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artificial intelligence
Outrage Over Trump Use of AI to Revoke Visas of Students Deemed 'Hamas Supporters'
"Those pushing for this repression will come to realize the dangerous precedent it will set for freedom of speech," warned one critic.
Mar 07, 2025
In what one critic called "a dangerous new front in the Trump administration's multi-pronged assault on First Amendment rights," the U.S. State Department is launching an artificial intelligence-powered "catch and revoke" program to cancel the visas of international students deemed supportive of the Palestinian resistance group Hamas.
The State Department is working with the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security in what one senior official called a "whole of government and whole of authority approach" to identify and proscribe foreign nationals who appear to support Hamas or other groups the U.S. has designated as "terrorist organizations," Axiosfirst reported.
According to Axios' Marc Caputo, the effort includes "AI-assisted reviews of tens of thousands of student visa holders' social media accounts," and "marks a dramatic escalation in the U.S. government's policing of foreign nationals' conduct and speech."
The free speech administration, if they like what you say: www.axios.com/2025/03/06/s...
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— Nora Benavidez (@attorneynora.bsky.social) March 6, 2025 at 11:00 PM
Explaining the new policy, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Thursday: "We see people marching at our universities and in the streets of our country... calling for intifada, celebrating what Hamas has done... Those people need to go."
Responding to the news, Abed Ayoub, national executive director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), said in a statement that "this should concern all Americans."
"This is a First Amendment and freedom of speech issue and the administration will overplay its hand," Ayoub added. "Americans won't like this. They'll view this as capitulating free speech rights for a foreign nation."
ADC said:
By employing AI to track and flag individuals for potential visa revocation and/or deportation, the administration is effectively criminalizing peaceful political expression and dissent. Not since the aftermath of 9/11 has such wide-scale surveillance been directed at noncitizen communities, and the reliance on AI tools only magnifies the likelihood of errors, misidentifications, and abuses of discretion. This raises profound questions about privacy and constitutional protections—who is controlling this data, how is it being used, and where is the human oversight?
Progressive podcaster Brian Allen said on the social media site X, "Let's be clear: This is state surveillance on steroids."
"The Trump [administration] is using AI to monitor foreign students' social media and punishing them for political speech," he continued. "So much for 'free speech absolutism'—guess that only applies if you're a billionaire or a Republican."
"The message is loud and clear: Dissent will be crushed," Allen added. "The crackdown is here."
AI tools can't be trusted as experts on the First Amendment or the nuances of speech. Using AI to scour visa holders’ social media for “pro-Hamas” posts and report them to an administration threatening to deport international students for protected speech will undoubtedly encourage self-censorship.
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— Sarah McLaughlin (@sarahemclaugh.bsky.social) March 6, 2025 at 3:26 PM
Journalist Laila Al-Arian warned that "those pushing for this repression will come to realize the dangerous precedent it will set for freedom of speech."
The launch of "catch and revoke" follows a January executive order by President Donald Trump authorizing the deportation of noncitizen students and others who took part in protests against Israel's assault on Gaza, which left the coastal strip flattened and more than 170,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing; and around 2 million more forcibly displaced, starved, or sickened, according to local and international agencies.
"To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice," Trump said at the time. "We will find you, and we will deport you."
Earlier this week, Trump also threatened to cut off federal funding to schools that allow what he dubiously called "illegal protests."
"Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came," the president said on social media. "American students will be permanently expelled or... arrested."
The ACLU responded to Trump's threats by publishing an open letter to colleges and universities nationwide on Tuesday "urging them to reject any federal pressure to surveil or punish international students and faculty based on constitutionally protected speech."
ACLU legal director Cecilia Wang said: "It is disturbing to see the White House threatening freedom of speech and academic freedom on U.S. college campuses so blatantly. We stand in solidarity with university leaders in their commitment to free speech, open debate, and peaceful dissent on campus."
