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u.s. state department
Screening of Student Visa Applicants' Social Media Denounced as Attack on Free Speech
One First Amendment expert warned the new Trump administration policy will "inevitably chill legitimate political speech both inside and outside the United States."
Jun 19, 2025
International students will once again be able to apply for U.S. visas following a cable sent Wednesday from the U.S. State Department to embassies and consulates—but not without being subjected to what one political scientist denounced "ideological purity tests" imposed by the Trump administration.
Nearly a month after Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the agency was pausing all student visa interviews amid the Trump administration's sweeping push to rid American universities of foreign students who have publicly supported Palestinian rights—as well as Chinese students and those accused of having ties to the Chinese Communist Party—the State Department said applications will once again be accepted, but scholars' social media use will be rigorously reviewed for signs of "hostility" toward the United States.
Applicants for F academic visas, M visas for vocational students, and J visas for educational and cultural exchanges will be required at their visa interviews to make all of their social media accounts accessible to consular officers who conduct their interviews, so officers can search for "any indications of hostility towards the citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles of the United States."
Both new and returning student visas applicants will be subject to the new screenings, and consular officers were instructed in the cable to take "detailed case notes" about students' online presence.
"Take screenshots to preserve the record against possible later alteration or loss of the information," read the cable.
"This new State Department policy is a digital-age version of a policy that history has already discredited."
Students who are found to "demonstrate a history of political activism" will be flagged under the new social media guidelines, and consular officers are being directed to "consider the likelihood they would continue such activity in the United States."
Sarah Spreitzer, vice president of the American Council on Education, told The New York Times that the organization is "very worried that this is going to be some political litmus test that's going to be applied to students."
Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said the new policy will "inevitably chill legitimate political speech both inside and outside the United States."
"This policy makes a censor of every consular officer," added Jaffer.
The new screening procedures followed the Trump administration's detention of and efforts to deport several foreign students who publicly expressed support for Palestinian rights, including Columbia University organizers Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi, Tufts University student and op-ed author Rümeysa Öztürk, and Georgetown University academic Badar Khan Suri. The latter three scholars have been released from detention in recent weeks after court rulings, but Khalil remains imprisoned in Louisiana. A judge in New Jersey determined last month that his detention is "likely" unconstitutional and ruled last week that the Trump administration cannot detain or deport Khalil, who has not been charged with a crime, but he has yet to be released.
The State Department cable instructed embassies and consulates to flag any social media activity that displayed "advocacy for, aid, or support for foreign terrorists and other threats to U.S. national security" and "support for unlawful antisemitic harassment or violence."
The communication did not detail how officials should determine what online comments or activity would qualify. Trump administration officials have openly conflated students' involvement in protests against Israel's U.S.-backed assault on Palestinians in Gaza with antisemitic, pro-terrorist activity.
The cable also contained a threat to student visa applicants if portions of their social media accounts remain "set to private" during their interviews.
In those cases, the directive says, "you should treat the case as any other where an applicant fails to provide certain information on request."
A bolded sentence added, "You must consider whether such failure reflects evasiveness or otherwise calls into question the applicant's credibility."
Jaffer noted that "some of the 20th century's most significant artistic and intellectual figures, including Pablo Neruda, Doris Lessing, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Graham Greene," were barred from entering the U.S. due to their ties to the Communist Party, after "ideological vetting" by U.S. officials.
"This new State Department policy," said Jaffer, "is a digital-age version of a policy that history has already discredited."
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'Hope He Smirks in Hell': Biden Spox Matt Miller Panned for Finally Acknowledging Israeli War Crimes
"The most cynical aspect of it all is that he is deluded enough to believe that now admitting what he knew all along makes him look principled," said one critic.
Jun 03, 2025
Matthew Miller—the former U.S. State Department spokesperson who smirked and lied his way through the Biden administration's support for Israel's annihilation of Gaza—now acknowledges that Israel has committed war crimes, but for many critics his admission is "too little, too late," as one critic said Tuesday.
Asked Monday by Sky News "Trump 100" podcast host Mark Stone whether Israel is committing genocide in Gaza—as alleged by a growing number of experts and in an ongoing International Court of Justice case—Miller said: "I don't think it's a genocide, but I think it is without a doubt true that Israel has committed war crimes."
"'Just following orders' alibi lost its efficacy after 1945."
When Stone said that "you wouldn't have said that at the podium" during his Biden administration tenure, Miller replied: "When you're at the podium, you're not expressing your personal opinion. You're expressing the conclusions of the United States government."
Numerous online critics blasted Miller's " just following orders" reply, with some noting that a number of State Department officials resigned in opposition to the Biden administration's support for Israel.
"Miller is a war criminal," Indian author and scholar Sunny Singh said, pointing to the legal principle established during the post-World War II Nuremberg Trials of Nazi officials stating that "the fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him."
Another academic, Oxford University professor and lawyer Alonso Gurmendi Dunkelberg, said that "Miller is a despicable person who willingly accepted to be the face of a genocide to provide cover for one of the most horrific mass atrocities of this century and is now trying to escape a sinking ship. He is irredeemable."
The Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project said on social media: "For months on end, in his position as State Department spokesperson, Matthew Miller lied through his teeth by denying Israel's war crimes and crimes against humanity against Palestinians in Gaza. Too little, too late, Matt, to finally admit it."
Entrepreneur-turned-commentator Arnaud Bertrand called Miller the "lowest of the low" in a lengthy social media post.
"Miller was quite literally the face of the U.S. covering for Israel, denying their war crimes on the podium day in and day out, all with his characteristic smirk," Bertrand said. "And NOW, after tens of thousands of women and children were massacred, he says he actually knew full well he was lying to the public, but that he was just doing his job and following orders."
"And the most cynical aspect of it all is that he is deluded enough to believe that now admitting what he knew all along makes him look principled," Bertrand added. "We're seeing more and more cases like his as the scale of the horrors that happened—and are still happening—in Gaza is becoming more and more impossible to deny. They're nothing more than opportunists trying to salvage their reputations on the graves of those they helped kill."
Miller's acknowledgment of Israeli war crimes marks a stark departure from what he typically said during many of his press briefings, when he repeatedly said that the Biden administration determined Israel was not breaking international law. Israel's conduct in the war prompted the International Criminal Court to issue arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged extermination and weaponized starvation—
Even as the Biden administration received hundreds of reports that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) were using U.S.-supplied weapons to kill and maim thousands of Palestinian civilians, Miller kept pushing the false narrative that Israel was not committing war crimes, despite internal department findings and outside expert assessments.
Miller went even further, accusing United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese of antisemitism in a bid to discredit her criticism of Israel and its U.S. and Western enablers, whom she called the "axis of genocide."
During one contentious exchange with journalist Sam Husseini, Miller acknowledged what many experts including in the Biden administration had warned: that the actual death toll in Gaza "could very well be more" than the roughly 38,000 Palestinians that the Gaza Health Ministry reported at the time. Asked by Husseini about a peer-reviewed study in the prestigious U.K. medical journal The Lancet estimating up to 186,000 indirect deaths in Gaza, Miller stumbled through his attempt at a response.
"You're smirking as you say that," Husseini said, giving birth to the "Count Smirkula" meme that dogged Miller for the rest of his tenure.
"Count Smirkula, Ma[t]thew Miller, stood on the podium day in and day out, denying Israel's war crimes," Palestinian engineer and researcher Bashar Zapen noted on social media. "The U.S. knew. Biden knew. Miller knew. He smirked every time he lied. Hope he smirks in hell."
During a press meeting on Tuesday, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said that the US is aware that the death toll in Gaza “could very well be more” than what has been reported. pic.twitter.com/Gqs4Mim9it
— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) July 10, 2024
Miller also said during the Sky News interview that there were "debates" about whether to suspend arms transfers to Israel, "and you saw at times us hold back certain arms while we negotiated the use of those arms."
However, at the time Miller denied that the Biden administration was considering any suspension of the billions of dollars in U.S. armed aid to Israel, which included bombs used in some of the deadliest IDF massacres in Gaza, such as the October 31, 2023 bombing of the Jabalia refugee camp with 2,000-pound bombs in which at least 126 civilians were killed in a bid to assassinate a single Hamas commander.
The Biden administration knew that the IDF had lifted all curbs on civilian harm following the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack, explicitly allowing the killing of an unlimited number of civilians in order to eliminate any Hamas member, no matter how low-ranking. Faced with growing congressional opposition to sending arms to Israel, the Biden administration repeatedly bypassed Congress to keep the armaments flowing.
The staggering Gaza death toll eventually prompted the Biden administration to temporarily suspend shipment of some arms including 2,000-pound bombs. But the shipments soon resumed and the death toll in Gaza—which now reportedly stands at more than 54,500 after nearly 20 months of Israel's onslaught and starvation-inducing siege—continued to rise.
Journalists—hundreds of whom have been killed or maimed by Israeli attacks in Gaza since October 2023—were particularly dismissive of Miller's acknowledgment.
"Zero respect for Matthew Miller,"
Washington Post opinion columnist Rana Ayyub wrote on the social media site X. "Day after day, he defended war crimes, gaslit the suffering of Gazans, and helped shape public opinion to justify atrocities—including the killing of journalists."
Palestinian journalist Abubaker Abed
said on the same site that "we will also never forgive and forget you, and you will always be remembered as the smirker of the Gaza Genocide."
"You also must be held accountable," he added.
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Critics Warn 'Office of Remigration' Is Just Right-Wing Code for Trump's Office of Ethnic Cleansing
Despite the acceleration in raids, "public polling is showing decreasing support for Trump's immigration agenda, as Americans wake up to the reality that mass deportation means arrests of our neighbors and friends."
May 30, 2025
Eight months after U.S. President Donald Trump publicly called for a policy of "remigration"—a term that's become a rallying cry among far-right groups in Europe and sparked comparisons to ethnic cleansing—the U.S. State Department said Thursday that it plans to create an office devoted to the project, with refugee aid resources diverted to Trump's rapidly accelerating mass deportation campaign.
