The Trump administration is revoking the visas of pro-Hamas foreign students in the United States “every day” as it wages a heavy-handed crackdown on terrorist sympathizers, according to the State Department.
“The department, I can say this, specifically revokes visas every day in order to secure America’s borders and keep our communities safe and will continue to do so because the process is ongoing,” State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce said in a press conference Friday afternoon.
Several weeks after the launch of an artificial intelligence-driven effort to police social media for pro-Hamas posts from foreign students, one congressman told the Washington Examiner that the problem is “widespread” and needs to be addressed by Congress.
“I applaud President Trump and Secretary Rubio for their efforts ridding our educational institutions from terrorist sympathizers and antisemitism,” Rep. Nick Langworthy (R-NY) said in a statement. “It’s clear by what has occurred on college campuses that this is a widespread problem and I am thrilled we have an Administration that is taking action.”
As of Thursday, the State Department had revoked the visas of over 300 foreign college and university students as part of a White House crackdown on pro-Hamas rioters who targeted campuses last year.
“It might be more than 300 at this point. We do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters at a news conference while traveling through Guyana on Thursday.
The State Department did not offer additional details on its overall target goals for visa revocations and how many others it is considering.
At a separate press conference in Paramaribo, Suriname, on Thursday, Rubio responded to a reporter’s question about why the government was targeting foreign students in the United States.
“We let them in our country to study,” Rubio said. “They didn’t say, ‘I want to go to university, and I want to vandalize your library, and I want to chase Jewish students down the street, and I want to wear a mask over my face like if it’s Halloween and terrorize people.’ We didn’t give them a visa to do any of that.”
The State Department has begun harnessing the power of AI to go after visa recipients in the U.S. who appear to express sympathy for Hamas and other terrorist groups.
Under a “catch and revoke” program that Rubio has launched recently but has not yet announced, the Trump administration is scanning social media posts to identify non-U.S. citizens residing in the country who are believed to support Hamas, according to Axios.
At the same time in mid-March, Langworthy introduced the Veto Your Visas Act, which would rescind student visas from those found to be involved with a foreign terrorist organization such as Hamas.
The bill would require universities and colleges to report to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Student and Exchange Visitor Information System immediately if they learn of a student’s participation or endorsement of terrorism-related activities.
“I am hopeful that my legislation, the Veto Your Visas Act, is passed so this policy can be codified into law regardless of who is in the White House,” Langworthy said.
State employees are using AI to search for social media posts in which visa recipients sympathize with the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel that resulted in the deaths of 1,139 people and the captivity of some 250 hostages.
The law states that students will be stripped of their visas if they are suspended or expelled from a college or university or arrested while studying in the U.S.
The State Department is now looking at internal databases to determine if any visa recipients were arrested but not removed from the country, given the wide-scale pro-Palestinian protests.
On Jan. 20, President Donald Trump warned that “all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests” were being “put on notice.”
“Come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you,” Trump said, according to a White House fact sheet. “I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.”
Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, Rubio has the authority to rescind visas of noncitizens he determines to be a threat to U.S. interests, a condition he echoed in a Fox News appearance days after the Oct. 7 attack when he was a senator.
THE PROBLEMS COMPLICATING TRUMP’S PLANS TO HOUSE IMMIGRANTS AT GUANTANAMO BAY
The rollout comes two weeks since the Trump administration’s first document revocation of Mahmoud Khalil, a green-card holder and recent graduate of Columbia University who helped lead protests over Israel’s war in Gaza.
The AI program has raised First Amendment concerns, with free speech and Arab American groups viewing the Gaza focus as a slippery slope that could conflate pro-Palestinian sentiment with support for Hamas itself. However, the State Department argues that the U.S. would never have approved the visas in the first place had the views of certain activists been known.