"Trump's latest coercion campaign, attempting to turn university administrators against their own students and faculty, harkens back to the McCarthy era and is at odds with American constitutional values and the basic mission of universities," Wang added, referring to the extreme repression during the Second Red Scare of the 1940s and '50s.
Israel's war on Gaza sparked the largest wave of nationwide protests—a significant number of them led by Jewish groups including Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow—since the Black Lives Matter movement. According to an analysis by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, 97% of the 553 campus protests it studied were nonviolent.
There were, however, numerous reports of pro-Israel counter-protesters and police attacking pro-Palestine demonstrators and encampments, including Jewish religious structures.
While few student protesters have endorsed Hamas—which for years was nurtured by Israel as a counterbalance to the Palestinian National Authority—or the October 7 attack, more have voiced support for Palestinian liberation "by any means necessary," including by armed struggle, a legitimate right under international law.
The United States and around two dozen other nations—all but one of them European or the result of European settler-colonialism—consider Hamas, whose political arm governs Gaza, a terrorist organization. Most of the Arab and wider Muslim world views Hamas, whose military wing led the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, as a legitimate movement for national liberation.
Meanwhile, scores of Global South countries, either directly or via regional blocs, and Ireland are backing a South Africa-led genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
The Trump administration has hit South Africa, as well as the International Criminal Court—which last year issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and Hamas leader Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity—with punitive sanctions.
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Watchdog Launches Probe of Trump-Musk Use of AI for Mass Firings of Federal Workers
"The American people deserve to know what is going on—including if and how artificial intelligence is being used to reshape the departments and agencies people rely on daily."
Mar 03, 2025
A watchdog organization on Monday launched a public records probe to determine the extent to which the Trump administration and its billionaire wrecking ball, Elon Musk, are using artificial intelligence as part of their lawless effort to purge the federal workforce.
"The American people deserve to know what is going on—including if and how artificial intelligence is being used to reshape the departments and agencies people rely on daily," said Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, the group behind the new investigation.
"We will continue to use every tool at our disposal to force the Trump-Vance administration to fulfill its obligation to the public and to our system of laws," Perryman added.
The probe comes days after NBC Newsreported that federal workers' responses to Musk's email ultimatum were "expected to be fed into an artificial intelligence system to determine whether those jobs are necessary."
"The information will go into an LLM (Large Language Model), an advanced AI system that looks at huge amounts of text data to understand, generate and process human language," the news outlet reported, citing unnamed sources. "The AI system will determine whether someone's work is mission-critical or not."
Additionally, according to The Washington Post, Musk lieutenants "have fed sensitive data from across the Education Department into artificial intelligence software."
"For an administration that claimed it wanted to bring about transparency and efficiency in government, the Trump-Vance administration's purge of public servants and sloppy processes have done just the opposite."
Democracy Forward said Monday that it would use Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests in an attempt to shine light on the administration's reliance on AI for personnel decisions. The Trump Justice Department argued in a court filing last week that the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, is exempt from public records requests—a claim that experts have rejected and condemned as an attempt to skirt oversight.
"For an administration that claimed it wanted to bring about transparency and efficiency in government, the Trump-Vance administration's purge of public servants and sloppy processes have done just the opposite," Perryman said Monday. "DOGE and this administration are operating in a shroud of secrecy, and their 'govern by chaos' tactics have only made government less efficient and caused disruptions to our safety and security."
Democracy Forward said its new FOIA requests were sent to DOGE as well as the Office of Personnel Management, the State Department, the Education Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the General Services Administration, among other agencies.
Wiredreported last month that "Thomas Shedd, the recently appointed Technology Transformation Services director and Elon Musk ally, told General Services Administration workers that the agency's new administrator is pursuing an 'AI-first strategy.'"
"Shedd provided a handful of examples of projects GSA Acting Administrator Stephen Ehikian is looking to prioritize, including the development of 'AI coding agents' that would be made available for all agencies," Wired added. "Shedd made it clear that he believes much of the work at [Technology Transformation Services] and the broader government, particularly around finance tasks, could be automated.
