, Trump invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, which allows the president to detain or deport those who were born in or who are citizens of enemy nations during wartime. It has been invoked only during major conflicts in the past, and was most infamously used to set up internment camps for Japanese Americans. Trump’s EO claims that Tren de Aragua, a transnational criminal cartel, has effectively mounted an invasion of the U.S. To wit: “TdA is perpetrating, attempting, and threatening an invasion or predatory incursion against the territory of the United States. TdA is undertaking hostile actions and conducting irregular warfare against the territory of the United States both directly and at the direction, clandestine or otherwise, of the [Nicolás] Maduro regime in Venezuela.”

The argument that this claim — we are being invaded by a Venezuelan gang working with Maduro’s authoritarian government — doesn’t involve Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, is ludicrous. He’s the secretary of state! Surely he is privy to all the details of Maduro’s supposed attempt to invade the U.S. with TdA members. Especially given how light the EO is on details, Bari could have easily asked him to explain more about all this: how the administration discovered that we were effectively at war with Venezuela, what sorts of negotiations, if any, took place prior to the administration taking this radical action, and so on. I doubt Rubio would have been able to answer these questions in a credible manner, but to not even try to get him on the record about them is a journalistic blunder.

The same logic applies even more intensely to the students the Trump administration is attempting to deport for their supposed terrorist sympathies, most famously Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk (whose case I wrote about here), graduate students at Columbia and Tufts, respectively. All the available evidence suggests that in both instances, the administration is simply attempting to deport them for their pro-Palestinian and/or anti-Israel speech.

Here the administration is relying on provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which grants the secretary of state the power to deport individuals whose continued presence in the U.S. is deemed to pose a significant threat to U.S. interests abroad. As NBC News explained, in the context of Khalil’s case:

Secretary of State Marco Rubio responded Wednesday evening in a memo obtained by NBC News. In a one-and-a-half-page memo, he cited an obscure provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 to justify Khalil’s removal from the U.S.

Rubio said that while Khalil’s “past, current or expected beliefs, statements, or associations that are otherwise lawful,” the provision allows the secretary of state alone to “personally determine” whether he should remain in the country.

He said that allowing Khalil to stay in the U.S. would create a “hostile environment for Jewish students in the United States.”

“The foreign policy of the United States champions core American interests and American citizens and condoning anti-Semitic conduct and disruptive protests in the United States would severely undermine that significant foreign policy objective,” he wrote.

Marco Rubio is quite involved in these deportations. This couldn’t have been a sweeter spot for Bari: It’s a controversy involving free speech, due process, and anti-Semitism, a veritable Free Press buffet of subjects. But she just let Rubio distance himself from these deportations without any pushback. That isn’t a properly journalistic way to interview an exceptionally powerful man making exceptionally consequential decisions about the lives of faraway people who have no say in the matter.

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In some cases, The Free Press is extremely concerned with due process. The publication’s interest in this subject includes both formal instances (laws, regulations, and rules) and information instances (how journalism and other communities treat people accused of wrongdoing).

Back in 2021, for example, I appeared on an episode of Bari’s podcast, Honestly, in which we dove deep into the Kyle Rittenhouse case. Without rehashing the details (which are here if you are unfamiliar with the case), this was a disgraceful moment for mainstream journalists and pundits. Despite the fact that, based on the available video, Rittenhouse obviously had a self-defense case and had not initiated conflict with any of the three people he shot (two fatally), what ensued was a genuinely deranged pile on in which Rittenhouse was painted as a white supremacist murderer by a large number of liberal journalists and commentators (not to mention the occasional member of Congress).