Secretary of State Marco Rubio has ordered U.S. embassies and consulates around the world to temporarily suspend scheduling of new student visa interviews as the Trump administration weighs requiring all foreign students to undergo social media vetting.
Politicoreported that a cable signed by Rubio on Tuesday said that "effective immediately, in preparation for an expansion of required social media screening and vetting, consular sections should not add any additional student or exchange visitor... visa appointment capacity until further guidance is issued."
While social media screening isn't new, previous efforts were largely focused on returning students who may have taken part in protests against Israel's annihilation of Gaza. The State Department cable does not specifically state what the expanded social media screening will look for, although it alludes to President Donald Trump's executive orders aimed at combating
terrorism and antisemitism.
Trump's January 29 order titled "Additional Measures to Combat Antisemitism" authorizes the deportation of noncitizen students and others who took part in protests against Israel's war on Gaza, which has killed more than 54,000 Palestinians and is the subject of an International Court of Justice genocide case.
Last month, the Department of Homeland Security
announced the launch of a task force to surveil immigrants' social media posts, including those of around 1.5 million foreign students, for alleged antisemitism. While DHS did not say how antisemitism would be defined, critics note that the Trump administration has adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition, which conflates opposition to Zionism—the settler-colonial movement for a Jewish homeland in Palestine—with hatred of Jews.
Earlier this year, the State Department also
launched a controversial artificial intelligence-powered "catch and revoke" program to cancel the visas of international students deemed supportive of the Palestinian resistance group Hamas.
Rubio has invoked
Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 to designate for deportation pro-Palestine international students who the government admits committed no crimes. These include Mahmoud Khalil, Mohsen Mahdawi, and Yunseo Chung—all permanent U.S. residents—as well as Rümeysa Öztürk, Ranjani Srinivasan, and others.
The Trump administration's dubious legal arguments have
not fared well in courts, as several judges have temporarily blocked the administration from proceeding with deportations of foreign students.
Earlier this month, for example, a federal judge
ruled that Öztürk—who was snatched off a Massachusetts streets by plainclothes federal agents and flown to a notorious Immigration and Customs Enforcement lockup in Louisiana—had been illegally arrested and ordered her immediate release.
Under mounting legal and public pressure, the Trump administration recently
reinstated the legal status of hundreds of terminated foreign students. However, for some, the move came too late, as they have been banned from entering the United States.
Meanwhile, the administration's draconian treatment of international students has put many off of studying in the U.S., a situation universities in other nations are exploiting in a
bid to attract applicants who are rejected by—or choose to eschew—the United States as a higher learning destination.
On Tuesday, American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick cited figures from the Association of International Educators
showing that noncitizen students studying at U.S. colleges and universities contributed $43.8 billion to the nation's economy and supported 378,175 jobs during the 2023-24 academic year.
"If the United States stops taking foreign students, the economic impact would be catastrophic," Reichlin-Melnick
said on social media, adding that the Trump administration's pause on international applicants "should be seen as a deliberate attempt to crash the U.S. economy by destroying higher education."
