Trump Wants to Force Immigrants to Share Their Social Media Handles

Soon, if a new proposal from the Trump administration goes into effect, immigrants applying for green cards or citizenship will have to disclose their social media handles with their application, The Intercept reported Sunday.

Considering the recent detention of Mahmoud Khalil, an immigrant and Columbia University student who helped lead pro-Palestinian protests on campus in 2024, this proposed new policy could negatively affect immigrants to the U.S. who have espoused pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel views, including people who have lived in the country for many years. Although Trump has alleged Khalil was a “Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas” operative, he has offered no evidence to back up his claim, and experts told Rolling Stone Khalil’s arrest is a clear violation of First Amendment rights.

The administration’s proposal refers to an executive order Trump signed on his first day in office that sets the stage for a second travel ban on citizens from majority Muslim countries. The order also directed federal agencies to find immigrants in the U.S. who hold “hostile attitudes” toward America.

During Trump’s first term in office, he instituted a so-called “Muslim ban” that was upheld by the Supreme Court. President Joe Biden repealed the ban in 2021, but Trump campaigned on bringing it back and making it “much stronger.” A draft list for the new ban obtained by The New York Times last week includes a total block on citizens from 11 countries as well as restrictions on citizens from 10 other nations, plus it gives 22 additional countries 60 days to address the administrations’ concerns.

Forcing immigrants to share their social media handles “would disparately impact Muslim and Arab applicants seeking U.S. citizenship that have voiced support for Palestinian human rights,” Robert McCaw, director of government affairs at the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told The Intercept. “Collecting the social media identifiers of any potential green card applicants or citizens is the means to silencing their lawful speech.”

In the proposal, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) stated that Trump’s executive order “requires the collection of all information necessary for a rigorous vetting and screening of all grounds of inadmissibility or bases for the denial of immigration-related benefits.” It goes on to say that gathering social media accounts is required “for the enhanced identity verification, vetting and national security screening.” USCIS proposes using the information to “help validate an applicant’s identity” and to determine if they pose “a security or public-safety threat.”

But the First Amendment provides protections to more than just U.S. citizens.

“Anybody who is within the bounds of the United States has First Amendment rights,” Saira Hussain, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told The Intercept. “The Constitution applies whether you are somebody who is a citizen or somebody who is a green card holder who is here in the United States. I think that this administration is trying to chip away at that notion, but that is very much what First Amendment jurisprudence has been under the courts.”

The proposal is currently open for public comment through May 5, 2025.