Rubio says number of US visas he has revoked is probably in the thousands

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Tuesday the number of visas he has revoked was "probably in the thousands," adding that he believed there was still more to do.

"I don't know the latest count, but we probably have more to do," Rubio told Senate subcommittee, estimating it was probably in the thousands at this point. "A visa is not a right, it's a privilege."

"We're going to do more. There are more coming. We're going to continue to revoke the visas of people who are here as guests and are disrupting our higher education facilities," he said.

He was responding to Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen who said Rubio was violating the US constitutional protections both of free speech and due process.

"Give me a break, Mr. Secretary. You know as well as I do this isn't about national security. It's about punishing free speech," Van Hollen said.

Rubio responded that he was targeting students who came to "lead campus crusades, to take over libraries and try to burn down buildings."

Van Hollen called his defense "pathetic" and raised the case of Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish doctoral student at Tufts University in Massachusetts who had written an opinion piece in a student newspaper criticizing the campus position on Gaza.

She was arrested on a street by masked agents. A judge recently ordered her release.

"Your own department found zero links to terrorism, no anti-Semitic statements, but you still yanked her visa and shipped her off to detention in Louisiana," Van Hollen said.

"I feel so much safer after locking up people like Ms. Ozturk," Van Hollen told Rubio sarcastically.

Van Hollen invoked the famous rebuke to senator Joseph McCarthy over his witch hunt for communists in the US government: "Have you no decency?"

Rubio, a former senator, was confirmed unanimously by his colleagues after being tapped by President Donald Trump as secretary of state, an unusual show of bipartisanship in Washington.

Van Hollen told Rubio he regretted his vote and that he falsely thought they shared in common "a belief in defending democracy and human rights abroad."

(With agency inputs)