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Joe Rogan has criticized President Donald Trump’s mass deportation policies during a recent podcast episode, calling raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents “f***ing nuts.”
While the Trump administration said the focus of its deportation plan would be on criminals in the U.S. illegally, there have been raids on construction sites, big-box store parking lots, and garment factories, leading to soaring numbers of detainees, only a third of whom are convicted criminals.
Such raids in Los Angeles earlier this month sparked demonstrations across the city’s downtown, leading to unrest, looting, confrontations with police, and the deployment of the National Guard and a battalion of Marines by the federal government.
In a podcast episode that aired late last week, Rogan slammed the raids and wondered whether Trump would have won the election if he had said this is how his administration would carry out deportations.
“Bro, these ICE raids are f***ing nuts, man,” Rogan told guests Luis J. Gomez and Big Jay Oakerson.
He continued: “The Trump administration, if they’re running and they said, ‘We’re going to 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…’ I don’t think anybody would’ve signed up for that.”
Rogan added: “They said we’re going to get rid of the criminals and the gang members first, right? And now we’re seeing, like, Home Depots get raided. Like, that’s crazy.”
The podcaster endorsed Trump in the 2024 election, although he has been critical of some of his policies since the beginning of his second term.
He has also pushed back on other aspects of the administration’s immigration policies, saying previously that deporting migrants to a megaprison in El Salvador was “horrific.”
Rogan also criticized a law enforcement officer for shooting an Australian reporter with a rubber bullet as she covered the protests in LA, calling the incident “insane.”
The trigger event for the week of unrest in downtown Los Angeles was an ICE raid at a Home Depot aimed at detaining people who would congregate there to pick up casual labor — the vast majority with no criminal record.
“They’re not going after drug kingpins, they’re chasing hardworking people through swap meets and Home Depot parking lots,” Mayor Karen Bass told The Los Angeles Times.
“You can see the impact of these random raids everywhere in our city — families are scared to go eat at restaurants, kids are scared their parents aren’t going to return from the store — the fear is there because they’ve seen videos of people being shoved into unmarked vans by masked men refusing to identify themselves,” she said.
The Trump administration's immigration enforcement has led to an 800 percent increase in the number of people without a criminal record being arrested by ICE since January. This surge has resulted in over 50,000 individuals being held in ICE detention centers, marking the first time this number has been reached.
Less than one-third of current ICE detainees are convicted criminals, with most arrested for non-criminal immigration violations or having pending charges. Internal documents reveal that only about one in ten ICE detainees from October to May were convicted of serious crimes like murder or rape.
Enforcement officials are reportedly under pressure to meet daily arrest targets and to expand efforts to detain and deport individuals in Democratic-run cities.
Rogan’s criticism of the way the Trump administration is handling its mass deportation plans naturally sparked its own reaction on social media.
California Democrat Rep. Eric Swalwell wrote: “Correct. @joerogan is absolutely right. No one signed up for ICE raiding Home Depot.”
“When you lose Joe Rogan...”, the “Republicans Against Trump” account posted on X.
Former Illinois Republican Rep. Joe Walsh was blunter, writing in a post: “Hey @joerogan, he ran on ‘mass deportations.’ What did you think mass deportations meant?”
Similarly, the Tennessee Holler account posted: “PSA: You were warned, Joe. Yet you signed up for it.”
