Rubio vows to keep stripping student visas in heated Senate return

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio vowed Tuesday to keep stripping visas from students in a fiery showdown with rival Democrats who accused him of trampling on free speech of Israel critics.

Rubio, once a well-liked senator who was unanimously confirmed by his peers, returned for the first time in his new role to the Senate in a sharply different atmosphere, clashing bitterly with Democrats.

President Donald Trump's top diplomat has proudly boasted of taking away visas from foreigners under an obscure law that allows removal for activities deemed counter to US foreign policy interests.

Rubio estimated he has revoked "thousands" of visas since taking office in January. He had given a figure of at least 300 visas in March.

"It's very simple. A visa is not a right -- it's a privilege," Rubio told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

"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.

Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen accused Rubio of violating 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 who had written an opinion piece in a student newspaper criticizing the school's 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 1950s witch hunt for communists in the US government: "Have you no decency?"

Rubio has quickly become a favorite of Trump and his base, some of which protested when he was nominated that he was part of the traditional Republican establishment.

The unanimous confirmation for Rubio was highly unusual in a fiercely partisan era in Washington since the rise of Trump and his "Make America Great Again" movement. AFP