Marco Rubio
Marco Antonio Rubio is an American politician, attorney, and diplomat serving as the 72nd United States secretary of state since 2025. A member of the Republican Party, he represented Florida in the U.S. Senate from 2011 to 2025. Rubio is also the acting national security advisor and acting archivist of the United States.
Rubio is a Cuban American from Miami, Florida, and attended law school at the University of Miami. After serving as a city commissioner for West Miami in the 1990s, he was elected in 2000 to represent the 111th district in the Florida House of Representatives. As the Republican majority leader, he was subsequently elected speaker of the Florida House; he served for two years beginning in November 2006. Rubio left the Florida legislature in 2008 due to term limits, and began teaching at Florida International University. In a three-way race, Rubio was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2010. In April 2015, he launched a presidential bid instead of seeking reelection. He suspended his campaign for the presidency on March 15, 2016, after losing to Donald Trump in the Florida Republican primary. He then ran for reelection to the Senate and won a second term. Despite his criticism of Trump during his presidential campaign, Rubio endorsed him before the 2016 general election and was largely supportive of his presidency.
Due to his influence on U.S. policy on Latin America during the first Trump administration, he was described as a "virtual secretary of state for Latin America". He is also considered to have been one of Congress's most hawkish members with regard to China and the Chinese Communist Party. The Chinese government sanctioned him twice in 2020 and he is banned from entering China. Rubio became Florida's senior senator in January 2019, following the defeat of former senator Bill Nelson, and was reelected to a third term in 2022, defeating Democratic nominee Val Demings in a landslide victory. Rubio endorsed Trump for president in 2024 days before the Iowa caucuses.
In November 2024, President-elect Trump announced his intention to nominate Rubio to be secretary of state in his second administration. Rubio was confirmed unanimously by the U.S. Senate and took office on January 21, 2025. On May 1, 2025, Trump announced that Rubio would become acting national security advisor, replacing Mike Waltz, while continuing to serve as secretary of state. This dual role was last held by Henry Kissinger from 1973 to 1975 in the Nixon and Ford administrations. Rubio is also the acting archivist of the United States. He was the last acting USAID administrator before the agency was abolished. He is the first Latino to serve as secretary of state or act as national security advisor, making him the highest-ranking Hispanic American official in U.S. history.
Early life and education
Marco Antonio Rubio was born in 1971 in Miami, Florida. He is the second son and third child of Mario Rubio Reina and Oriales Rubio. His parents were Cubans who immigrated to the United States in 1956 during the regime of Fulgencio Batista, two and a half years before Fidel Castro ascended to power after the Cuban Revolution. His mother made at least four return trips to Cuba after Castro's takeover, including a month-long trip in 1961, and a return to Cuba had been planned before the changes in their native country. Rubio's parents were not U.S. citizens at the time of Rubio's birth. They were naturalized in 1975. Some relatives of Rubio's were admitted to the U.S. as refugees.Rubio's maternal grandfather, Pedro Victor Garcia, immigrated to the U.S. legally in 1956, but returned to Cuba to find work in 1959. When in 1962 he fled communist Cuba and returned to the U.S. without a visa, he was detained as an undocumented immigrant and an immigration judge ordered him to be deported. But immigration officials reversed their decision later that day, and the deportation order was not enforced. Instead, Garcia was reclassified to the legal status of "parolee" that allowed him to stay in the U.S. He reapplied for permanent resident status in 1966 after the Cuban Adjustment Act passed, and his residency was approved. Rubio had a close relationship with his grandfather during his childhood.
In October 2011, The Washington Post reported that Rubio's previous statements that his parents were forced to leave Cuba in 1959 were falsehoods. His parents left Cuba in 1956, during the Batista regime. According to the Post, " Florida, being connected to the post-revolution exile community gives a politician cachet that could never be achieved by someone identified with the pre-Castro exodus, a group sometimes viewed with suspicion". Rubio denied that he had embellished his family history, stating that his public statements about his family were based on "family lore". Rubio asserted that his parents intended to return to Cuba in the 1960s. He added that his mother took his two elder siblings back to Cuba in 1961 with the intention of living there permanently, but the nation's move toward communism caused the family to change its plans. Rubio said that the "essence of my family story is why they came to America in the first place and why they had to stay".
Rubio has three siblings: older brother Mario, older sister Barbara, and younger sister Veronica. Rubio received his first communion as a Catholic in 1984 before moving with his family back to Miami a year later. He was confirmed. Although he changed religious affiliations several times, he remains with the Catholic Church. From ages 8 to11 he and his family attended the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints while living in Las Vegas. During those years in Nevada, his father worked as a bartender at Sam's Town Hotel and his mother as a housekeeper at the Imperial Palace Hotel and Casino. As a teenager, Rubio was hired by his brother-in-law Orlando Cicilia to care for the latter's dogs, and used the money to attend Miami Dolphins games. When Rubio was 16, Cicilia was arrested and convicted of trafficking millions of dollars worth of cocaine; the Rubio family maintains that they had no knowledge of his criminal activity.
