US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has instructed diplomats overseas to monitor the social media activity of student visa applicants to deny entry to those critical of the United States and Israel, according to a report.
On Tuesday, The New York Times cited two American officials as saying that Rubio issued the directive in a long cable to diplomatic missions overseas.
The directive is part of a broader campaign of deportations targeting students who have expressed support for Palestinians amid the ongoing genocidal war on Gaza or participated in campus protests against Israel.
Rubio 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.”
The cable sets out the broad parameters the diplomats should use to judge whether to deny a visa.
According to the report, applicants whose social media posts should be scrutinized are those who are “suspected of having terrorist ties or sympathies” and who either had a student or exchange visa between October 7, 2023, the start date of Israel’s war, and August 31, 2024 or had their visa terminated from the date of the war to the present.
Israel launched the war on Gaza on October 7, 2023, after the Hamas resistance movement, designated by the US as a “terrorist” group, waged the surprise Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the occupying entity in response to the Israeli regime’s decades-long violence against Palestinians. Since the start of the offensive, the Tel Aviv regime has killed over 50,000 Palestinians.
“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 Times reported.
The cable also states that applicants can be denied a visa if their behavior or actions show they bear “a hostile attitude toward US citizens or US culture (including government, institutions, or founding principles).”
Since becoming secretary of state in late January, Rubio has cancelled over 300 visas, many of them belonging to students, having personally signed off on every visa revocation.
This comes as the US continues with its crackdown on pro-Palestine activism.
Last week, Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish doctoral student at Tufts University, was arrested in a street in the town of Somerville, Massachusetts, the school's president said in a statement, over expressing pro-Palestine leanings in an article she co-authored.
Also last month, federal authorities arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate and a Palestinian activist who helped organize campus protests against Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza across the US last year.
Khalil has been facing deportation despite being a legal permanent resident in the US.
Earlier, the Department of Homeland Security arrested Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian student who had taken part in protests at Columbia University, for allegedly overstaying her F-1 student visa.
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