In March 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio launched an AI-fueled “Catch and Revoke” effort to cancel the visas of foreign nationals who appear to support Hamas or other designated terror groups. This program relies on the AI to scrape people’s social media to revoke visa applications of people who have been protesting Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. As of early April 2025, at least 600 people have apparently had their visas revoked because of this AI monitoring, a massive incursion into people’s right to free speech, freedom of assembly, and the right to protest.
The speed with which social media monitoring is growing is staggering. As of March 2025, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) has been working with web-scraping contractor ShadowDragon to pull data from over 200 different sites, social networks, apps, and services across the web to map out a person’s activity, movements, and relationships.
If they can do this to people with fewer rights than citizens now, they will do it to anyone they can, at any stage, as much as they can get away with it.
If they can do this to people with fewer rights than citizens now, they will do it to anyone they can, at any stage, as much as they can get away with it.