How A Biden Era Software Is Being 'Misused' To Flag Immigrants, Revoke Visas

A Department of Homeland Security task force has been especially created to search the social media histories of around 1.5 million immigrant students in the United States to find grounds for revoking their visas, according to a report by NBC News.

The Trump administration announced on Wednesday that moving forward, it would consider any forms of antisemitic activity on social media and "physical harassment of Jewish individuals" as grounds to revoke or deny immigration benefits.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem "has made it clear that anyone who thinks they can come to America and hide behind the First Amendment to advocate for anti-Semitic violence and terrorism - think again," she added. "You are not welcome here."

According to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the policy will consider social media content that indicates an immigrant is "endorsing, espousing, promoting, or supporting antisemitic terrorism, antisemitic terrorist organisations, or other antisemitic activity" as a negative factor in their application. This means that immigrants who have expressed support for groups like Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, or Ansar Allah (also known as the Houthis) on social media may be denied immigration benefits.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights and advocacy organisation said that the new policy is reminiscent of "McCarthyism", a tactic that violated privacy rights and was used to identify alleged communists in the Cold War.

"The spirit of Joseph McCarthy is alive and well in the Trump administration, which has spent months dishonestly mischaracterising 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," the organisation's National Deputy Director Edward Ahmed Mitchell said in a statement.

The interesting part is that the data analytics tools that are now being used to scrutinise social media was enhanced during the Biden administration. However, the usage was completely different. A former Biden administration DHS official said that, "We were not targeting political activity or speech. We would only review them if they were inciting violence", very different from using the tools to search social media of non violent students.

Customs and Border Protection's National Targeting Center and National Vetting Center are handling the tools that the DHS is using to make sure security threats do not enter the United States. Potential red flags are alerted to the Citizenship and Immigration Services, which then asks the State Department if the student's visa should be revoked.

Once it is decided that their visa needs to be revoked, the task force informs Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in local field offices to arrest and deport the student.

According to media reports, about 300 immigrant students were stripped off their visas.

Earlier the investigative work would have been done at the field office level, and then shared with ICE officers. But now, the agents are taking orders from people they do not know in the task force in Washington and are not even provided a clear guidance about why a particular person is being targeted.

The ICE Chief of Staff Jon Feere has criticised the Student and Exchange Visitor Program and has written articles for the Center for Immigration Studies, an organisation that advocates for reduced immigration to the United States.

"Blatant, widespread fraud has become a central part of America's foreign student program, and the government agencies responsible for putting an end to it have been asleep at the wheel for far too long," Feere said in an article he wrote.