The State Department is reportedly embarking on an artificial intelligence-powered initiative to spot foreigners in the US who are sympathetic to Hamas or other terror organizations and revoke their visas.
Using AI tools, officials intend to pore through the social media accounts of foreign student visas and assess whether there’s evidence of sympathies toward Hamas in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack, Axios reported.
That effort, dubbed “Catch and Revoke,” will reportedly encompass a review of news articles to spot names of foreign nationals who engaged in anti-semitic activity.
“Those who support designated terrorist organizations, including Hamas, threaten our national security. The United States has zero tolerance for foreign visitors who support terrorists,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared Thursday.
“Violators of US law — including international students — face visa denial or revocation, and deportation.”
Authorities will also comb government databases to see whether the Biden administration permitted any visa holders who were arrested to remain within the country, per the report.
The revelation comes after President Trump declared earlier this week that all federal funds will cease for institutions of higher education that permit “illegal protests.”
“Agitators will be imprisoned/ or permanently sent back to the country from which they came,” he added on Truth Social. “American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on on the crime, arrested.”
The State Department’s effort is part of a “whole of government” approach to combating anti-semitism and includes collaboration with the Department of Homeland Security as well as the Justice Department.
“We found literally zero visa revocations during the Biden administration,” one official told Axios, “which suggests a blind-eye attitude toward law enforcement.”
Officials had looked through 100,000 individuals in the student visa system since Oct. 2023 to gauge whether the Biden administration had pursued any revocations, Axios reported.
There were an estimated 1.5 million active F-1 and M-1 student visas in 2023, according to data from the DHS.
Rubio, 53, enjoys broad powers under the Immigration Nationality Act of 1952 to yank visas from foreigners considered to be a threat.
As a senator, Rubio had called for the Biden administration to pull visas in response to the surge in anti-semitism across the country in the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack.
Back in January, as first reported by The Post, Trump, 78, had ordered federal agencies to flag “all civil and criminal authorities” at their disposal to combat anti-semitism.
The executive order specifically called for visas to be revoked against foreign students who violated the law during the anti-Israel unrest that swept campuses across the country last year.
“I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before,” Trump declared in the executive order.
Critics have raised free speech concerns, but a State Department official countered that “it would be negligent for the department that takes national security seriously to ignore publicly available information about [visa] applicants in terms of AI tools.”
Scores of Republicans in Congress have cheered Trump’s push to crack down on anti-semitism on campuses.
“We have a president who has a moral clarity about what freedom in America is all about,” House Education Committee Chairman Tim Walberg (R-Mich.) told The Post. “Dissent, demonstrations, etc on campuses are to be encouraged for freedom of speech, but not … [when it] that takes away freedom and liberty for a certain set of students and teachers.”
Walberg argued that the red line for the protests is violence and laws such as the Civil Rights Act.
The Post contacted the State Department for comment.
