Marco Rubio’s support for comprehensive immigration reform two years ago remains a major question mark hovering over his presidential campaign, even as he’s cracked top-tier status in the GOP field. On Tuesday, the freshman senator’s tightrope walk on the issue will continue, when the Senate takes up a bill, co-sponsored by Rubio and favored by the party’s staunchest immigration opponents, to crack down on so-called sanctuary cities.

But Rubio’s attempts to explain his trajectory on immigration — from chief GOP advocate of sweeping reform to largely disavowing that effort and now advocating an enforcement-first approach — is drawing criticism from all sides.


“He’s being very sloppy in the way he’s answering questions,” said Alfonso Aguilar, executive director of the American Principles Project’s Latino Partnership, which pushes conservative causes among Latinos. “He’s being very vague.”

Immigration advocates who were Rubio’s allies just two years ago are now threatening electoral retribution if he becomes the Republican nominee next year. To them, Rubio’s pro-reform role in the 2013 immigration battle and his Latino heritage won’t be enough to make up for his distancing himself from his chief legislative initiative.

And among the hard right, critics of his immigration stances say Rubio’s views have changed little in the campaign: The Florida senator still espouses positions on the high-octane issue that are largely unpopular with Republican primary voters.

“At this point, there’s very little he’s backed off” of, said Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, one of Rubio’s chief GOP nemeses on immigration. “On a series of issues, I don’t think he’s ever backed off of the fundamentals of the bill.”

Rubio’s complex history on immigration will be back in the spotlight when the GOP-led Senate takes up the sanctuary cities measure, which was spearheaded by Sen. David Vitter (R-La.), one of the most hard-line opponents of looser immigration policies. Sanctuary cities are localities that decline to cooperate with federal immigration authorities, believing their policies can invite racial profiling and harm local policing strategies. When Vitter rolled out the bill earlier this month, Rubio was one of more than a half-dozen Republican co-sponsors.

The measure on the Senate floor Tuesday would impose a five-year mandatory minimum prison sentence for some immigrants who repeatedly try to enter the United States illegally. Vitter and other conservative Senate Republicans — such as Texas Sen. Ted Cruz — have been on the attack against sanctuary cities since July, when authorities say a Mexican immigrant in the country illegally shot and killed a young woman in San Francisco. Most Senate Democrats will vote to block it, aides said Monday.

Understanding Rubio’s immigration views requires grasping his positions on both policy and procedure.

Rubio has not disavowed his stances on immigration during his presidential campaign. He still supports bolstering security measures, like more resources on the border and a mandatory employment-verification system. He also wants to reform the immigration system for highly skilled workers, seeing it as an economic boon to the United States. Finally, he would ultimately find a way for the 11 million undocumented immigrants here to obtain legal status.

All those provisions were essentially in the Senate bill Rubio pushed two years ago, and they are the three prongs of his immigration platform outlined in his book, “American Dreams.” Rubio said the lesson he took from his 2013 experience is that it’s impossible to get a comprehensive bill through a divided Congress, so a piecemeal approach is more effective.

But breaking up the issue into chunks — Rubio’s current refrain — would only ensure that a pathway to citizenship would never actually begin, veterans of immigration battles in Washington say.

Rubio emphasizes border security and stopping illegal immigration, but declines to lay out specifics on what that would look like. In an interview last month with Fox News, he said the debate about legalization shouldn’t even begin until after illegal immigration is halted and the legal immigration system is fixed – and it's difficult to discern what the overall time frame would actually be because he isn't specific about what it means to stop illegal migration.

“The big difference between Rubio’s views in 2013 versus Rubio of 2015 is that he does not want to be pinned down on when exactly legalization would begin,” said Kerri Talbot, former chief counsel for Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) and one of the key staffers behind the Senate "Gang of Eight" bill. “It seems he does not want legalization to begin while he would be president.”

On the campaign trail, Rubio also stresses opposition to a so-called special pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants – meaning a way to eventually become a citizen that isn’t offered to other immigrants. Talbot said Senate negotiators wrote the Gang of Eight bill in a way that would allow Rubio to say there was no special path, because other immigrants – such as refugees who had already been in the United States – could technically also qualify for that pathway to citizenship.

“If you create a special pathway, you make it impossible to do anything on immigration,” Rubio told CNBC this month. “The argument you hear from people is: ‘Why should someone who came here illegally be able to access citizenship or a green card faster than someone who came here legally?’”

Still, Rubio’s tactics have allowed him to play both sides of the immigration divide, argued Frank Sharry, a longtime immigration advocate who leads the left-leaning pro-reform group America’s Voice.

“He’s saying to donors and to Latinos that I’m still for a path to citizenship, I’m still for immigration reform. But I’ve learned the hard way” regarding a comprehensive bill, Sharry said. “It’s very clever. It sounds reasonable. But for people who actually know what it takes to pass legislation, especially immigration reform legislation, it’s so hollow. It has all the substance of Cheetos.”

Aguilar, an immigration official under President George W. Bush, agreed.

“How long will it take? Give us an idea. How long it will take to get there?” he said. “Ten years, he supports a path to a green card which means a path to citizenship. The debate happens 10 years then? Or now? This is the problem.”

Aguilar added: “That is the kind of sloppiness that I think opens the door for a lot of people, Democrats in a general election, to question if he’s really committed to immigration reform.”

Rubio's campaign spokesman, Alex Conant, pointed to the senator’s book when asked about Rubio’s immigration positions. He declined to respond when asked how a President Rubio would deem the border secure, or how long the entire immigration process under Rubio’s presidency would take.

Kica Matos, director of immigrant rights and racial justice at the Center for Community Change, argued that Rubio’s positions will spur a backlash among key voting blocs in 2016, adding: “Being Latino is not enough. You have to show some level of commitment to issues that affect the Latino community.”

When asked how Rubio has handled immigration on the campaign trail, Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) responded: “Poorly.”

“He should just affirm what he believed in and what he worked with his colleagues on,” Gutierrez said. “I was very, very grateful to him and said so publicly on numerous occasions … You know, in these days, you have to have backbone.”

On the sanctuary cities issue, Rubio’s sponsorship of that bill came after the conservative outlet Breitbart News pummeled the Florida senator for not yet signing on to an enforcement-focused immigration bill.

Conant indicated that the coverage wasn’t a factor, saying the senator co-sponsored the Vitter legislation as soon as it was available. Rubio’s Senate aides, Conant said, had long been in contact with other key GOP offices, including Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn of Texas, on crafting a sanctuary cities measure.

But Rubio has his defenders. Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona, a Gang of Eight member who has had his own quibbles with the sanctuary cities measure, said Rubio’s endorsement of the immigration crackdown bill did not violate “at all” the basic principles of the 2013 bill.

“Most of us would still move ahead with comprehensive reform if we could,” Flake said. “But absent that, most of us are willing to move ahead piecemeal if we can."