Senior White House adviser Kari Lake, the election-denying MAGA devotee dismantling Voice of America, is leading a push to boot her own staff from the country.
Lake is hellbent on expelling international journalists who had worked for VOA before she fired them in this year’s mass layoffs.
“Their time here is up. And I said before, if I have to go to the airport with them, and accompany them to the airport and get them on the flight, I will do that,” Lake told Eric Bolling of the right-wing network Real America’s Voice.
For decades, the U.S.’s international broadcasting service had recruited journalists from around the world to deliver news from an American perspective in more than 50 languages.
Many arrived in the U.S. on J-1 visas, which required them to stay employed by the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), the entity overseeing VOA, or leave the country within 30 days.
That countdown began immediately upon their terminations, beginning with the first wave of layoffs in March, The Atlantic reported. Yet, some reporters are at risk of persecution or imprisonment if they are sent back to their home nations after working for the U.S. government, according to the outlet.
But Lake, who argues that the visa program “should have never started to begin with,” is laughing in their faces.
During the interview on Real America’s Voice, Bolling suggested that the VOA journalists might be encouraged to leave if they were sent to “Alligator Alcatraz,” Florida’s new migrant detention center.
Lake, a former journalist herself, chuckled and said, “Well, if you overstay your visa, ICE is going to find you. And they will find you in this case as well.”
Using an imperfect metaphor, she quipped, “America’s not a hostel, you don’t get to come here and stay for ever.”
The twice-defeated candidate for statewide office in Arizona appears to have finally found her calling; presiding over VOA’s demise.
After President Donald Trump signed the broadcaster’s death warrant in a March executive order, Lake ordered mass layoffs for hundreds of VOA employees and slashed global programming, that, since World War II, had delivered news to countries under autocratic regimes.
She has denounced VOA as “rotten to the core” and “anti-American‚” though journalists warn that killing its broadcasts hands adversaries such as Russia, China, and Iran more room to spread anti-American propaganda.
And while anti-immigrant rhetoric is a staple of the Trump administration, Lake has gone further in her crusade against her former employees, painting J-1 visa holders as “spies.”
“Many of them [are] from nations that are hostile to America,” she told Bolling. “These are from countries that are adversarial to the United States of America. You have to worry that they will become a national security risk.”
However, former VOA director Chase Untermeyer, who served under President George H. W. Bush, told The Atlantic, “In many ways, they’re exactly the people you want.”
He called the firing and expelling of the multilingual journalists who were working to counter propaganda from autocracies as “extraordinarily short-sighted.”
In the wake of their terminations, some international VOA employees—once on a path to green cards and citizenship—have left the country, while others are applying for asylum.
The Committee to Protect Journalists told The Atlantic in a statement, “Protecting these journalists from the risk of deportation is a moral obligation and demonstrates a commitment to democratic values and a free press.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to USAGM for comment.
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