Marco Rubio Makes Office Of "Remigration" A Reality In Agency Restructuring

Secretary of State Marco Rubio published his 136 page proposal for his budget for next year to Congress and part of that is a massive restructuring. But one of the things that has kind of captured the headlines is this office of remigration where they're going to help DHS and ICE with their deportations. He's taken an office whose focus was helping people settle into the United States and their job is now going to be to rip people from this country and either send them back home or to third countries.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Secretary of State, Marco Rubio in the news again. He published his 136 page proposal for his budget for next year to Congress and part of that is a massive, massive restructuring. There's 18% reduction in force across the secretary's staff. Most everything in the column shows less money. It's really a continuing assault on the soft power of the United States.

It really is. Republicans in this administration love to tell us that we got to shrink the government. We have to get rid of all these people. They're useless, they're redundant. We don't need them. Let's make it smaller. But what we've seen so far through everything that has happened is that when you get rid of these qualified people, you're left with a government that doesn't function. And the Secretary of State's office is one that has not necessarily seen the sweeping cuts that some of the other departments have yet. And Rubio says, well, guess what? They're coming. I'm redoing this. I'm remaking these agencies. I'm taking these five departments and I'm squishing it into one with half the staff. There's no rhyme or reason to it. It's restructuring for the sake of restructuring, not actually fixing any problems, not actually undoing any redundancies in employment or tasks. It's being done because this is what Rubio thinks Trump wants me to do this, Elon Musk wants me to do this, so this is what I'm doing. He doesn't have an original thought in his head. So I don't want to give him any credit for cooking this up. No, other people said, this is what you do and he said, well, here you go. So that's what I think he did.

And some of these cuts are very concerning, particularly the department that was re-immigrating folks that helped us during the Afghani war, interpreters, people who worked with the US military, they've done away with that function. A lot of veterans groups, obviously very upset for these people who risked their lives to help us during the war. But one of the more interesting cuts, I believe, too, was the Office of Global Women’s Issues and the State Department's diversity and inclusion efforts would be eliminated. And according to the letter, the women's issues office is being eliminated to ensure that promoting women's rights and empowerment is a priority across the full scope of the department's diplomatic engagement. This is particularly rich given this administration's, let's call it, complicated history with women, sexual assault allegations, rape allegations on many, many nominees, and people who currently hold office.

Right. And domestic violence, harassment, all kinds of things from members of Donald Trump's cabinet and allegations against Trump himself, of course, and again, none of that's been charged or sued for, for the most part. But one of the things that has kind of captured the headlines is this office of remigration. And what this is, is you have these departments in the State Department whose job it was basically to help, as you said, resettle refugees, work on people coming into the United States. We help the immigrants. We're gonna get you settled, we're gonna get you situated. And instead they've actually flipped it. So now this is the office of remigration, which is, oh, hey, you want to come to the United States? No, we're gonna get you out of here as quickly as possible. We're gonna help DHS and ICE with their deportations.

So we have taken an office whose focus was helping people settle into the United States.