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Jeff Merkley Tells Marco Rubio His Actions Led To 'The Death Of 100s Of 1000s Of Children'—Then Rubio Responds
Forbes Breaking News
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5/27/2025
At Wednesday's Senate Appropriations Committee hearing, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) questioned Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
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00:00
Senator Merkley.
00:03
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
00:06
Second chance to ask some questions of you today.
00:08
Thank you for testifying to multiple committees.
00:11
Back in March, you noted that you had revoked some 300 student visas
00:16
using the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act,
00:20
which specifically says the Secretary of State can revoke a visa
00:23
if an alien's activity in the U.S. would have a serious adverse foreign policy consequence.
00:31
And that issue of 300, what's the number up to now?
00:36
How many visas have you revoked?
00:37
I don't know the latest count, but we probably have more to do.
00:41
Can you give us an estimate?
00:42
Probably in the thousands at this point, depending.
00:45
Not all of them are under that statute.
00:47
Some are people.
00:48
So there's two visa revocations.
00:49
I don't want to go into SEVIS.
00:50
It's a separate issue.
00:51
No, no, no.
00:52
They're related, but we can't conflate them because they're two different.
00:54
One is the one you've just cited, National Interest of the United States.
00:57
Some of the visa revocations are happening.
01:00
Because somebody violated the terms of their visa.
01:02
They dropped out of school or they got convicted of a crime or some criminal investigation.
01:05
Those are separate from what you've said.
01:07
So 300 in March, but now 1,000.
01:10
How many under this 1952 Act?
01:12
I'd have to get you a good answer, but probably under 1,000.
01:15
But I'd have to get you the right answer.
01:16
I don't want to speculate about the exact number.
01:19
And I'll tell you, this particular thing does bother me.
01:24
And you testified in Louisiana Immigration Court a pretty expansive interpretation of that 52 law,
01:31
saying that it could be for citizens.
01:33
It extends to any non-citizen for past, current, or expected beliefs, statements, or association.
01:41
And that expected really caught my mind.
01:43
This power rests solely.
01:45
This 1950 law rests solely with you.
01:48
And your interpretation sounds like you're saying if you, the Secretary of State,
01:53
think you expect someone's beliefs or statements, past, current, or future,
01:58
then you can toss their visa.
02:02
The visa's not a right.
02:03
It's a privilege.
02:05
All right.
02:05
So I will just say, and then I'm going to go on to another topic.
02:08
I profoundly disagree.
02:10
The Fifth Amendment is very powerful in protecting citizens and non-citizens like with due process.
02:16
I know this will be adjudicated in court,
02:18
but the idea that one individual could, on their opinion of someone's future activity or expected activity,
02:24
that one individual being our Secretary of State, can toss somebody's visa,
02:29
seems to me an extraordinary violation of due process.
02:34
I want to ask you to defend it now.
02:36
I'm happy to put it in writing for you to give us a follow-up and explain it better.
02:41
But I do think it's a fundamental attack on freedom,
02:46
because due process is the guardian of the gate to keep a government from taking away people's life or liberty.
02:53
And liberty is what happens when you take away a visa without due process.
02:58
I want to turn to the issue my colleagues have mentioned,
03:02
and that is there is a legal way to restructure the Secretary of State's department and USAID specifically.
03:10
But what we saw on February 3rd was Elon Musk say,
03:14
over the weekend, I tossed USAID into the wood chipper.
03:18
That's a pretty profound weekend.
03:20
It didn't involve consultation with Congress over the consequences.
03:25
There was no rewriting of the law.
03:28
There was no discussion of what funds could be delayed, frozen, redirected.
03:33
And the result is different groups have estimated how many people have died to date
03:39
and will die over the course of a year or a prolonged period as a result of the destruction
03:45
of the weekend of February 1st and 2nd.
03:49
Did Elon Musk have your support in putting USAID into the wood chipper?
03:56
Well, I don't think that's an ex-post, or I guess you're imagining a social media post,
04:01
is not a government act.
04:02
Not at all.
04:03
That's a quote.
04:04
That's what he said.
04:04
Yeah, that's okay.
04:05
That's what he said.
04:05
But ultimately, what happened as acting director is all these decisions have to come to me.
04:09
Does actions have your full support?
04:11
The ones that I signed off on, yes, which is the ones that happened.
