Celebrity podcaster Joe Rogan invited far-right Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) onto his show this week — and grilled her about the brutality and seeming randomness of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids around the country under President Donald Trump.
Rogan has previously backed Trump and entertained various right-wing conspiracy theories — but he has also expressed reservations about some aspects of Trump's agenda, particularly ICE raids against day laborers, which he has called "insane."
Luna, for her part, fiercely defended Trump's policies and dismissed protests against ICE around the country as being propped up by "Chinese money" — which did not satisfy Rogan.
“I absolutely believe this is true, but also, it was in reaction to some of the ICE raids,” said Rogan. “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. That’s what freaks people out.”
Rogan added that none of this was what he had in mind when he heard Trump speaking about immigration on the campaign trail: “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.”
This comes after Rogan also sharply criticized the president over the administration's handling of the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking case files controversy, promising huge revelations and a "client list" of co-conspirators, only to back off all of it.
"I didn't even know what to say," Rogan said of the FBI director promising there was "nothing" in the files. "My thought was, and people are like, 'Why didn't you push back more?' My thought was like, 'I'm just going to put this out there and let the internet do its work." He added that he was also outraged by the strange time skip in Epstein's prison cell footage: "Do you think we're babies? Like what is this?"
Watch the episode below or at the link here.