Joe Rogan on Trump's mass deportations: “I really thought they were just going to go after the criminals”
Rogan: “You're about to ship them to a country where they've never been ... that shows no heart”
Published
Citation
From the October 9, 2025, edition of The Joe Rogan Experience, posted to YouTube
DUNCAN TRUSSELL (GUEST): And yet, when you see this in practice, you know, when you, when you, when it's not an NPR interview and you see the videos you've been seeing and everyone else has been seeing, then you realize, like, there's — okay sure, but there must be a way to do this that doesn't involve ripping parents out of their communities away from their children. It doesn't involve, like, actually removing people who've been contributing to society, to American society, from American society. Sending people to other countries when they can't even speak the language. You know what I mean?
JOE ROGAN (HOST): No one with a heart is going to go along with that.
TRUSSELL: No.
ROGAN: And no one — I did not, I did not ever anticipate seeing that on TV on a regular basis.
TRUSSELL: Me either, man. Me either. It's shocking.
ROGAN: I thought that, I really thought they were just going to go after the criminals. I really thought there was enough gang members and enough people, MS-13 members and whatever they were looking for that, that they're wanted. They would go after those guys.
TRUSSELL: Dude, I, you know —
ROGAN: That's what I thought, right? But how many gang members have they actually arrested?
TRUSSELL: No idea. No idea. But you see how, you know, and I hate using this word because the word is getting thrown around so much and it's a stupid — well you didn't say that word, I'll say authoritarianism. You see how, how authoritarianism when it begins to emerge, it's not like — it's like non-consensual. You see how it slowly, slowly creeps in, and how there's a great many people directly impacted by people who have crossed the border without using the right protocol and in a horrific way and, and there are gangs that have been in apartment complexes. We've seen those videos too.
...
ROGAN: If you've been robbing people for the last ten years and you're an illegal, you have to leave the country, right? That makes sense. But if you've been here for 25 years, you have a family, your kids go to school here, you speak the language. You're just illegal, but you're a contributing member to the community that up until now has been protected — this is crazy to ask lower-income and middle-income people who are, you know, kind of getting by, and then all of sudden, you're about to ship them to a country where they've never been. They haven't been since they were four. And you're going to pull up their family and they've been in the community like that.
That, that shows no heart, and that's the problem. Like, you're not going to get any reasonable people to wanna go along with that. Any kind person would look at that and go, there's — this can't be the only way to do this.
TRUSSELL: Damn right. But, but, you see, once authoritarianism starts creeping in, and it makes some inroads, which it's definitely making right now man.