Secretary of State Marco Rubio clashed with CBS’s Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan on Sunday, firing back at a question about a Columbia University student’s visa revocation. The spat saw Rubio fiercely defend the Trump administration’s visa crackdown, spotlighting recent arrests tied to campus protests as he told Brennan she should “watch the news.”
Brennan zeroed in on whether Mahmoud Khalil’s visa revocation—part of a wave hitting pro-Hamas activists—hinged on “material support for terrorism” or mere “controversial views.”
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Rubio bristled, “They take over – I mean, do you not – I mean, you should watch the news. These guys take over entire buildings. They vandalize colleges; they shut down colleges.”
“We covered it intensely,” Brennan said.
He pegged the student as a protest ‘spokesperson’ who hid his intent to sow chaos, justifying the boot.
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Brennan, however, continued pressing Rubio, asking if there was “any evidence of a link to terrorism” or if it was simply “his point of view” that officials disagreed with.
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“Well, this specific individual was the spokesperson, was the negotiator – negotiating on behalf of people that took over a campus, that vandalized buildings. Negotiating over what?” blasted Rubio. “That’s a crime in and of itself that they’re involved in being the negotiator or the spokesperson, this, that, the other. We don’t want – we don’t need these people in our country. We never should have allowed them in in the first place.”
“If he had told us, I’m going over there and I’m going over there to become the spokesperson and one of the leaders of a movement that’s going to turn one of your allegedly elite colleges upside down, people can’t even go to school, the library – buildings being vandalized, we never would have let him in. We never would have let him in to begin with,” said Rubio. “And now that he’s doing it and he’s here, he’s going to leave and so are others, and we’re going to keep doing it.”
The exchange dovetailed with fresh DHS action.
On Friday, officials nabbed Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian overstaying her visa—canned in 2022 for “lack of attendance”—after her April 2024 Columbia protest arrest. Ranjani Srinivasan, an Indian doctoral student, saw her visa yanked on March 5 for “advocating violence and terrorism” and self-deported Tuesday.
Both follow Mahmoud Khalil’s March 8 arrest, a protest figure now fighting deportation from a Louisiana cell, where his lawyers claim he was “kidnapped” by unnamed agents—a saga landing in Manhattan federal court Thursday.
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