A State Department official told Axios that the proposed creation of the Office of Remigration would be part of a broad reorganization of the agency, with a division that resettled Afghan people who supported the U.S. during the 20-year occupation of Afghanistan eliminated.
A proposal sent to Congress detailed how the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration's immigration work would be consolidated into three offices, including the Office of Remigration, to shift the bureau's focus "towards supporting the administration's efforts to return illegal aliens to their country of origin or legal status."
The office would be a "hub for immigration issues and repatriation tracking," according to the proposal.
Trump first called for a "remigration" program in September 2024 ahead of the presidential election, saying he would "return Kamala [Harris]'s illegal migrants to their home countries" in a post on his social media platform Truth Social.
The comment came amid his attacks on Haitian legal residents in Springfield, Ohio and Venezuelan migrants, claiming the U.S. was under an "invasion" and saying he would "ship them back to their country."
His use of the term remigration went largely unremarked on by the corporate media, said the news analysis group Media Matters at the time, but Zeteo founder Mehdi Hasan noted that Trump was "calling for the ethnic cleansing of legal immigrants in the United States."
"Public polling is showing decreasing support for Trump's immigration agenda, as Americans wake up to the reality that mass deportation means arrests of our neighbors and friends."
The term has been embraced by far-right groups in Europe including Alternative for Germany and Austria's Freedom Party, which called for the European Union to appoint a remigration commissioner last year.
Remigration policy has long been promoted by Austrian far-right activist Martin Sellner, who had communications with the white supremacist who killed 51 Muslim worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019. Sellner has denied involvement in the attacks.
On his website, Wired reported on Thursday, Sellner "lays out a three-phase plan to implement remigration" that includes "striking similarities to Trump's current immigration policies":
The primary aim of this phase is "stopping the invasion." The Trump administration, invoking the Alien Enemies Act in March, cited an alleged "invasion" by a Venezuelan gang as a source of authority to take unprecedented steps to remove migrants from the U.S.
Sellner's website also lists a number of "tools" that can be used to achieve remigration, which includes "stop family reunification"—something Trump was doing even in his first term in office. In the first phase, Sellner also encourages governments to "create an ultimatum and economic incentives to self-deport." The Trump administration is already purportedly offering undocumented immigrants a stipend of $1,000 if they use the CBP Home App to self deport.
Sellner adds that governments should "cut humanitarian aid" to force immigrants to stop entering the country. Last month, the Trump administration attempted to cut legal aid to unaccompanied migrant children, only for a court to temporarily block its efforts.
Julia Ebner, a researcher with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and the University of Oxford, told The Guardian last year that the term "sounds a lot more benign than what it actually stands for. Because, particularly in the context of Germany and Austria, there is still a very strong association of the term mass deportation with the Holocaust."
Far-right lawmakers and activists from the U.S., Germany, Ireland, and France were among more than 400 attendees at the first-ever Remigration Summit near Milan earlier this month. Jacky Eubanks, who was endorsed by Trump during her 2022 run for the Michigan House of Representatives, claimed in a speech at the summit that Europeans were the "founding stock" of the U.S., disregarding the existence of indigenous people across the continent.
The State Department is planning to open the Office of Remigration as the administration ramps up its mass deportation operations, with Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller informing immigration officials last week that federal agents should begin arresting 3,000 immigrants per day—tripling numbers from earlier this year.
The push has coincided with mandates for federal law enforcement agents to assist in raids and arrests and the targeting of people at formerly protected locations like courthouses.
"We're seeing the Trump administration take the unprecedented step of arresting non-citizens who are following the government's rules and procedures, and showing up for their court hearings," Nayna Gupta, the policy director for the American Immigration Council, told The Guardian on Thursday. "They are desperate to reach a certain number of arrests per day. And the only way they can find non-citizens easily and quickly is to go to the courthouses, where [immigrants] are doing exactly what they're supposed to do."
The Washington Post reported that Immigration and Customs Enforcement in more than 20 states have been directed to arrest people at courthouses during court proceedings.
"The Trump administration is pressuring judges in immigration courtrooms to function more like cogs in the mass deportation machinery rather than as fair and balanced arbiters of the law," Greg Chen, senior director of government relations for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told the Post. "That is not the way Americans want and understand our judicial system to work. Immigration judges should be worried about this."
Gupta said the administration is "doubling down" on its "illusion that they had been given a broad mandate to effectuate an aggressive immigration enforcement agenda."
Less than a third of Americans in a March Gallup poll agreed with Trump's stated goal of removing all undocumented immigrants from the United States; those who said "some" undocumented immigrants should be deported said that committing violent crimes should be a prerequisite for removal.
"Public polling is showing decreasing support for Trump's immigration agenda," said Gupta, "as Americans wake up to the reality that mass deportation means arrests of our neighbors and friends, masked agents in our communities, and people afraid to go to work and show up to school, in ways that undermine our local economies."
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