Rubio: ICC Power Grab Threatens to Put American Soldiers, Border Agents on Trial

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Secretary of State Marco Rubio is warning that the International Criminal Court (ICC) has morphed from a narrow tribunal for the world’s worst atrocities into an unaccountable body seeking to prosecute American troops, police officers and Border Patrol agents. The Trump administration intends to fight back.

In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, Rubio argued the ICC, established in 2002, was originally marketed as a limited backstop for the gravest crimes. Instead, he wrote, the court now seeks “near-unlimited reach” to override the courts and constitutions of sovereign nations and prosecute Americans before judges “from random countries across the globe.”

Rubio noted President Bill Clinton declined to submit the Rome Statute, the ICC’s founding treaty, to the Senate, citing “concerns about significant flaws in the Treaty.” A bipartisan Senate supermajority later passed the American Servicemembers’ Protection Act, authorizing the president to use “all means necessary” to keep the ICC from detaining Americans.

Americans were targeted anyway, Rubio said. In 2020, the ICC opened a war-crimes investigation into U.S. troops in Afghanistan after then-prosecutor Fatou Bensouda argued the U.S. hadn’t prosecuted enough of its own soldiers — a move Rubio said made her “the final judge of U.S. military policy and the entire U.S. justice system.”

Rubio described that probe as the opening move by a court backed by “leftist nongovernment organizations, smug globalists, and hostile Third World governments united by their enmity toward the U.S.”

He cited recent escalations: activist groups pushing for action against deportations to El Salvador; a former ICC prosecutor calling Trump’s strikes on narcoterrorists “a crime against humanity,” a claim Rubio said U.N. officials and Democratic politicians echoed; and a Washington advocacy group urging Iran to seek an ICC probe of U.S. personnel.

Pushback has only fueled more threats, Rubio wrote. When 12 senators wrote the ICC prosecutor with concerns, his office accused them of crimes. After Trump sanctioned ICC personnel, a former Human Rights Watch chief said all 125 member states would be obligated to arrest him.

The Secretary of State warned it’s “only a matter of time” before Border Patrol agents, Marines and federal prosecutors face prosecution simply for defending the country. Accepting that authority, he said, “would mean the death of the U.S. as a sovereign and independent nation.”

Rubio said the administration will protect U.S. service members and is launching a diplomatic campaign built around one message: “sovereign states over globalism.”

“This is only the beginning,” Rubio wrote. “Using all the tools at our government’s disposal, working beside every ally with whom we can make common cause, we will dismantle the ICC — brick by brick, if necessary.”

The U.S. has never joined the ICC, which counts 125 member states.