Big Trouble for Little Marco

By BRUCE LOWITT

Four days after revoking the visas of all South Sudan passport holders, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was arrested Wednesday by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, hurriedly flown to Cuba, and imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay after President Donald Trump said he was in the United States illegally.

“Because Little Marco – that’s what I call him – because he was born in the United States in 1971 while his Cuban-born parents, Mario and Oriales Rubio, were living here illegally and didn’t become U.S. citizens until they were naturalized four years later, I have no choice but to fire him from the office he was running so badly and deport him,” Trump said.

According to something a White House lawyer wrote for Trump in one of the executive orders he loves to sign and wave around, “… the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution has never been interpreted to extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States.”

Asked if that should apply to Rubio, Trump replied, “I don’t know if Litle Marco is a tráfala, because I don’t know what that word means. But if my labor secretary, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, gave it to me to use, it must be right because she’s fluent in Spanglish.”

Rubio, a Republican elected three times to the U.S. senate from Florida, announced Saturday morning that he was revoking peoples’ South Sudanese visas because their nation was refusing to accept citizens being deported by Trump.

He denied then that his decision had anything to do with the possibility that the University of Florida men’s basketball team might face Duke University and its star basketball star, Khaman Malauch of South Sudan, Monday night in the NCAA men’s basketball final.

On Saturday night, Duke blew a 14-point lead with eight minutes to play and lost its semifinal game to Houston, which in turn lost to Florida in Monday night’s championship game.

Rubio’s wife, Jeanette, said neither she nor of their two daughters or two sons have been able to speak with Marco, held incommunicado since his incarceration.

“I don’t want to say anything that might get my husband into any trouble,” Jeanette Rubio said, “but if Trump thinks Marco’s done anything wrong after spending the past nine years forcing himself to bow and scrape, and kissing that narcissist’s fat orange ass … um, maybe I’ll just leave it at that.”