In an early March announcement that was underreported at the time (but just became a lot more relevant in early April) the Trump regime revealed its intention to collect and presumably monitor social media handles of folks applying to legally work and reside in the United States:
https://theintercept.com/2025/03/23/trump-immigrants-social-media-citizenship-green-card/
Trump Wants Immigrants on U.S. Soil to Hand Over Social Media Accounts to Apply for Citizenship
"Collecting social media information, according to the USCIS proposal first posted March 5, is necessary “for the enhanced identity verification, vetting and national security screening.”
The proposal specifically cites Trump’s January 20 executive order, which advocates have warned goes well beyond the Muslim travel ban from Trump’s first term, which targeted people living abroad.
The new executive order stated that “the United States must ensure that admitted aliens and aliens otherwise already present in the United States do not bear hostile attitudes toward its citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles, and do not advocate for, aid, or support designated foreign terrorists and other threats to our national security.”
USCIS said the social media handles it collects would be used to determine if people applying for a variety of immigration statuses pose a “security or public-safety threat.”"
Of course, observers immediately noted the connection between this proposed policy and Trump's ideological policing, kidnaping, and attempted deportation of foreign students who participated in anti-Genocide protests and/or oppose the Trump regime:
"In light of Columbia University protester Mahmoud Khalil’s ongoing detention, one official from a Muslim civil rights group said the new policy poses special danger for critics of Israel and the Trump administration.
“This policy would disparately impact Muslim and Arab applicants seeking U.S. citizenship that have voiced support for Palestinian human rights,” said Robert McCaw, director of government affairs at the Council on American-Islamic Relations. “Collecting the social media identifiers of any potential green card applicants or citizens is the means to silencing their lawful speech.”
Furthermore, as a representative of the EFF presciently observed, there are few if any limits on the scope of what the government can do with this data if they get it, and modern AI technology allows for the regime to ideologically police and target a terrifying number of people who oppose our fascist overlords. It's also, strictly speaking, a violation of Constitutional rights:
"The policy proposal does not sketch out limits on how USCIS can use its newly acquired data, according to Saira Hussain, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Hussain said she was particularly concerned that the government might use artificial intelligence or other automated tools to punish speech it dislikes, pointing to a news report that the State Department is using AI to revoke the visas of people who allegedly express “pro-Hamas” sentiments.
Hussain said she feared a chilling effect, where people applying for a change in status refrain from speaking about potentially controversial issues.
“Anybody who is within the bounds of the United States has First Amendment rights,” she said. “The Constitution applies whether you are somebody who is a citizen or somebody who is a green card holder who is here in the United States. I think that this administration is trying to chip away at that notion, but that is very much what First Amendment jurisprudence has been under the courts.”
Finally, it should be pointed out that the regime's proposal gives no indication whatsoever of when the government would stop recording and monitoring the social media activities of the people it's targeting:
"CAIR’s McCaw said he worried that the policy could be used to continue tracking people’s activity on social media even after they become naturalized citizens.
“There’s no clear sign on when this intrusion into our electronics and communications will end,” he said."
#Fascism #DHS #ICE #Trump #AI #WhiteNationalism #SocialMedia #OnlineSurveillance #Immigration #MigrantRights #Islamophoba #Palestine #Genocide #PoliceState #McCarthyism #USCIS #Nativism
