Administration will review all 55M visa holders for deportable violations

https://apnews.com/article/trump-visas-deportations-068ad6cd5724e7248577f17592327ca4

by anigbrowl • 11 months ago

145 110 11 months ago

andsoitis11• 11 months ago

Nothing really to see here. Normal course of business, except maybe that reviewing all 55m systematically is gonna take a while with all the database joins you will have to do across disparate systems.

anigbrowl3• 11 months ago

Sure, f you trust the administration to rely on objective standards rather than making arbitrary and capricious decisions at scale. Looking at social media, I see a lot of people (including GOP county chairs, example below) saying things like 'deport them all, let them reapply for re-entry,' which kinda proves the argument that it was never about illegal immigration in the first place.

https://x.com/BoFrenchTX/status/1958611053119775213

stevenwoo• 11 months ago

It's certainly to be some sort of political litmus test with a quick perusal of social media for anything other than rabid Trump support along with a test for darker tone of skin or country of origin that is out of favor, to bulk up their failure to kick out enough migrants (not coming close to their stated goals of 1000s per day) through the means they have used so far with fake justification, ticky tacky legal and paperwork issues used to justify deportation.

immibis2• 11 months ago

Whether or not the person has ever attended an anti-Israel protest is an objective standard that is not arbitrary. There are lots of bad things to say, but it's not arbitrary or unobjective.

andsoitis11• 11 months ago

It is worth familiarizing oneself with VISA rules in other countries and how they enforce them, before the automatic outrage.

Let's take The Netherlands as an example to get a feel.

- Pronouncement of undesirability: https://ind.nl/en/pronouncement-of-undesirability

- Entry bans: https://ind.nl/en/entry-ban

If you have ever had to apply for a Schengen Visa to enter the EU, then you will know how strict the EU is (even hotels want to see your passport and record it).

_fs• 11 months ago

You say that as if Palantir does not already have all this information ready for AI analysis today.

ux266478• 11 months ago

Or that the NSA doesn't have it all centralized, tagged and sorted.

aiauthoritydev2• 11 months ago

This is not normal course of business at all. This is probably a wave of capricious decision making to "meet quota" because they are not able to find and catch illegal immigrants to make news.

lajetl• 11 months ago

They're going to do a few keyword searches for things "Gaza" and "universal healthcare" and try to mass-deport anyone who used those words on social media. And if no one tries to stop them, then it will happen. Habeas Corpus is gone.

josefritzishere• 11 months ago

That's probably true.

seanicus• 11 months ago

Which is why the Trump admin will just default to Betar US, repping a foreign entity ethnostate, for their list of visas to revoke.

slt20214• 11 months ago

this is done to deport all pro-Palestine and anti-Zionist visa holders, with the help of Palantir.

Social media posts have been scrubbed, list of people have been prepared, just a matter of cross-checking whether they are non-citizens and can be deported

cpncrunch• 11 months ago

https://amnesty.ca/human-rights-news/palantir-babel-street-s...

barbazoo5• 11 months ago

I bet it's much more a campaign to instil fear in people with non-citizen status in general and for them to watch what they're doing and saying in general.

People are already spread too thin to revolt anyway, the billionaire masters made sure of that by lowering wages until people were just near enough the poverty line that losing their job would mean ruin. Can't go protest if you have to put food on the table. Now you also have to worry not to be taken out of your community and sent to a random 3rd country. I bet that makes people be quiet real quick. I bet we'll see a widening of what's un-acceptable by the administration.

aiauthoritydev2• 11 months ago

Well, the Israeli child abusing officer has left the country.

cyanydeez2• 11 months ago

I'm sure there's more. The type of people who clamor for power often do so for the ability to do amoral things.

It's unsuprising theres a mix of nazis and israelis at the helm of America's "self interest" and there's criminals, child molestors, rapists constantly being squeezed out.

xnx• 11 months ago

Does this include H-1B fraud?

cyanydeez2• 11 months ago

Anything that implicates businesses, unles clearly run by dirty communists, will be ignored.

tdsanchez• 11 months ago

It should.

rchaud2• 11 months ago

There is no way 55 million visas can be reviewed in any reasonable amount of time (cue the "AI can do it" comments). The number of H1B visa holders is a tiny fraction of 55m, if they cared about reviewing those, it'd require a lot less in time and resources.

Targeting H1b would also result in much stronger legal opposition. It takes a year to process less than 100k H1B applications annually, and companies have to pay thousands processing fees for each one. The goal of this is to discourage foreign students, refugee claimants and tourist visa holders from coming to America.

Herring• 11 months ago

Naturalized citizens are up next.

pfannkuchen4• 11 months ago

Birthright citizenship revocation being applied retroactively is definitely lower hanging fruit than that. If that happens I would be concerned about naturalized citizens, but only then.

