At Wednesday's Senate Appropriations Committee hearing, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) questioned Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
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00:00Senator Merkley.
00:03Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
00:06Second chance to ask some questions of you today.
00:08Thank you for testifying to multiple committees.
00:11Back in March, you noted that you had revoked some 300 student visas
00:16using the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act,
00:20which specifically says the Secretary of State can revoke a visa
00:23if an alien's activity in the U.S. would have a serious adverse foreign policy consequence.
00:31And that issue of 300, what's the number up to now?
00:36How many visas have you revoked?
00:37I don't know the latest count, but we probably have more to do.
00:41Can you give us an estimate?
00:42Probably in the thousands at this point, depending.
00:45Not all of them are under that statute.
00:47Some are people.
00:48So there's two visa revocations.
00:49I don't want to go into SEVIS.
00:50It's a separate issue.
00:51No, no, no.
00:52They're related, but we can't conflate them because they're two different.
00:54One is the one you've just cited, National Interest of the United States.
00:57Some of the visa revocations are happening.
01:00Because somebody violated the terms of their visa.
01:02They dropped out of school or they got convicted of a crime or some criminal investigation.
01:05Those are separate from what you've said.
01:07So 300 in March, but now 1,000.
01:10How many under this 1952 Act?
01:12I'd have to get you a good answer, but probably under 1,000.
01:15But I'd have to get you the right answer.
01:16I don't want to speculate about the exact number.
01:19And I'll tell you, this particular thing does bother me.
01:24And you testified in Louisiana Immigration Court a pretty expansive interpretation of that 52 law,
01:31saying that it could be for citizens.
01:33It extends to any non-citizen for past, current, or expected beliefs, statements, or association.
01:41And that expected really caught my mind.
01:43This power rests solely.
01:45This 1950 law rests solely with you.
01:48And your interpretation sounds like you're saying if you, the Secretary of State,
01:53think you expect someone's beliefs or statements, past, current, or future,
01:58then you can toss their visa.
02:02The visa's not a right.
02:03It's a privilege.
02:05All right.
02:05So I will just say, and then I'm going to go on to another topic.
02:08I profoundly disagree.
02:10The Fifth Amendment is very powerful in protecting citizens and non-citizens like with due process.
02:16I know this will be adjudicated in court,
02:18but the idea that one individual could, on their opinion of someone's future activity or expected activity,
02:24that one individual being our Secretary of State, can toss somebody's visa,
02:29seems to me an extraordinary violation of due process.
02:34I want to ask you to defend it now.
02:36I'm happy to put it in writing for you to give us a follow-up and explain it better.
02:41But I do think it's a fundamental attack on freedom,
02:46because due process is the guardian of the gate to keep a government from taking away people's life or liberty.
02:53And liberty is what happens when you take away a visa without due process.
02:58I want to turn to the issue my colleagues have mentioned,
03:02and that is there is a legal way to restructure the Secretary of State's department and USAID specifically.
03:10But what we saw on February 3rd was Elon Musk say,
03:14over the weekend, I tossed USAID into the wood chipper.
03:18That's a pretty profound weekend.
03:20It didn't involve consultation with Congress over the consequences.
03:25There was no rewriting of the law.
03:28There was no discussion of what funds could be delayed, frozen, redirected.
03:33And the result is different groups have estimated how many people have died to date
03:39and will die over the course of a year or a prolonged period as a result of the destruction
03:45of the weekend of February 1st and 2nd.
03:49Did Elon Musk have your support in putting USAID into the wood chipper?
03:56Well, I don't think that's an ex-post, or I guess you're imagining a social media post,
04:01is not a government act.
04:02Not at all.
04:03That's a quote.
04:04That's what he said.
04:04Yeah, that's okay.
04:05That's what he said.
04:05But ultimately, what happened as acting director is all these decisions have to come to me.
04:09Does actions have your full support?
04:11The ones that I signed off on, yes, which is the ones that happened.
04:13Of what Elon Musk did with USAID?
04:15No, no.
04:16But understand, these are contracts.
