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Joe Rogan Met Up With Trump Days Before Trashing His ICE Raids

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yesterday

Joe Rogan, podcaster and prominent supporter of Donald Trump’s presidential bid, is souring on the administration’s immigration agenda.

The Washington Post reported Wednesday that Rogan, who dined with the president on June 30, “has discussed immigration policy with Trump and pushed him to back off deporting workers who have not committed crimes.”

In a podcast episode that aired three days after their dinner, Rogan expressed a sense of betrayal, saying, “We were told there would be no—well, there’s two things that are insane. One is the targeting of migrant workers. Not cartel members, not gang members, not drug dealers. Just construction workers showing up in construction sites and raiding them. Gardeners. Like, really?”

Rogan agreed too when his guest, Replit CEO Amjad Masad, denounced Trump’s targeting of pro-Palestinian students.

The podcaster has criticized Trump’s immigration policy since at least March, when he publicly decried the deportation of Andry José Hernández Romero, a Venezuelan makeup artist who sought asylum in the U.S. to avoid persecution for being gay, and whom the Trump administration spuriously accused of being a gang member. Romero was sent to the maximum-security CECOT prison in El Salvador.

“That’s bad for the cause,” Rogan said at the time. “The cause is, ‘Let’s get the gang members out,’ everybody agrees. But let’s not let innocent gay hairdressers get lumped up with the gangs.”

In a June podcast episode, Rogan expressed further frustration with Trump’s targeting of noncriminals, telling his guest that Trump would not have been elected if he’d announced, “We’re gonna go to Home Depot, and we’re going to arrest all the people at Home Depot. We’re going to go to construction sites, and we’re going to just, like, tackle people at construction sites.”

MAGA in recent days has been forced to reckon with the worrisome implications of Trump’s promised mass deportations, which the president touts as a means to root out violent criminals, while undocumented immigrants who haven’t committed crimes have faced the brunt of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s increasingly aggressive operations.

Then there’s the fact that mass deportations would spell disaster for the U.S. economy and food supply—which led Trump to propose a carve-out for undocumented immigrant farmworkers. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, however, promised there’d be “no amnesty,” instead floating the fatuous idea that nonworking Medicaid recipients could replace deported farmworkers.

Many hard-liners want to throw civil liberties, not to mention the economy, to the wind, to allow deportations to proceed full speed ahead. Others, like Rogan, are growing wary.

Senator John Fetterman has once again turned his back on undocumented immigrants with the rubber stamp from Donald Trump.

“ICE performs an important job for our country,” Fetterman wrote on X Thursday. “Any calls to abolish ICE are 💯 inappropriate and outrageous.”

But “Abolish ICE” has long been a slogan used by the exact kind of progressives who first got Fetterman elected to the Senate in 2022. Since then, the so-called Democrat has betrayed his own voter base time and time again by supporting Trump’s efforts to target and deport undocumented immigrants (even though his own wife, Gisele, was undocumented). But now, Fetterman appears to have been emboldened by the president’s support.

On Wednesday, Fetterman defended ICE officers following an allegedly coordinated attack on an ICE facility in Texas.

“Absolutely unacceptable. Terrible. Awful,” Fetterman said. “ICE agents are just doing their job and I fully support that. For me and people in my party, you know, to abolish it or treat them as criminals or anything, that’s inappropriate and outrageous. ICE performs an important, an important job for our nation.”

During a meeting at the White House with African leaders Wednesday, Trump openly agreed with the Democrat. “The new John Fetterman is exactly what you said—he’s right, he’s right,” Trump said. “And we have to protect our police officers, and we will, and we have been.”

Fetterman told the Daily Mail the following day that the president’s comments “made [his] parents proud.”

“They’re big Fox News viewers,” Fetterman continued. “My whole family is Republican.”

A few hours later, he posted on X reiterating his statement and condemning calls to abolish ICE.

But not everyone was feeling pride. Annie Wu Henry, who ran the Fetterman campaign’s social media, responded to Fetterman’s latest post on X by sharing a campaign video where the Democrat took the opposite view when discussing his own family.

“Ya know, I was asked, ‘Your wife’s family broke the law, what do you think of that?’ And I said, ‘Well I’m so grateful that they did because if they didn’t have the courage to take that step I wouldn’t have the three beautiful children that I have today,’” Fetterman said in the voiceover.

“Ya know, I was asked, your wife’s family broke the law, what do you think of that? And I said, well I’m so grateful that they did because if they didn’t have the courage to take that step I wouldn’t have the 3 beautiful children that I have today.” https://t.co/Sz5HcjceDV pic.twitter.com/8vh0LhpRct

Texas State Senator Angela Paxton has filed for divorce from her husband, Republican state Attorney General Ken Paxton, who has long faced accusations of infidelity and corruption. Senator Paxton blamed the split squarely on her husband’s cheating, while the attorney general blamed the split on “the pressures of countless........

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