FireBeyond2• 11 months ago

"If that happens" is still an "if", but, I mean, Republicans are actively working on that as we speak.

dragonwriter2• 11 months ago

Denaturalization is a process which exists and has been used for years, scaling up the intensity of its use is a much easier thing (and one which both the current [0] and the previous [1] Trump Administration actually have done) than ending birthright citizenship.

Since it is, in fact, already happening, I think it is a mistake to view it as something to worry about only if and when the administration succeeds in overturning birthright citizenship.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2025/06/30/nx-s1-5445398/denaturalizatio...

[1] https://www.acslaw.org/expertforum/trump-administration-seek...

hodgehog11• 11 months ago

How many "mistakes" are going to be made in this process, I wonder? A colleague of mine had his student's visa status suddenly revoked a few months ago. Fortunately, the student's lawyers successfully argued in court that there were no grounds for revocation. It still isn't clear why any of it happened.

astro1138• 11 months ago

Is Freedom of Speech only meant for US citizens?

verzali2• 11 months ago

No, next they'll be reviewing citizenships too in order to make sure you haven't said anything mean about Trump or Vance online. Oh sorry, to make sure you haven't said anything that goes against the fundamental values of the United States.

angarg12• 11 months ago

This isn't discussed enough. One argument I've heard is that "this only applies to people who break the law".

One thing to consider is how easy is to make minor mistakes that technically count as an infraction. When acting in good faith, the administration can acknowledge this and promptly fix it, as it happened to me during my immigration process.

Then there are random mistakes out of your control. For example, when I first moved to the US and tried to get insurance for my car, I received extremely high quotes from the insurer. When I inquired why, they replied that my file showed several traffic infractions years ago in a different state. Simply clarifying that they'd mistaken me for another person was enough to fix it. Imagine if instead they deported me to a prison in El Salvador without a chance to defend myself.

And this is not talking shadier practices, such as changing the rules so that certain things suddenly become offenses, or simply fabricating evidence against someone.

readthenotes1• 11 months ago

55M visa holders ???

I had no idea it was that many.

I thought 18M undocumented was a high %age!

342M people in the US. 16% visa holders

I wonder how that compares to other countries?

https://www.census.gov/popclock/

https://www.census.gov/topics/population/foreign-born/about....

anigbrowl3• 11 months ago

Historically this isn't exceptional, and is arguably a reversion ot hte mean following the disruption of a WW2 and its aftershocks.

https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/imm...

I thought 18M undocumented was a high %age!

Seems inflated. Reliable estimates run around 2/3 of that. Higher numbers always seem anchored only by handwavey 'there must be more because reasons', which is why you regularly see people claiming sums of 20m, 30m, 40m. The current president has a habit of picking arbitrary numbers based on his feelings, but that doesn't sem a very reliable system to me.

https://ohss.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2024-06/2024_0418_o...

verzali2• 11 months ago

Surely includes a lot of tourist visas, and many of these people might be outside the US already but the visa just hasn't expired yet. Or people who need to come frequently for business trips.

staringback• 11 months ago

Think about what a "visa holder" might be and then try your comment again.

hdgvhicv2• 11 months ago

Tourist visas, Business visas, temporary work visas

There are 55m visas, majority of which are non immigrant visas.

giobox• 11 months ago

What does non-immigrant actually mean? The h1b/l1b that is hugely popular in tech are both legally defined as “non-immigrant” visas, yet both include very widely used legal paths to permanent residency and citizenship for the holders - immigration.

My point being, this distinction may not mean what it might appear with a layman’s or dictionary based understanding of the phrase “non-immigrant visa”.

slt20214• 11 months ago

Why is this flagged, can anyone explain?

Seems relevant since a lot of tech ppl are on visa

drewbug01• 11 months ago

The reason for the flag is always the same: because they don’t want to talk about it here.

The real question is: why don’t people want to talk about it? I’ve found it typically falls into three camps:

One group flags these kinds of stories because they’re exhausted, and can’t stomach any more. I feel bad for this group, and I understand the impulse.

Another group flags because suppressing information about what the administration is up to aligns with their personal ideology. This is the more dangerous group, and I’m always sad to see people coming out in support of awful stuff like this.

The last group flags it because it annoys them, and they don’t want to engage with it. It makes them uncomfortable and they feel it doesn’t impact them. They point to the HN guidelines and say it’s not relevant. It is, they’re just lucky enough to have not been affected personally by anything yet.

I pity the last group, honestly.

Jackson__• 11 months ago

Possibly a fourth group of startup founders and investors that don't want H1B pipelines to dry up as a result of constant bad news.

barbazoo5• 11 months ago

There are obviously N groups but one you're missing might be the people that just don't think it's a topic that fits the purpose of this space, at least how it's stated in the guidelines.

