GUATEMALA CITY (AP) — Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday delivered a robust defense of the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development and praised President Donald Trump’s widely panned proposal for the United States to take control of the Gaza Strip.
Rubio said the administration was essentially forced to shut down USAID because of “insubordination” within its ranks by staffers who refused to comply with demands to justify its budget and its programs.
He said Trump’s suggestion that the U.S. take over Gaza was in fact a “very generous” offer to reconstruct and develop the war-ravaged Palestinian territory.
President Donald Trump suggested Tuesday during a news conference with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that displaced Palestinians in Gaza be permanently resettled elsewhere and proposed the U.S. take “ownership” in redeveloping the area into “the Riviera of the Middle East.”
“It was not meant as a hostile move,” Rubio said during a news conference in Guatemala City. “It was meant as a, I think, a very generous move.”
He said Gaza is “akin to a natural disaster” and people can’t live there because there are unexploded munitions, debris and rubble.
“In the interim, obviously people are going to have to live somewhere while you’re rebuilding it,” he said.
At USAID, almost all the agency’s workers overseas are being pulled off the job and out of the field under a sudden Trump administration order.
Rubio said the original intention was to keep the agency running while reviewing how money was being spent. But he said the government received no cooperation and employees were acting in “contravention” and “insubordination.”
“It is not the direction I wanted it. It’s not the way we wanted to do it initially, but it is the way we will have to do it now,” Rubio said. “What would be a gift to our geopolitical rivals is billions of dollars in foreign aid that is not aligned to the national interests in the foreign policy of the United States."
Immigration, a Trump administration priority, has been the major focus of Rubio’s first foreign trip as America’s top diplomat, a five-country tour of Central America.
During his visit to Guatemala, the country's President Bernardo Arévalo said his country will accept migrants from other countries being deported from the United States.
Under the “safe third country” agreement announced by Arévalo, the deportees would then be returned to their home countries at U.S. expense.
“We have agreed to increase by 40% the number of flights of deportees both of our nationality as well as deportees from other nationalities," Arévalo said, speaking during a news conference with Rubio.
The Guatemalan president's offer came days after El Salvador Monday announced a similar but broader agreement.
Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele said his country would accept U.S. deportees of any nationality, including American citizens and legal residents who are imprisoned for violent crimes.
Matthew Lee, The Associated Press
