Secretary of State Marco Rubio is stepping up his game and creating an AI-driven program that will search the social media accounts of foreign nationals with visas to find pro-Hamas activists, in order to revoke their visas and send them packing.

Here’s more on this via Axios:

Secretary of State Marco Rubio is launching an AI-fueled “Catch and Revoke” effort to cancel the visas of foreign nationals who appear to support Hamas or other designated terror groups, senior State Department officials tell Axios.

The effort — which includes AI-assisted reviews of tens of thousands of student visa holders’ social media accounts — marks a dramatic escalation in the U.S. government’s policing of foreign nationals’ conduct and speech.

• The reviews of social media accounts are particularly looking for evidence of alleged terrorist sympathies expressed after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, officials say.

Officials plan to examine internal databases to see whether any visa holders were arrested but allowed to stay in the country during the Biden administration.

• They say they’re also checking news reports of anti-Israel demonstrations and Jewish students’ lawsuits that highlight foreign nationals allegedly engaged in antisemitic activity without consequence.
• The State Department is working with the departments of Justice and Homeland Security in what one senior State official called a “whole of government and whole of authority approach.”

To launch “Catch and Revoke,” federal officials examined 100,000 people in the Student Exchange Visitor System since October 2023 to see if any visas had been revoked because the student been arrested or suspended from school.

• Usually, a consular official whose office issues the visa for a foreigner makes the revocation decision once they’ve been alerted about an arrest or a suspension.
• “We found literally zero visa revocations during the Biden administration,” the official said, “… which suggests a blind eye attitude toward law enforcement.”

The Immigration Nationality Act of 1952 gives the secretary of state the authority to revoke visas from foreigners deemed to be a threat —a point Rubio made as a senator eight days after Oct. 7.

• “We see people marching at our universities and in the streets of our country … calling for Intifada, celebrating what Hamas has done … Those people need to go,” Rubio said.
• Trump echoed the same sentiments in a Jan. 30 White House fact sheet tied to an executive order aimed at antisemitism at “pro-Hamas” activity: “To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice. We will find you, and we will deport you.”
• Another executive order, issued Jan. 20, targets visa holders and foreigners who “threaten our national security, espouse hateful ideology.”

You can bet there’s going to be a lot of ‘scrubbing’ of social media accounts now that this news has been leaked. But that’s a massive undertaking unless these pro-Hamas activists just shut down their social media accounts all together.

 
UPDATE: Rubio confirms: