Joe Rogan is once again railing against the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration tactics, blasting Donald Trump for his “crazy” crackdown on international students on college campuses.
The podcast host’s latest public condemnation of the president came on Tuesday’s episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience” during a conversation with comedian Mike Vecchione. While discussing what he referred to as the administration’s “overcorrection” on immigration, Rogan said that a “bunch of people that are totally innocent” are being caught up in Trump’s mass deportation efforts, including foreign students.
“They’re kicking students out that like write articles they don’t like,” Rogan said. “F—— crazy. Isn’t a university supposed to be a place where someone’s allowed to express themselves and have opinions?”
Although Rogan didn’t mention a specific case, he was likely referring to Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish doctoral student at Tufts University who was detained by immigration officials for six weeks after co-authoring an essay in her student newspaper criticizing the university’s response to Israel’s war in Gaza.
“They’re writing something down, and they’re not calling for violence either,” Rogan said. “And they’re getting challenged. That’s supposed to be how it happens. You get challenged, [and then] smarter people have better arguments or your argument stands.”
Vecchione agreed with Rogan, adding that college is “supposed to be a place for discourse.” Rogan continued: “Deporting people because you don’t like who they’re criticizing? Like, that gets kind of shifty.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has argued the U.S. has the right to deport students for their speech under the decades-old Immigration and Nationality Act.
One section of the 1952 law states that the U.S. government can deport an immigrant “whose presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”
In recent months, Rogan, who threw his support behind Trump just before the November election, has become a vocal critic of the president on some policy matters, most notably on immigration. Earlier this month, Rogan called the large-scale immigration raids targeting farm and construction workers “insane.”
