Rubio says State Department has denied visas to people ‘celebrating’ Kirk’s murder

By Jennifer Hansler, CNN

(CNN) — The State Department has “most certainly been denying visas” to people “celebrating” the murder of Charlie Kirk, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said.

The top US diplomat’s comments come amid broader threats by the Trump administration to punish alleged “hate speech” after the killing of the president’s ally last week. The moves have raised questions about whether they are legal under the First Amendment’s freedom of speech protections.

The administration has already been aggressive in its policies to revoke and deny visas, blocking students tied to protests against the war in Gaza, most individuals holding a Palestinian Authority passport, and members of the Palestinian Authority and Palestine Liberation Organization.

Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau said last week he had directed consular officials, who are involved in adjudicating visas, to “take appropriate action” against people “praising, rationalizing, or making light of” Kirk’s death. He instructed the consular officials to monitor the comments on social media claiming to identify such individuals.

Rubio, in remarks before departing Israel Tuesday morning local time, claimed that the policy “isn’t just about Charlie Kirk.”

“If you’re a foreigner and you’re out there celebrating the assassination of someone who was speaking somewhere, I mean, we don’t want you in the country,” he said.

“Why would we want to give a visa to someone who think it’s good that someone was murdered in the public square? That’s just common sense to me,” he continued.

Rubio did not provide details of how many visas had been denied, how the State Department decided they were “celebrating” Kirk’s death, or the authority that was used to block them.

The top US diplomat said he did not know if any visas had been revoked yet, but said he expected that some would be.

“We’ve got to go at process in all these,” Rubio said. “I’m sure there’ll be some that are revoked. There’s no shortage of idiots around the world that have decided it’s a great idea to murder someone.”

“By the way, it’s bad that we have people that are US citizens that feel that way,” he said.

Harold Hongju Koh, who served as the State Department’s legal adviser during the Obama administration, said that revoking visas based on statements about Kirk’s death is “a First Amendment violation.”

“It shouldn’t matter whether you agree with what they say or not, but the idea that they lose their visa over this is essentially violating the first premise of US Supreme Court First Amendment law,” Koh told CNN.

He also noted that the standards for revoking the visas is “incredibly vague.” Koh questioned what the metrics are and who would make the decisions of when they were applied.

“It’s a punitive exercise of the president’s diplomatic powers, and what are the limits to this? What if they decide next that criticizing the president is the basis for engaging in visa denials?” said Koh, who is now a professor of international law at Yale.

“I don’t know any lawyer who was in L (Office of the Legal Adviser) in my time who would have signed off on this,” he told CNN.

Scott Anderson, a former attorney-adviser at the State Department, said that there could be some distinction between revoking the visas and denying them.

Foreign citizens, once they’re “lawfully situated” in the US “usually have a fair amount of First Amendment rights,” he explained.

“It gets trickier when you’re talking about people overseas coming to the United States or here on more discretionary visas, and exactly where the limits are on that,” said Anderson, who is now at the Brookings Institution. “People overseas don’t have any entitlement to come to the United States. There’s certainly no constitutional rights.”

Domestically, Attorney General Pam Bondi said the government will “target” those it deems to have used hateful speech.

“We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech, anything, and that’s across the aisle,” she said on a podcast.

Bondi argued in a post on X that “hate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence is NOT protected by the First Amendment.”

CNN’s Michael Williams contributed to this report.

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