Geoffrey Fowler, the Post's technology columnist, noted Monday that "lots of recent evidence shows that relying on automation alone to make critical decisions can lead to big government mistakes."
"Just ask New York City, where last year a government AI chatbot advised businesses to break the law," Fowler wrote. "Or Australia, where a deeply flawed algorithm called Robodebt created the opposite of efficiency: the government had to settle for more than a billion dollars with citizens for wrongly reclaiming benefits."
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Starmer Condemned for Pushing 'Cringeworthy' Trade Deal With Lax Tech Regulations
"A tech trade deal with Trump would roll out the red carpet to tech billionaire oligarchy," said one critic.
Feb 27, 2025
Rights campaigners in the United Kingdom on Thursday greeted the news that British Prime Minister Keir Starmer had formally invited U.S. President Donald Trump to the U.K. for a state visit with a call for critics to "take to the streets" as they did during Trump's first term, as advocates condemned Starmer for "cozying up to a dangerous and megalomaniac U.S. president."
"This is the latest embarrassing step in Starmer's attempts to toady to Trump and provide a cloak of respectability to Trumpism," said the Stop Trump Coalition. "The British people reject Trumpism and all those in power who appease Trump. History will not be kind to this club of Trumpism cheerleaders."
Nick Dearden, director of the anti-poverty campaign group Global Justice Now, added that critics plan to "welcome" the U.S. president "in the traditional manner" after Starmer presented Trump with an official invitation from King Charles.
Starmer invited the president during his first meeting at the White House since Trump was elected to serve a second term in November, which came as a bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers introduced legislation to authorize comprehensive trade talks between the two countries regarding "tariff and nontariff barriers affecting any industry, product, or service sector."
Ahead of the meeting, Starmer told reporters that his message to Trump would be "really simple, that there is no more important relationship for the United Kingdom [than the U.S.], in defense, in security, in trade, in tech, in finance, and so much more."
"We are reforming permitting, getting things built, reducing barriers to investment and growth. And we're open for business, open for investment, and we're determined to help U.S. innovators thrive in the United Kingdom," said Starmer. "So my message is we want to work with you, we want to welcome you to Britain, we want a new partnership, because our history shows that when we work together, great things happen."
The comments were indicative of Starmer's push for cooperation with the U.S. on artificial intelligence and other "advanced technologies," which the new British ambassador to the U.S., Peter Mandelson, has dubbed a plan to "Make Our Economies Great Again," or MEGA.
Dearden called the proposal "cringeworthy" ahead of Starmer's meeting.
"We need to stop this," he said. "A tech trade deal with Trump would roll out the red carpet to tech billionaire oligarchy."
Global Justice Now earlier this month denounced Starmer and Trump for refusing to join 60 international signatories in supporting a declaration backing "inclusive and sustainable" AI at a summit in Paris, with U.S. Vice President JD Vance saying the Trump administration objected to "excessive regulation" of technology and critics suggesting the U.K. Labour government was attempting to curry favor with Trump.
Dearden said last week that any trade negotiations with the U.S. were likely to see Trump "pushing the demands of Big Tech oligarchs who want to avoid tax and regulation in the U.K."
"People in the U.K. don't want to see a wrecking ball taken to our regulations, standards, and public services, especially when we'e talking about new technologies like AI where we're only just beginning to get to grips with the dangers," said Dearden.
The U.K. is pushing to avoid the tariffs Trump has threatened for Canadian, Mexican, and E.U. imports. Trump said earlier this month that he believed differences with the U.K. on trade "can be worked out." He said Thursday that the tariffs targeting Canada and Mexico are set to take effect next week.
Dearden warned last week that with trade talks taking place behind closed doors, "tech titans" will be empowered "to make their demands away from the public gaze."
"Any potential for a Trump trade deal," he said, "must be taken off the table immediately."
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