04:17All these contracts.
04:18Did he do it without or with your support?
04:19That's what I'm trying to understand.
04:21Well, not with my support, it was my actions.
04:24His Doge team did a lot of cancellations very, very quickly,
04:28and it fired a lot of people.
04:29It just wasn't clear to me whether that had your support or not.
04:32No, no, the Doge team didn't do anything.
04:34I did it.
04:35I was the one that made the decisions.
04:36I went through contracts, literally spreadsheets, line by line.
04:39I remember being in a hotel, I believe, in Guatemala,
04:41going through line by line on spreadsheets of contracts that were canceled,
04:45contracts that were approved, contracts that were amended.
04:49These are all contracts.
04:50So, in that case, I'll put the responsibility with you since you're taking credit for it
04:55rather than with Elon Musk.
04:57But the Boston School of Public Health has a kind of a website where they post their estimated deaths
05:07as a result of the actions that were taken to dismantle USAID.
05:12And they're updating it continuously.
05:14So, if you go to it, the numbers keep changing.
05:16They have a one-year estimate, but they also have what they estimate has happened to today.
05:21And as of today, they estimate that the actions taken in putting USAID in the wood chipper,
05:27child malnutrition, 53,500 more deaths.
05:31And I'm rounding off because the numbers are continuously changing.
05:33Child diarrhea, 45,400 more deaths.
05:36Child pneumonia, 59,200 more deaths.
05:39Malaria, 25,100 more deaths.
05:43So, what happened that weekend has resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands of children.
05:49And the estimate for the end of this year is much, much higher.
05:53This happened because the law was not followed for consultation with Congress,
05:58analysis, bringing in experts, holding hearings.
06:01How do you kind of accept what you just put forward,
06:06that it was your action to cancel these contracts,
06:09that your contracts in this fashion, freezing fund,
06:12firing individuals, has resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands of children?
06:16That's false. That's fake.
06:18That's just not true.
06:20That's a study based on if we canceled every one of these programs permanently.
06:24Okay, and I'm reading it right here because I'm glad you brought it up.
06:26It assumes a near total freeze in U.S. foreign aid for HIV, AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and other diseases.
06:34There is not a total freeze.
06:3685% of PEPFAR recipients are receiving their care right now.
06:40But the numbers you're saying, those aren't real numbers.
06:43I understand that's what the school said in the worst case dramatic scenario.
06:46And even then I think it's exaggerated.
06:47But there's just no evidence of the fact that, I don't remember the numbers here,
06:51100,000 children have starved to death in the last four months
06:53because the United States made reductions to the USAID.
06:57Well, that, first of all, is pretty atrocious.
06:59That would mean that nobody else in the world is doing anything.
07:01We're taking care of the entire planet?
07:03Well, I must say, I think your response is not fit with what the published results were.
07:08But there's other groups that have done this as well.
07:10There's a study in Nature with health care experts from a whole number of leading universities.
07:14And they said, basically, if you shut down USAID, and it may not be fully shut down,
07:19but my colleagues who follow this closely say, you know, it's 80, 90% shut down.
07:24And Nature study, or published in Nature, said, look, because of what has happened,
07:31we will see some 15 million additional deaths over 15 years just from HIV,
07:38producing 14 million orphans, and another 10 million people, children and adults,
07:43dying from malnutrition, tuberculosis, diarrhea, malaria, and other diseases.
07:50And there's even higher numbers from the Friends of the Global Fight Against AIDS.
07:54I think it's this rash shutdown without due process of law that is not coming and doing it
08:00in collaboration with rewriting the law, freezing funds, canceling these contracts without constitution,
08:07that you have exacted enormous harm on the world.
08:11Again, those numbers you're saying are staggering and unrealistic.
08:14The reality of it is that what you're saying is that unless the United States funds foreign aid
08:18at these levels in perpetuity, the world's going to suffer 15 million deaths in 15 years,
08:24and every country should be voting for everything we want at the UN.
08:26The number was 15 million in the study of nature, yes, from the shutdown of these programs.