Trump Admin Proposes Forcing Citizenship And Green Card Applicants To Hand Over Social Media Usernames

The Intercept reports:

President Donald Trump’s administration wants to force people in the U.S. applying for green cards or citizenship to fork over their social media handles, in a move with far-reaching implications as the government cracks down on pro-Palestine activists.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS, which oversees naturalization and immigration, earlier this month proposed requesting social media names from people in the U.S. who apply for asylum, permanent residency, or naturalization, expanding a policy that used to only target people living abroad applying for visas.

The proposal references Trump’s day-one executive order laying the groundwork for a new Muslim travel ban, which also asked federal agencies to identify immigrants in the U.S. who hold “hostile attitudes” toward the government.

Rolling Stone reports:

In the proposal, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) stated that Trump’s executive order “requires the collection of all information necessary for a rigorous vetting and screening of all grounds of inadmissibility or bases for the denial of immigration-related benefits.”

But the First Amendment provides protections to more than just U.S. citizens. “Anybody who is within the bounds of the United States has First Amendment rights,” Saira Hussain, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told The Intercept.

“The Constitution applies whether you are somebody who is a citizen or somebody who is a green card holder who is here in the United States. I think that this administration is trying to chip away at that notion, but that is very much what First Amendment jurisprudence has been under the courts.”

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