Joe Rogan Endorsed Trump in 2024 but Is Now Condemning His Deportation Policies

The Trump administration is moving forward with force on a variety of different policies that Trump discussed during the campaign. While stock brokers continue to freak out over his tariffs, news of his deportation policies has also begun to make waves.

One person who seems to be quite upset by the mass deportation policy is Joe Rogan, one of the most famous and popular podcasters on the planet. Rogan endorsed Trump during the 2024 election, but many want to know what he's said about the president more recently. Here's what we know.

On an episode of The Joe Rogan Experience released on March 30, Rogan referred to the Trump administration's recent deportation operations as "horrific."

“You got to get scared that people who are not criminals are getting, like, lassoed up and deported and sent to, like, El Salvador prisons,” he explained. Specifically, Rogan discussed the deportation of Andry José Hernández Romero, a makeup artist and hairdresser from Venezuela who was seeking asylum in the U.S.

Romero was deported to El Salvador in March after the Trump administration suggested that he belonged to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. As evidence, they cited his tattoos, which include a pair of crowns on his wrists that read "mom" and "dad."

Rogan suggested that deporting people who had done nothing wrong and taking them to a country that is not where they came from is counterproductive.

“That’s bad for the cause,” Rogan said. “The cause is, ‘Let’s get the gang members out,’ everybody agrees. But let’s not [let] innocent gay hairdressers get lumped up with the gangs, and then, like, how long before that guy can get out? Can we figure out how to get him out? Is there any plan in place to alert the authorities they’ve made a horrible mistake and correct it?”

Romero was one of 200 people who were deported after Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law that had only been used in wartime before.

While Rogan has always prided himself on being a free thinker, this kind of break could suggest that there are cracks starting to form in the coalition that helped to elect Trump as president.

While immigration has tended to be favorable terrain for Trump, these stories of innocent people being swept up in raids and deported have left many questioning whether Trump and his team care that much about who they're grabbing as they execute their deportation policies. When anyone with tattoos who wasn't born here can be sent to a prison in El Salvador, it suddenly seems like anyone at all could be taken for any reason.

Rogan has been hugely sympathetic to Trump's broader goals. It's telling, then, that even he doesn't think the ends will justify the means in this case, meaning that even though he might want gang members taken, he doesn't necessarily think America should be the kind of country that just randomly grabs people off the street.