Little Marco. Remember when Donald Trump used to call Marco Rubio that? Trump was obviously referring to Rubio’s short stature and, knowing Trump, also insinuating that Rubio has a small penis.
And now former Florida congressman Rubio is the U.S. Secretary of State. And he is sanctioning things like letting ICE snatch people off the street, loading them into planes and sending them to concentration camps based solely on the assumption that they’re gang members. No due process needed.
This includes a 23-year-old named Andrys who “has vanished into a Salvadoran mega-prison,” according to The Advocate. His lawyer, Lindsay Toczylowski, appeared on “The Rachel Maddow Show” saying that “the Trump administration forcibly removed her client from the United States without a court hearing or deportation order.”
“We feel it’s important to let the world know who Andrys, our client, is because he is a human being,” Toczylowski told Maddow. “He is a young professional from Venezuela. He’s a makeup artist. He is a gay man.”
He also has tattoos, which immigration officers decided were gang-related (his lawyer said they are not). And on that basis alone, he’s locked up in El Salvador at the Terrorism Confinement Center which The Advocate describes as “a sprawling, 40,000-capacity mega-prison used to detain suspected gang members” that has been condemned by human rights groups for “extreme overcrowding, systemic abuse, denial of medical care and a communications blackout.’
“Our client’s life is at risk. We’re concerned for his safety. And the fact that he was forcibly taken from the United States with no due process — it’s just — it’s something that really shocks the conscience in a way that we haven’t seen since family separation happened in 2018,” Toczylowski told Maddow. Andrys is not allowed contact with his lawyer.
Andrys came to the U.S. seeking asylum, which is not a crime. What the Trump administration is doing to people like Andrys is, in fact, a crime.
Not that they care. A judge already told them they can’t do what they’re doing and the administration basically told the judge to pound sand.
A little civics refresher: The United States has three branches of government: legislative, judicial and executive. The idea is that these three branches serve to check and balance each other so that no one branch becomes a lawless vortex that answers to no one.
The legislative branch, the U.S. House and Senate, is currently fully controlled by Republicans. They aren’t going to do shit to reign in Trump’s abuse of power. The judicial branch can try to stop Trump if he follows court orders. But he isn’t following court orders. This situation, where the checks and balances propping up our democracy are failing, is called a “constitutional crisis.”
And in the middle of it all is Rubio, spineless and small. Then again, to call him spineless is to assume that he wants to stand up to Trump. In reality, he’s right at home in this fascist regime.
In his role as Secretary of State, Rubio has been going out of his way to be harmful to the LGBTQ+ community around the world.
“Early into the new [Trump] administration, Secretary of State Marco Rubio suspended all passport applications requesting changes to gender marker, something that endangers trans, nonbinary and intersex passport holders whose gender presentation may differ from the gender they were assigned at birth,” reports LGBTQ Nation. “Eighty-two House Democrats recently signed a letter demanding that the administration undo this policy change.”
Before you get too grateful to the Democrats, you should know that there are 213 Democrats in the U.S. House. So more than half of them are apparently fine with this anti-trans passport bullshit.
“Rubio also ended all foreign aid for international HIV prevention programs, endangering the lives of millions,” LGBTQ Nation continues. “Rubio has also signaled his intention to permanently ban any foreign trans athletes from entering the United States.”
But wait, that’s not all! The State Department, which Rubio heads, is hard at work editing and erasing parts of the annual human rights report, which was drafted by the Biden administration, in order to make it less “woke.”
“The LGBTQ+ portion [of the report] would traditionally have included sections on violence and harassment, the availability of legal gender recognition and freedom of expression. The whole section has been cut,” reports Politico. “Smaller sections detailing discrimination against indigenous people, people with disabilities, and corruption in government also are being cut out.”
In the Trump administration, you can’t call something a human rights abuse if it is done against someone you don’t consider human. And Trump has clearly decided that his executive powers extend to deciding who gets to have rights and who doesn’t. Chances are very good that you and the people you care about fall into the latter category.