Daily Times

United States immigration authorities said on Wednesday they would look at social media accounts and deny visas or residence permits to people who post content considered anti-Semitic by President Donald Trump’s administration.

Posts defined as anti-Semitic will include social media activity in support of groups classified by the United States as terrorists, including Hamas, Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Yemen’s Houthis.

The move comes after the Trump administration has controversially cancelled visas for students inside the US, where the first amendment of the constitution guarantees freedom of speech. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem “has made it clear that anyone who thinks they can come to America and hide behind the first amendment to advocate for anti-Semitic violence and terrorism – think again. You are not welcome here”, department spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement.

The US Citizenship and Immigration Services “will consider social media content that indicates an alien endorsing, espousing, promoting or supporting anti-Semitic terrorism, anti-Semitic terrorist organisations or other anti-Semitic activity as a negative factor” in determining benefits, the statement said.

The policy would take effect immediately and apply to student visas and requests for permanent resident “green cards” to stay in the US.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said late last month that he has stripped visas for some 300 people and was doing so on a daily basis.

Rubio said that non-US citizens do not have the same rights as Americans and that it was at his discretion, not that of judges, to issue or deny visas.

A number of people stripped of visas contend that they never voiced antipathy for Jews, with some saying that they were targeted because they found themselves in the same place as protests.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has already stripped roughly 300 international students of their visas.

“We do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa,” he said.

The first student arrested as part of the effort was Mahmoud Khalil, a 30-year-old Palestinian former graduate student at Columbia University.

Khalil, who has a green card, was nabbed by ICE agents last month for his role in helping organize several anti-Israel protests at Columbia.

Khalil is currently detained in an ICE detention center in Louisiana, where he is fighting the Trump administration’s push to deport him.