The US State Department has revoked hundreds of visas and placed hundreds more under scrutiny, targeting mostly foreign nationals engaged in pro-Palestine activism.
The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, confirmed the scale of the crackdown, announcing that he has cancelled visas for more than 300 people he called “lunatics” connected to campus pro-Palestine protests in the US, with promises of action to continue daily.
Asked by reporters during a visit to Guyana in South America to confirm reports of 300 visas stripped, Rubio said: “Maybe more than 300 at this point. We do it every day, every time I find one of these lunatics.”
One recent example of the policy’s implementation has been US immigration authorities detaining Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish doctoral student at Tufts University on a Fulbright scholarship, in broad daylight by masked agents in plainclothes.
Her arrest and visa revocation came after she voiced support for Palestinians in Gaza in an op-ed she co-authored in her student newspaper. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) claimed she “engaged in activities in support of Hamas”, a justification being denounced as a direct assault on academic freedom and the erosion of free speech and personal liberties.
In addressing her case specifically, Rubio said: “We revoked her visa … once you’ve lost your visa, you’re no longer legally in the United States … if you come into the US as a visitor and create a ruckus for us, we don’t want it. We don’t want it in our country. Go back and do it in your country.”
The Trump administration has simultaneously implemented other restrictive measures, including pausing green card processing for certain refugees and asylum seekers and issuing a global directive instructing visa officers to deny entry to transgender athletes, of which there are very few.
In a statement to Fox News, the state department claimed that it had “revoked the visas of more than 20 individuals”, and said hundreds more were under consideration under the banner of what they call “national security concerns”.
“Overall, we continue to process hundreds of visa reviews to ensure visitors are not violating terms of their visas and do not pose a threat to the United States and our citizens,” the statement said.