State Department to use AI to revoke student visas

Secretary of State Marco Rubio plans to use artificial intelligence to review and revoke visas of foreign students who appear to be Hamas sympathizers, Axios reported Thursday, citing State Department officials.

The “Catch and Revoke” initiative will use AI to review tens of thousands of student visa holders’ social media accounts, looking for signs that they supported Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. 

If officials find a social media post from an international student that appears to endorse the attack and looks “pro-Hamas,” that could be grounds for visa revocation, an official told Axios. 

Officials also plan to check news reports of anti-Israel demonstrations and lawsuits brought by Jewish students that might indicate a foreign national engaged in antisemitic activity. 

Axios reported that to launch Catch and Revoke, the department examined a database of 100,000 people in the Student Exchange Visitor System since October 2023 to see if any visas had been revoked but the student was allowed to stay in the country during the Biden administration. 

“We found literally zero visa revocations during the Biden administration,” a State Department official said, “which suggests a blind eye attitude toward law enforcement.”

The official said, “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 … AI is one of the resources available to the government that’s very different from where we were technologically decades ago.”

“Under President Trump, the Immigration Nationality Act [sic] is great again,” the official added.