Secretary of State Marco Rubio has ordered diplomats overseas to scrutinize the social media content of some applicants for student and other types of visas, in an effort to ban those suspected of criticizing the United States and Israel from entering the country, U.S. officials say.
Mr. Rubio laid out the instructions in a long cable sent to diplomatic missions on March 25.
The move came nine weeks after President Trump signed executive orders to start a campaign to deport some foreign citizens, including those who might have “hostile attitudes” toward American “citizens, culture, government, institutions or founding principles.”
Mr. Trump also issued an executive order to begin a crackdown on what he called antisemitism, which includes deporting foreign students who have taken part in campus protests against Israel’s war in Gaza.
Mr. Rubio’s directive said that starting immediately, consular officers must refer certain student and exchange visitor visa applicants to the “fraud prevention unit” for a “mandatory social media check,” according to two American officials with knowledge of the cable.
The fraud prevention unit of an embassy’s or consulate’s section for consular affairs, which issues the visas, helps screen applicants.
The cable described the broad parameters that diplomats should use to judge whether to deny a visa. It cited remarks that Mr. Rubio made in an interview with CBS News on March 16: “We don’t want people in our country that are going to be committing crimes and undermining our national security or the public safety,” he said. “It’s that simple, especially people that are here as guests. That is what a visa is.”
The cable specifies a type of applicant whose social media posts should be scrutinized: someone who is suspected of having terrorist ties or sympathies; who had a student or exchange visa between Oct. 7, 2023, and Aug. 31, 2024; or who has had a visa terminated since that October date.
Hamas attacked southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing 1,200 Israelis and taking about 250 hostages. That ignited a war in which Israel has carried out airstrikes and a ground invasion of Gaza that have killed more than 50,000 Palestinians, according to Gazan health ministry estimates.
The dates specified by Mr. Rubio in the cable indicate that one of the main aims of the social media searches is to reject the applications of students who have expressed sympathy for Palestinians during the war.
The cable also states that applicants can be denied a visa if their behavior or actions show they bear “a hostile attitude toward U.S. citizens or U.S. culture (including government, institutions, or founding principles.)”
Such wording could spur foreign citizens to self-censor many kinds of speech to avoid jeopardizing their chances of getting a visa.
And U.S. consular officers could find it difficult to judge an applicant’s past statements and social media posts, especially if they do not know the proper context.
Some foreign citizens who have a critical view of U.S. policies might forgo applying for a visa, which is a stated preferred outcome of Mr. Rubio’s.
The requested visa types that would set off extra scrutiny are F, M and J — student and exchange visitor visas, the cable said.
The details of the cable were first reported by The Handbasket, an independent news site.
A State Department spokesperson, when asked for comment, said the agency did not discuss internal deliberations. They pointed out that in 2019, the department changed visa application forms to ask for information about social media accounts.
As a senator from Florida, Mr. Rubio pressed the Biden administration’s State Department, run by Antony J. Blinken, to cancel the visas of students involved in campus protests against Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. Since becoming secretary of state in late January, Mr. Rubio has revoked perhaps 300 or more visas, many of them belonging to students, he told reporters last Thursday. He said he had been signing letters daily revoking visas.
“My standard: If we knew this information about them before we gave them a visa, would we have allowed them in?” he said. “And if the answer is no, then we revoke the visa.”
Earlier that day, responding to a reporter’s question, Mr. Rubio said the students were “going beyond demonstration. They are going and they are creating a ruckus. They are creating riots, basically, on campus.”
“Every one of them I find, we’re going to kick them out,” he added.
A State Department spokesperson said in an email in mid-March that “all available technology” was being used to screen visa applicants and visa holders. The spokesperson was replying to a question from The New York Times about whether the department was using artificial intelligence to scan databases and social media posts to find holders of visas that, in the eyes of Trump aides, should be revoked.
After signing the revocation letters, Mr. Rubio sends them to the Department of Homeland Security. The department has dispatched agents to detain some of the foreign citizens who have been stripped of their visas or, in a few cases, their status as a permanent U.S. resident, commonly known as a green card holder.
In early March, Mr. Rubio notified homeland security officials that he had revoked the permanent residency status of Mahmoud Khalil, 30, who had recently earned a graduate degree from Columbia University and was born in Syria, and Yunseo Chung, 21, an undergraduate at Columbia who was born in South Korea. He cited a statute of immigration law that allows him to recommend for deportation anyone whose presence would have “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”
Mr. Khalil is married to an American citizen, and Ms. Chung has lived in the United States since she was 7.
Last week, a half-dozen federal agents clad in black, some wearing masks, snatched Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish graduate student at Tufts University, off a street in Somerville, Mass., and took her to a detention center. Mr. Rubio said afterward that he had revoked her student visa.
Ms. Ozturk wrote an essay for a student newspaper last year calling for university support of Palestinian rights and divestment from Israel.
“At some point I hope we run out because we’ve gotten rid of all of them,” Mr. Rubio said last Thursday. “But we’re looking every day for these lunatics that are tearing things up.”
He added, “I encourage every country to do that, by the way, because I think it’s crazy to invite students into your country that are coming onto your campus and destabilizing it.”
Michael Crowley contributed reporting.