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

I can't help but feel that stories like these fall under "off-topic".

metalman• 11 months ago

very relevant, as the govenment may be mixing up the perfect own goal hat trick, by undermining american competitiveness in tech, agriculture, and so called "essential" workers through depertations and closing of institutions, while trying to "tarrify" the world into submission, to the point that the US postal service is jamming and juddering from what must be the memo epocolypse. proof?, Xi is smiling again, after years of bieng kinda grim looking.

barbazoo5• 11 months ago

This might be obvious to others but to me this story really made it clear to me that this is probably much about fear. Fear of stepping out of line, drawing attention to yourself and as a result at best getting into trouble, or at worst deported.

The admin makes it clear, if you have opposing views and share them, you're not welcome here.

hearsathought2• 11 months ago

Fall semester is about to start. Don't think the timing is a coincidence. Israel really doesn't like people criticizing and protesting against them. Especially on college campuses.

barbazoo5• 11 months ago

They don't care really about Israel I think, what leverage would they have to pressure the US admin to do anything? I think this is about being critical of the people in government in general. If everyone is at risk of being deported, who would go and protest anything? That would certainly make me think twice about it.

mindslight• 11 months ago

Speaking of fear, don't forget that "deport" doesn't mean that you will just be moved to a different country, but rather there is a good chance you will end up in a concentration camp.

e402• 11 months ago

Absolutely. Every single one of those 55M people will think twice about every aspect of their life. It will be debilitating for many of them.

How long can support for this last?

wkat42424• 11 months ago

Well if they had followed the news they would have already thought twice about everything they said and did since Snowden showed the entire US population has been under constant surveillance for decades now. At the time most people didn't quite care because their country "did this in their best interest and it would never turn authoritarian". Yay land of the free.

How much of that surveillance was kept I wonder? I don't consider it unimaginable that someone would get expelled for saying something on WhatsApp 15 years ago.

wkat42424• 11 months ago

The question is whether people will still want to put up with this. Why even bother going to the US anymore? I certainly won't even visit for work events any longer. I will refuse such requests. Privately I don't want to anyway.

I'm not going to go to a country that eyes me with suspicion. Especially because I'm very LGBT friendly too.

Ms-J• 11 months ago

This is only about protecting Israel.

From the article:

The review of all visa holders appears to be a significant expansion of what had initially been a process focused mainly on students who have been involved in what the government perceives as pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel activity.

aaomidi• 11 months ago

America first etc etc

Centigonal• 11 months ago

It was originally about that, but this expansion appears to be more general, no?

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF7• 11 months ago

It's unclear from the passage. The "significant expansion" sounds like it could be referring to who is being examined or the violations authorities are looking for or both.

sagarm• 11 months ago

Seems unlikely this will convince anyone that disagrees with Israeli policy that they're wrong. Quite the opposite, I imagine. That can't be good for long term support of Israel by America.

watwut• 11 months ago

In the short term, it will allow genocide to be finished. In the long term, it is quite possible it will be forgotten, excused and lied about. Eventually everyone will move on as if nothing happened, except small minority

rexpop2• 11 months ago

This is not at all about protecting Israel. That's just an antisemitic pretense—a way to scapegoat "the Jews" for all this authoritarian crap.

nielsbot• 11 months ago

How the comment is antisemitic, I don't get it.

9dev• 11 months ago

only is doing a lot of heavy lifting to excuse punishing having the wrong opinion in the freedom nation.

greatgib• 11 months ago

The fell fast on the slippery slope in US.

   Officials say the reviews will include all visa holders’ social media accounts, law enforcement and immigration records in their home countries, along with any actionable violations of U.S. law committed while they were in the United States.

   The reviews will include new tools for data collection on past, present and future visa applicants, including a complete scouring of social media sites made possible by new requirements introduced earlier this year. Those make it mandatory for privacy switches on cellphones and other electronic devices or apps to be turned off when an applicant appears for a visa interview.

"I have nothing to hide" kind of people will get a nice surprise when they will be deported for liking a post against Trump...

AugSun• 11 months ago

"Those make it mandatory for privacy switches on cellphones and other electronic devices or apps to be _turned off_ when an applicant appears for a _visa interview_." This is direct violation of GDPR and similar law. US may go fuck themselves with such interviews. I will never set my foot in that dumpster. It also sets really bad precedent - EU will retaliate and soon we all will have to unlock and present our phones at any (semi)official procedure. Hell, even when board a train or a bus ... What a joke! Time to tell personal electronic devices good bye.

Administration will review all 55M visa holders for deportable violations

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