“Fake and Illegitimate”: Rubio Tells the Federalist Society the ICC Does Not Rule Americans

Written By TNT Staff, Posted on November 15, 2026

Secretary of State Marco Rubio went to the Federalist Society’s National Lawyers Convention on Friday with a message aimed as much at The Hague as at the lawyers in the room. The International Criminal Court, he said, is a “fake and illegitimate” tribunal that has appointed itself “judge and jury and executioner of the international order,” including over countries that never joined it.

The United States is one of those countries. “Americans have never agreed to submit to the ICC’s authority,” Rubio told the convention at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, according to a State Department transcript. The court and “its allies in the global bureaucracy,” he said, claim “the right to rule over everyone, but they are accountable to no one, armed with the power to investigate, to prosecute, to persecute, and to jail our citizens according to laws we neither consent nor control.”

A court Americans never joined

That is not a new American position. It is a new willingness to enforce it. On Oct. 9, the United States sanctioned the ICC itself under Executive Order 14203, a step Rubio called unprecedented. “America never joined the court. We don’t need it. And we don’t want it,” he said in the State Department statement announcing the designation. “President Trump will never allow the International Criminal Court to prosecute Americans.” The statement ended with a choice for the court: “Either the ICC will end its threats, or we will end the ICC.”

Friday’s speech explained why the administration thinks those threats are not abstract.

Rubio said “international law” has been “invoked against nearly every major foreign policy decision or action of this administration.” When President Trump “ordered our military to sink cartel boats in the Caribbean,” Rubio said, “we were told that they were violating international law.” The “founding chief prosecutor of the fake and illegitimate International Criminal Court even accused us of crimes against humanity.”

When American forces “captured Nicolás Maduro, a fugitive of American justice, and brought him to the United States to face that justice,” he said, “we heard the same accusations from the highest levels of” the United Nations. Even “the enforcement of our own immigration laws here on American soil” has been attacked, he said, with groups like the ACLU “petitioning the United Nations to investigate ICE.” After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, he added, “UN human rights experts” denounced the decision “as a betrayal of America’s binding legal obligations under international law.”

“None of this has anything to do with any real higher standard of justice,” Rubio said. “It is a function of the people who control the official organs of global governance” — a “sprawling network of NGOs and agencies staffed by international activists and bureaucrats, along with their patrons here in the United States and around the world.”

For that “global elite,” he said, international law “is not a neutral body of rules; international law is an instrument, an instrument to advance their interests under the pretense of universal principles.” They “lecture us on the importance of sovereignty even as they demand that nations surrender control of their borders and outsource their immigration laws to unelected international courts.”

Consent, not “paper decrees”

The American answer, as Rubio framed it, is older than the ICC. Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. A court the United States never joined cannot invent a jurisdiction the American people never granted.

“They can certainly try,” Rubio said of the court’s claims. “But if they’re foolish enough to try to enforce their paper decrees on Americans, our answer will probably be the same as the Roman general, Pompey, when he said to those who were trying to invoke their cities’ charters against his legions. He said, ‘Stop quoting laws to men with swords.'”

The line drew laughter and applause in the room. The policy behind it is already in force. The Oct. 9 designation, issued under section 1(a)(ii)(A) of Executive Order 14203, is meant, Rubio said at the time, to “ban transactions with this rogue court, cutting off their resources and crippling its ability to operate.” The administration left the door open to a diplomatic off-ramp if states that belong to the court reined it in. Friday’s speech did not sound like a government waiting on one.

Rubio told the Federalist Society that the deepest question is not a treaty clause. “The ultimate question of our time,” he said, “is whether Americans have a moral right to exist as a distinct nation and a distinct people, and thus to demand a government that defends and pursues our interests above all else.”

A court that claims the power to jail Americans for carrying out the laws and foreign policy of their own government has already answered that question for itself. The Trump administration is answering it the other way.

Sources: U.S. State Department, “Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Federalist Society’s 2026 National Lawyers Convention,” Mayflower Hotel, Washington, D.C. (Nov. 13, 2026); Secretary Rubio, “Imposing Sanctions on the International Criminal Court” (Oct. 9, 2026).

TNT Staff