Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla, shifted gears from his previous stance on former President Trump’s deportation plans, which he had panned as “not a workable plan.”
“Yes,” Rubio said during an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday, where he was asked whether he supports Trump’s plan to use the military to deport illegal immigrants from the country. “We cannot absorb 25, 30 million people who entered this country illegally. They’re here illegally, what country on earth could tolerate that?”
The comments were seemingly in stark contrast to Rubio’s previous stance on the issue, most notably as a primary rival of Trump’s in 2015. Then, Rubio was critical of the Trump plan to round up and deport the millions of illegal immigrants living in the United States.
Sen. Marco Rubio joins other members of Congress for a news conference. (Paul Morigi/Getty Images)
“We have 12 or 13 million human beings who have been here for a long time. There’s not really a realistic way of rounding up and deporting 12 or 13 million people and our nation wouldn’t want to do that anyway. It does need to be addressed and it does need to be addressed in a series of manners; we’re not going to be able to do it in one big piece of legislation – we learned that two years ago, the last time we tried,” Rubio said while campaigning in Iowa in 2015, according to a report from Politico.
Trump has vowed to implement a plan of mass deportation if he wins November’s election, promising last month to use the National Guard if needed to deport illegal immigrants from the country.
Rubio acknowledged that there were millions more people in the country today compared to when he gave the NBC interview, but argued that the dangers of the U.S. being unable to properly vet the flow of incoming migrants justified “dramatic” action.
Sen. Marco Rubio (Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
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“We’re going to have to do something dramatic to remove people from this country that are here illegally, especially people we know nothing about,” Rubio said.
Asked why his stance has changed since campaigning against Trump nearly a decade ago, Rubio argued that the situation itself has changed since then.
“When I said that back in 2013 when I was involved in immigration reform, we had 11, 12 million people that had been here for longer than a decade, now we’ve had almost that number in the last three years alone,” Rubio said, noting that he believes some of those who have entered the country more recently could include “terrorists.”
A group of migrants attempts to enter the U.S. by rushing the border, March 21, 2024, knocking down Texas National Guardsmen before they were stopped. (James Breeden for New York Post/Mega)
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“This is not immigration, this is mass migration,” Rubio said. “This is an invasion of the country.”
Rubio’s office did not immediately respond to a Fox News Digital request for comment.
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