Joe Rogan on his podcast “The Joe Rogan Experience”.Image: screenshot/youtube
The podcaster is considered an opinion maker by many Republicans. But now he has clear words against Trump’s ICE operations.
Jan 16, 2026, 8:16 p.mJan 16, 2026, 8:16 p.m
Joe Rogan is one of the most famous podcasters in the world. Around 10 million people listen to the company every episode and it is considered a key opinion maker in the USA – especially among swing voters. When he publicly spoke out in favor of Donald Trump as president in 2024, he influenced thousands of mostly young men. In a podcast episode, the 58-year-old found surprisingly critical words for the Trump administration.
In the new episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” the host spoke with a Republican politician about what’s happening in Minnesota. An American citizen was shot and killed by an ICE officer in the US state last week. There are dozens of videos circulating online that document the whole thing. A tragedy that some Trump voters also strongly condemn.
“To me it seemed incredibly wrong.”
Joe Rogan is one of these. The murder of Renee Nicole Good In the podcast he describes it as a “terrible catastrophe” and said: “I know the situation was very tense, but to me it seemed incredibly wrong.” Such events would affect him very much, especially if the victims were women.
In general, Rogan doesn’t seem to be a fan of the immigration agency ICE. “I can understand the perspective of those who say, ‘You don’t want militarized people running around the streets arresting people, many of whom turn out to be US citizens who just don’t have their papers with them,'” said the podcaster. And further:
“Do we really want to become the Gestapo? Have we really reached this point?”
The Secret State Police, known as the Gestapo for short, was the political police of the German regime during the Nazi era from 1933 to 1945.
“It’s ugly to see”
With his statements, Rogan also goes against the views of US Vice President JD Vance. After the death of Renee Nicole Good, he assured the ICE officers that they would be “protected by absolute immunity”. According to Vance, Good tried to run over the officer. That’s why she’s a domestic terrorist.
However, Rogan seems to have interpreted the video differently: “It’s very ugly to see someone shoot a US citizen in the face. That looked terrible. When people say it was justified because she hit him with the car, to me it looked more like she was somehow steering the car to the side,” Rogan says in the podcast.
@terfralilo197714 In a recent episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” Joe Rogan compared US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to the Gestapo, openly opposing President Donald Trump and his administration’s immigration enforcement policies. He expressed shock at the shooting death of 37-year-old Gudiel by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, calling the incident “horrific,” questioning the Trump administration’s justification for the event, and criticizing the militarization of ICE enforcement. He even posed the rhetorical question, “Are we really going to become the Gestapo?”, suggesting that this aggressive enforcement approach could damage the fundamental trust within American free society.
The American’s statements are now being hotly discussed in the media. CNN asked former Republican strategist David Urban and wanted to know how strongly Rogan’s opinion is also represented among Republicans. He then replied:
“This attitude is omnipresent. Many people voted for Trump because they wanted to see the borders become more secure. But what they don’t want to see are masked men running down the street asking Americans for their papers and arresting them.”
David Urban on ICE.
Urban also believes that Republicans would not have voted for such a strategy. “That will have an impact on the number of voters. Immigration was Trump’s strongest area. This strategy now weakens him in this area. If he loses Joe Rogan too, he will have a problem,” concludes the 62-year-old.
“It’s not surprising that people don’t like it when ICE shows up.”
In his statement, the strategist also made a comparison to the Obama administration. The 44th US President also deported many people. In contrast to today, however, these were people who were intercepted directly at the borders, not people who had already integrated into a community. He added: “It’s not surprising that people don’t like it when ICE shows up and takes away people with whom they have some kind of relationship.”
In the same report, CNN political commentator Karen Finney also commented on Urban’s statement. She added: “It’s not just that we don’t like people we know being taken away from us. It’s the way it’s done. With violence. With terror.”
“That’s exactly what he voted for”
Reactions to Joe Rogan’s statements have been mixed on social media. Some of his Republican supporters are disappointed in the podcaster and write comments on clips from the episode such as: “I was a big fan, but now I have to unfollow Joe” or “Why is he suddenly acting so left-wing?” While some Democratic viewers found Rogan’s classification important, they are generally of the opinion that the podcaster voted exactly for it and now has no right to complain.
This is not the first time that Joe Rogan has been critical of ICE. In previous podcast episodes, he has criticized Donald Trump’s mass deportation policy and described the Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids as “f*cking nuts”.