Podcaster Joe Rogan, who has been a supporter of Donald Trump, has now described the US President’s deportations as “horrific.” In a recent episode of The Joe Rogan Experience with Francis Foster and Konstantin Kisin, Rogan hailed Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration. However, he said the news of a gay Venezuelan asylum-seeker being deported along with an alleged Tren de Aragua gang member left him upset.
“I think a human being, being plucked out of nowhere and ending up in a country he’s never been in, in a maximum-security prison with gang members, seems like a bad thing to happen,” said Kisin, who co-hosts the Triggernometry podcast with Foster.
“It’s horrific,” Rogan responded. “This is crazy that that could be possible.”
“That’s horrific, and again, that’s bad for the cause. The cause is, let’s get the gang members out, everybody agrees,” he added. “But let’s not, innocent gay hairdressers get lumped up with the gangs, and then, like, how long before that guy can get out?”
The deportation of Andry José Hernández Romero
Rogan, who endorsed Trump in the 2024 presidential election and even attended his inauguration, appeared to be referring to the case of Andry José Hernández Romero, a gay makeup artist who faced persecution in Venezuela for his sexuality and political views and subsequently sought asylum in the United States. Statements from his attorney and founder of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, Lindsay Toczylowski, said that he had no criminal history and that he was wrongfully deported, Newsweek reported.
Immigration officials thought Romero’s tattoos indicated he was affiliated with a gang, but his attorney denied this, telling MSNBC that they were “normal tattoos.” Rogan said that in politics in recent days, the approach is to never admit “fault” or “you’re wrong.” “This is the thing we’re seeing with the Signal thing,” he said, referring to a scandal where journalist Jeffrey Goldberg was added to a secret group chat by mistake where high-ranking Trump administration members had been discussing an upcoming military strike against Yemen’s Houthi rebels.
Rogan also said on The Joe Rogan Experience: “The thing is, like, you got to get scared that people who are not criminals are getting like, lassoed up and deported and sent to, like, El Salvador prisons.”
