Joe Rogan sounded more like a migrant rights champion than a MAGA podcaster as he pushed back on Rep. Anna Paulina Luna over her ICE protests conspiracy theory.
Speaking on his podcast Wednesday, the Florida Republican, 36, claimed the protests against the Trump administration’s ICE raids in June had been orchestrated by “Chinese money.”
Even Rogan, 58, who frequently entertains and endorses fringe theories, wasn’t entirely buying it.
“I absolutely believe this is true,” he began, before reminding Luna, “but also, it was in reaction to some of the ICE raids.”
“It was a visceral reaction that a lot of people had to the idea of people just showing up and pulling people out of schools and pulling people out of Home Depot and pulling people that were just hard-working people.”
The podcaster added, “That’s what freaks people out.”
Rogan endorsed Donald Trump and his anti-immigration platform in 2024, but he has slammed the scope of the president’s immigration crackdown in recent months.
Perhaps using “people” as a stand-in for his own experience, he told Luna, “When people thought about ICE, they thought, ‘Great, we’re going to get rid of the gang members,’ they didn’t think, ‘Great, you’re going to get rid of the landscaper.”
On the campaign trail, Trump pledged to carry out the “largest deportation effort in U.S. history,” while promising to target the “worst of the worst.” But at the end of June, 71.7 percent of the 57,861 people detained by ICE had no criminal convictions, the Associated Press reported, citing ICE data.
Rogan pushed back against the Trump administration’s default line that immigrants should simply enter the country through legal avenues if they want to avoid ICE, laying out a scenario for Luna.
“If you’re just a landscaper, you’re just a guy who lives in a third-world country and you want a better life, and you say, ‘I heard you can get across, and I heard when you get across you can get work,’—like what is that guy going to do?” Rogan said. “That guy doesn’t have the money to hire a lawyer.”
Borrowing from Trump’s deflection tactics, Luna defaulted to pointing fingers at the Biden and Obama administrations.
But she and Rogan found common ground in condemning corporations that rely on undocumented labor and having a closed border.
Even as he reportedly maintains ties with Trump, the UFC commentator has recently also attacked the Trump administration on another front—its “gaslighting” on the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.
