Unions Sue US to Try to Stop Monitoring of Visa Holders’ Social Media

The U.S. government program surveilling the social media accounts of legally present visa holders violates the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment, unions said in a lawsuit filed on Oct. 16.

“The Challenged Surveillance Program is carried out to identify and punish noncitizens who express viewpoints disfavored by the government,” the suit states. “Defendants seek and have sought to punish political and ideological expression by noncitizens on a number of topics, including criticism of the United States, criticism of the Trump administration, criticism of the state of Israel, and support for Palestine.”

The State Department has acknowledged keeping track of visa holders’ social media activity. Officials said this week that they revoked the visas of six foreigners who publicly celebrated the assassination of Charlie Kirk, who led the conservative group Turning Point USA. That included a Mexican national who said Kirk “died being a racist” and that “there are people who deserve to die,” according to the agency.

“The United States has no obligation to host foreigners who wish death on Americans,” the State Department said on Oct. 14.

The State Department is one of the named defendants in the new complaint.

Three unions—United Automobile Workers, Communications Workers of America, and American Federation of Teachers—lodged the suit in federal court in New York.

They are asking the judge overseeing the case to find the surveillance program and the officials’ actions to implement it unconstitutional, and to block officials from continuing to carry it out.

“The labor movement is built on our freedoms under the First Amendment to speak and assemble without fear retaliation by the government,” Claude Cummings Jr., president of Communications Workers of America, said in a statement. “The unconstitutional Challenged Surveillance Program threatens those freedoms and explicitly targets those who are critical of the administration and its policies.”

According to the suit, which cites administration officials, views targeted by the program include being critical of the United States and antisemitism, in addition to celebrating Kirk’s murder.

President Donald Trump, for instance, has written that there are students at schools across the country “who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it.” He added that “We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country—never to return again.”

The government is using artificial intelligence as part of the program to monitor activity documented online or every visa holder in the United States, the unions said. There are about 55 million visa holders currently in the country.