Updated May 20, 2025 at 4:24 PM CDT
Secretary of State Marco Rubio had some testy exchanges with Democratic senators on Tuesday, who questioned him on Trump administration policies ranging from diplomacy with Russia to aid cuts, refugees and more.
Rubio was defending decisions including major budget cuts and the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing.
Several senators mentioned they had voted for the former Florida Republican senator to be confirmed as secretary of state in January, but said this was not the Marco Rubio they remembered working with.
Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., said he thought Rubio would stand up for democracy and human rights around the world.
"You haven't. You've done the opposite," Van Hollen said. "And you used to speak with conviction about the importance of foreign aid as a tool to advance American values and interests. Then you stood by while Elon Musk took a chainsaw to USAID and other assistance programs. That has left a staggering toll."
Van Hollen said people in Sudan, for example, have died because emergency food kitchens were forced to close.
He also criticized Rubio for fast-tracking white Afrikaners from South Africa for U.S. refugee status, as "making a mockery of our country's refugee process," while the administration was blocking other refugees already approved for admission.
"And I have to tell you directly and personally that I regret voting for you for secretary of state," he said.
Rubio responded by ridiculing Van Hollen's recent trip to El Salvador to meet a man the Trump administration has acknowledged that it mistakenly deported. And he repeated the administration's allegation that the man belonged to a gang.
"We deported gang members … including the one you had a margarita with," Rubio charged. Lawyers for the deportee Van Hollen met with, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, deny he is a gang member.
Van Hollen protested to committee Chairman Jim Risch, R-Idaho: "Mr. Chairman, he can't make unsubstantiated claims like that."
It was an unusually heated exchange in a committee where Rubio was once a member.
Republican members expressed support for the secretary of state. Chairman Risch said the administration has "accomplished incredible things in a short period," including the release of American hostages captured by Hamas, a ceasefire between India and Pakistan, as well as efforts to end the war between Russia and Ukraine.
The committee's ranking Democrat, New Hampshire Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, however, grilled Rubio over the administration's outreach to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
"What Vladimir Putin is doing now is playing for time and he's playing the president like a fiddle," she said. "And the ... longer he plays it, the more opportunity he has to gain territory in Ukraine and the harder it's going to be to get him to the table."
President Trump's phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday failed to produce an immediate ceasefire as Ukraine and its allies had hoped, with Putin instead proposing further talks.
Shaheen said the administration was giving away its leverage. But Rubio defended the administration's efforts, saying it continued to pressure Russia while supporting Ukraine.
"Well, I disagree with this 'playing with a fiddle' analogy, because the truth of the matter is, when Vladimir Putin woke up this morning, he had the same set of sanctions on him that he's always had since the beginning of this conflict. And Ukraine was still getting armaments and shipments from us and from our allies," he said.
"What the president is trying to do is end a war," Rubio said. Shaheen responded by saying that's something "we all support."
Both Republicans and Democrats have been pushing for more sanctions on Russia. Rubio has said President Trump believes that if the U.S. starts threatening sanctions, the Russians will stop talking.
Trump did get bipartisan support for lifting sanctions on Syria's new government, though Rubio issued a dire warning about where that country could be heading.
"It is our assessment that, frankly, the transitional authority, given the challenges they're facing, are maybe weeks — not many months — away from potential collapse and a full-scale civil war of epic proportions, basically the country splitting up," Rubio said.
He said the U.S. is hoping to prevent that by engaging Syria's transitional leaders, who include former affiliates of al-Qaida who fought to overthrow the regime of President Bashar al-Assad last year.
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