04:13
Of what Elon Musk did with USAID?
04:15
No, no.
04:16
But understand, these are contracts.
04:17
All these contracts.
04:18
Did he do it without or with your support?
04:19
That's what I'm trying to understand.
04:21
Well, not with my support, it was my actions.
04:24
His Doge team did a lot of cancellations very, very quickly,
04:28
and it fired a lot of people.
04:29
It just wasn't clear to me whether that had your support or not.
04:32
No, no, the Doge team didn't do anything.
04:34
I did it.
04:35
I was the one that made the decisions.
04:36
I went through contracts, literally spreadsheets, line by line.
04:39
I remember being in a hotel, I believe, in Guatemala,
04:41
going through line by line on spreadsheets of contracts that were canceled,
04:45
contracts that were approved, contracts that were amended.
04:49
These are all contracts.
04:50
So, in that case, I'll put the responsibility with you since you're taking credit for it
04:55
rather than with Elon Musk.
04:57
But the Boston School of Public Health has a kind of a website where they post their estimated deaths
05:07
as a result of the actions that were taken to dismantle USAID.
05:12
And they're updating it continuously.
05:14
So, if you go to it, the numbers keep changing.
05:16
They have a one-year estimate, but they also have what they estimate has happened to today.
05:21
And as of today, they estimate that the actions taken in putting USAID in the wood chipper,
05:27
child malnutrition, 53,500 more deaths.
05:31
And I'm rounding off because the numbers are continuously changing.
05:33
Child diarrhea, 45,400 more deaths.
05:36
Child pneumonia, 59,200 more deaths.
05:39
Malaria, 25,100 more deaths.
05:43
So, what happened that weekend has resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands of children.
05:49
And the estimate for the end of this year is much, much higher.
05:53
This happened because the law was not followed for consultation with Congress,
05:58
analysis, bringing in experts, holding hearings.
06:01
How do you kind of accept what you just put forward,
06:06
that it was your action to cancel these contracts,
06:09
that your contracts in this fashion, freezing fund,
06:12
firing individuals, has resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands of children?
06:16
That's false. That's fake.
06:18
That's just not true.
06:20
That's a study based on if we canceled every one of these programs permanently.
06:24
Okay, and I'm reading it right here because I'm glad you brought it up.
06:26
It assumes a near total freeze in U.S. foreign aid for HIV, AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and other diseases.
06:34
There is not a total freeze.
06:36
85% of PEPFAR recipients are receiving their care right now.
06:40
But the numbers you're saying, those aren't real numbers.
06:43
I understand that's what the school said in the worst case dramatic scenario.
06:46
And even then I think it's exaggerated.
06:47
But there's just no evidence of the fact that, I don't remember the numbers here,
06:51
100,000 children have starved to death in the last four months
06:53
because the United States made reductions to the USAID.
06:57
Well, that, first of all, is pretty atrocious.
06:59
That would mean that nobody else in the world is doing anything.
07:01
We're taking care of the entire planet?
07:03
Well, I must say, I think your response is not fit with what the published results were.
07:08
But there's other groups that have done this as well.
07:10
There's a study in Nature with health care experts from a whole number of leading universities.
07:14
And they said, basically, if you shut down USAID, and it may not be fully shut down,
07:19
but my colleagues who follow this closely say, you know, it's 80, 90% shut down.
07:24
And Nature study, or published in Nature, said, look, because of what has happened,
07:31
we will see some 15 million additional deaths over 15 years just from HIV,
07:38
producing 14 million orphans, and another 10 million people, children and adults,
07:43
dying from malnutrition, tuberculosis, diarrhea, malaria, and other diseases.
07:50
And there's even higher numbers from the Friends of the Global Fight Against AIDS.
07:54
I think it's this rash shutdown without due process of law that is not coming and doing it
08:00
in collaboration with rewriting the law, freezing funds, canceling these contracts without constitution,
08:07
that you have exacted enormous harm on the world.
08:11
Again, those numbers you're saying are staggering and unrealistic.
08:14
The reality of it is that what you're saying is that unless the United States funds foreign aid
08:18
at these levels in perpetuity, the world's going to suffer 15 million deaths in 15 years,
08:24
and every country should be voting for everything we want at the UN.
08:26
The number was 15 million in the study of nature, yes, from the shutdown of these programs.
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