Rubio attended South Miami Senior High School, graduating in 1989. He attended Tarkio College in Missouri for one year on a football scholarship before enrolling at Santa Fe Community College in Gainesville, Florida. He transferred again and earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from the University of Florida in 1993, then received his Juris Doctor, cum laude, from the University of Miami School of Law in 1996. Rubio has said that he incurred $100,000 in student loans, but paid off those loans in 2012.
Early career (1996–2000)
While studying law, Rubio interned for U.S. representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. He also worked on Republican senator Bob Dole's 1996 presidential campaign. In April 1998, two years after finishing law school, Rubio was elected to a seat as city commissioner for West Miami. He was elected to the Florida House of Representatives in early 2000.Early political career (2000–2008)
Florida House of Representatives
Elections and concurrent employment
In late 1999, a special election was called to fill the seat for the 111th House District in the Florida House of Representatives, representing Miami. It was considered a safe Republican seat, so Rubio's main challenge was to win the GOP nomination. He campaigned as a moderate, advocating tax cuts and early childhood education.Rubio placed second in the Republican primary on December 14, 1999, but won the runoff election for the Republican nomination, defeating Angel Zayon by 64 votes. He defeated Democrat Anastasia Garcia with 72% of the vote in a January 25, 2000, special election.
In November 2000, Rubio was reelected unopposed. In 2002, he was reelected to a second term unopposed. In 2004, he was reelected to a third term with 66% of the vote. In 2006, he was reelected to a fourth term unopposed.
Rubio served in the Florida House of Representatives for nearly nine years. Since the Florida legislative session officially lasted only 60 days, he spent about half of each year in Miami, where he practiced law. He worked at a law firm that specialized in land use and zoning until 2014, when he took a position with Broad and Cassel, a Miami law and lobbying firm..
Tenure
When Rubio took his seat in the legislature in Tallahassee in January 2000, voters in Florida had recently approved a constitutional amendment on term limits. This created openings for new legislative leaders due to many senior incumbents having to retire. According to an article in National Journal, Rubio also gained an extra advantage in that regard, because he was sworn in early due to the special election, and he would take advantage of these opportunities to join the GOP leadership.Majority whip and majority leader
Later in 2000, the majority leader of the House, Mike Fasano, promoted Rubio to be one of two majority whips. National Journal described that position as typically requiring much arm-twisting, but said Rubio took a different approach that relied more on persuading legislators and less on coercing them.Fasano resigned in September 2001 as majority leader of the House due to disagreements with the House speaker, and the speaker passed over Rubio to appoint a more experienced replacement for Fasano. Rubio volunteered to work on redistricting, which he accomplished by dividing the state into five regions, then working individually with the lawmakers involved, and this work helped to cement his relationships with GOP leaders.
In December 2002, Rubio was appointed House majority leader by Speaker Johnnie Byrd. He persuaded Speaker Byrd to restructure the job of majority leader, so that legislative wrangling would be left to the whip's office, and Rubio would become the main spokesperson for the House GOP.
According to National Journal, during this period Rubio did not entirely adhere to doctrinaire conservative principles, and some colleagues described him as a centrist "who sought out Democrats and groups that don't typically align with the GOP". He co-sponsored legislation that would have let farmworkers sue growers in state court if they were shortchanged on pay, and co-sponsored a bill for giving in-state tuition rates to the children of undocumented immigrants. In the wake of the September 11 attacks, he voiced suspicion about expanding police detention powers and helped defeat a GOP bill that would have required colleges to increase reporting to the state about foreign students.
As a state representative, Rubio requested legislative earmarks, totaling about $145million for 2001 and 2002, but none thereafter. Additionally, an office in the executive branch compiled a longer list of spending requests by legislators, including Rubio, as did the non-profit group Florida TaxWatch. Many of those listed items were for health and social programs that Rubio has described as "the kind of thing that legislators would get attacked on if we didn't fund them". A 2010 report by the Tampa Bay Times and Miami Herald said that some of Rubio's spending requests dovetailed with his personal interests. For example, Rubio requested a $20-million appropriation for Jackson Memorial Hospital to subsidize care for the poor and uninsured, and Rubio later did work for that hospital as a consultant. A spokesman for Rubio has said that the items in question helped the whole county, that Rubio did not lobby to get them approved, that the hospital money was necessary and non-controversial, and that Rubio is "a limited-government conservative... not a no-government conservative".