U.S. authorities will examine the social media of foreigners seeking to enter the country as the Trump administration seeks to bar people it believes have engaged in antisemitic activity, the Department of Homeland Security announced Wednesday.
DHS will apply the scrutiny to foreign students, people applying for legal residency or any other kind of immigration benefit as part of a plan to “protect the homeland from extremists” and comply with executive orders issued by President Donald Trump, the agency said in a statement announcing the measure.
“There is no room in the United States for the rest of the world’s terrorist sympathizers, and we are under no obligation to admit them or let them stay here,” DHS Assistant Secretary of Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin said in the statement.
DHS said it would seek to keep out people who have demonstrated “support” for what it called “violent antisemitic ideologies” and organizations such as Hamas, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, or the Houthis.
The announcement raised immediate concerns, including how the U.S. would define what constitutes the support of antisemitic activity and whether any criticism of Israel or its conduct of the war in Gaza would be enough to bar someone from the country. It also raised broader questions about free speech and civil liberties.
“By surveilling visa and green card holders and targeting them based on nothing more than their protected expression, the administration trades America’s commitment to free and open discourse for fear and silence,” the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression wrote on X. “Unfortunately, that chill appears to be the administration’s aim.”
The Council on American-Islamic Relations accused the administration of “shredding the First Amendment” for the benefit of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“The spirit of Joseph McCarthy is alive and well in the Trump administration, which has spent months dishonestly mischaracterizing legitimate criticism of the Israeli government’s war crimes in Gaza as antisemitic, pursuing witch hunts into American colleges, and threatening the free speech rights of immigrants,” CAIR National Deputy Director Edward Ahmed Mitchell said in a statement.
The DHS directive comes as the administration moves to revoke visas and deport foreign students who took part in protests of the Israel-Gaza war that roiled college campuses last year. That includes Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate student and green-card holder who was arrested by immigration authorities in New York City and Rumeysa Ozturk, a doctoral student at Tufts University, who was detained near Boston.
The administration has launched investigations of institutions, including Columbia University, that have been accused of being overly tolerant of the harassment of Jewish students during the demonstrations.
US to check social media as it seeks to bar non-citizens suspected of antisemitism
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