Secretary of State Marco Rubio is desperately trying to show President Donald Trump he remains a capable MAGA soldier.
While Vice President JD Vance got the nod to spearhead peace negotiations in Pakistan this weekend, Rubio made sure Trump knew he was still hard at work on Saturday.
Rubio revealed that he terminated the lawful permanent resident status of family members linked to Masoumeh Ebtekar, an Iranian politician and spokesperson for the group who raided the U.S Embassy in Tehran in 1979 and took American diplomats hostage.
“This week, I terminated their lawful permanent resident status and today, Seyed Eissa Hashemi, Maryam Tahmasebi, and their son are now in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement pending their removal from our country,” Rubio wrote on X.
Rubio claims the family members entered the country legally under the Obama administration and were granted green cards in June 2016.
“Her family should never have been allowed to benefit from the extraordinary privilege of living in our country,” Rubio said, adding that “America can never become home for anti-American terrorists or their families—and under the Trump Administration, it never will.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the Department of State and ICE for comment.
Rubio’s statement comes a week after he announced the revocation of legal status and the subsequent ICE detention of the niece and grand-niece of the former commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Major General Qasem Soleimani, who was killed by a U.S. airstrike in 2020.
The post also comes on the same day that high-level negotiations between U.S. and Iranian delegations began. They are being led by Vance, Special Envoy Steve Witkoff, and the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
Since Trump launched his unpopular war with Iran on Feb. 28, Rubio has struggled to keep up with his shifting messaging.
Rubio, second only to Vance on odds of winning the 2028 GOP nomination, has so far been an “ambivalent” figure on the war, according to The New York Times.
Vance, whose political career has been built on opposition to military intervention abroad, has also been described as one of the administration’s skeptics of the war in Iran.
Still, the rumored presidential hopefuls gave the 79-year-old president an exuberant standing ovation as he vowed in an early April primetime address to bring Iran “back to the Stone Ages where they belong.”
Trump has previously said he would like to see Vance and Rubio run on a joint ticket, but has not specified which of them he would want at the top.
“I think we have a combination of people that would be very good,” the president said last month when asked about who his preferred successor was.
