The Trump administration may soon demand the social media accounts of people applying for green cards, US citizenship, and asylum or refugee status. US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) — the federal agency that oversees legal migration, proposed the new policy in the Federal Register this week — calling this information “necessary for a rigorous vetting and screening” of all people applying for “immigration-related benefits.”
In its Federal Register notice, USCIS said the proposed social media surveillance policy is needed to comply with President Trump’s “Protecting the United States from Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Safety Threats” executive order, issued on his first day in office. That order requires the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other government agencies to “identify all resources that may be used to ensure that all aliens seeking admission to the United States, or who are already in the United States, are vetted and screened to the maximum degree possible.”
The public has until May 5 — 60 days after the notice’s publication in the Federal Register — to comment on the proposed policy.
According to the Federal Register notice, USICS will begin requiring applicants for certain immigration benefits to list their social media handles on their application forms. Among those who will be affected are people applying for green cards and naturalization; asylum-seekers, refugees, and the relatives of people who have been granted asylum or refugee status. The proposed policy will affect over 3.5 million people, per USCIS’s own estimates.
“One way of looking at this is that it’s an attempt at basically catching up to modernity,” Kathleen Bush-Joseph, an analyst at the Migration Policy Institute’s US immigration program, told noti.group. Bush-Joseph, whose work partly focuses on efforts to modernize the US immigration system, said that the immigration system “does not really reflect the reality of the twenty-first century in important ways.”
Bush-Joseph said she will be watching out for whether the new social media policy, which is framed in a way that emphasizes national security and the need for additional “vetting” of immigrants, is part of the Trump administration’s efforts to restrict legal migration. Trump indefinitely halted refugee resettlement via executive order, and rescinded Temporary Protected Status for Venezuelan and Haitian nationals. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s playbook for a second Trump term, laid out a plan to severely curtail legal migration. But Bush-Joseph added that it’s too soon to tell whether USCIS’s proposed social media surveillance plan will be used to reject applications for green cards, citizenship, and refugee status.
Immigrant advocates certainly think so. Catalyze/Citizens, a pro-immigration group, said the change would “weaponize digital platforms” against immigrants. “This is not immigration policy—it is authoritarianism and undemocratic surveillance,” Beatriz Lopez, the group’s executive director, said in an emailed statement. “Trump is turning online spaces into surveillance traps, where immigrants are forced to watch their every move and censor their speech or risk their futures in this country. Today it’s immigrants, tomorrow it’s U.S. citizens who dissent with Trump and his administration.”
The proposed social media regulation goes beyond a policy the State Department implemented in 2019, which required all visa applicants to disclose five years’ worth of social media history. Unlike the new USCIS policy, the State Department’s social media efforts apply to foreign nationals applying for visas from outside the country — not to immigrants already in the US who are looking to adjust their status.
Two documentary filmmakers sued the first Trump administration over the State Department’s social media policy in 2019, arguing that it violated the First Amendment and hadn’t proven necessary to protect national security interests. Requiring visa applicants to disclose their social media handles, the complaint claimed, “facilitates the government’s access to what is effectively a live database of their personal, creative, and political activities online.” A federal judge dismissed the case with prejudice in 2023. The Brennan Center and the Knight First Amendment Institute — which filed the lawsuit on behalf of the filmmakers — appealed that ruling in early 2024, but that social media policy remains in place.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
