(Dave DeCamp, Antiwar.com) Secretary of State Marco Rubio is launching an AI-driven effort to revoke the visas of foreigners in the US who “appear pro-Hamas” in a crackdown targeting pro-Palestine protests on college campuses, Axios reported on Thursday.
The report said the effort will involve AI-assisted reviews of social media accounts of tens of thousands of foreign students in the US on visas that will look for “evidence of alleged terrorist sympathies expressed after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.”
The language in the report suggests that any foreign students who attend pro-Palestine demonstrations or express sympathy for Palestinians online could be swept up in the crackdown since opponents of the Israeli siege on Gaza or US military support for Israel are often labeled “pro-Hamas.”
Civil liberty groups have strongly criticized President Trump’s promises to deport foreign students who attend pro-Palestine protests since the speech of foreigners inside the US is supposed to be protected under the First Amendment.
“If we open the door to expelling foreign students who peacefully express ideas out of step with the current administration about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we should expect it to swing wider to encompass other viewpoints too,” Sarah McLaughlin, senior scholar at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), said in an op-ed for MSNBC in January.
“Today it may be alleged ‘Hamas sympathizers’ facing threats of deportation for their political expression. Who could it be in four years? In eight?” McLaughlin added.
Abed Ayoub, head of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, told Axios that Americans won’t like the State Department’s effort because they’ll view it as “capitulating free speech rights for a foreign nation.”
The new State Department project is part of a broader administration effort against protests that are critical of Israel, which includes threats from President Trump that universities that allow what he called “illegal protests” would lose federal funding. The Department of Justice also launched a new task force investigating alleged incidents of “antisemitism” on college campuses.
This article originally appeared at Antiwar.com.
