In yet another clampdown on speech in the U.S., the Trump Administration announced Tuesday that it has revoked the visas of six foreign nationals over remarks they made online after the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
In a series of X posts, the State Department said the U.S. “has no obligation to host foreigners who wish death on Americans” and that it had identified visa holders who “celebrated” Kirk’s death. The thread included the social media posts or comments in question, with the users’ names redacted and identified only by their nationalities, followed by “Visa revoked.”
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]According to the thread, an Argentine national said Kirk “deserved” to burn in hell, a Mexican national said “there are people who would make the world better off dead,” and a Brazilian national said Kirk “DIED TOO LATE.” It also included examples from a South African, a German, and a Paraguayan. It’s unclear if the visa-holders were currently in the U.S. when their visas were revoked.
The announcement of visa revocations came shortly after President Donald Trump posthumously awarded Kirk the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the U.S.’s highest civilian honor, at the White House on Tuesday.
It follows Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau’s post on X the day after Kirk’s death last month, saying that he was “disgusted to see some on social media praising, rationalizing, or making light of the event” and urged the public to “bring such comments by foreigners to my attention” so that U.S. consular officials could “undertake appropriate action.”
“It isn’t just about Charlie Kirk,” Secretary Marco Rubio said on Sept. 15. “ If you’re a foreigner and you’re out there celebrating the assassination of someone who was speaking somewhere, I mean, we don’t want you in the country. Why would we want to give a visa to someone who think it’s good that someone was murdered in the public square? That’s just common sense to me.”
Kirk was fatally shot during a speaking event at a Utah university on Sept. 10, and the Trump Administration and the political right quickly blamed his death on the left.
Vice President J.D. Vance encouraged people to report anyone celebrating Kirk’s death: “Call them out, and hell, call their employer.” People like MSNBC commentator Matthew Dowd were fired from their jobs over comments, and late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel had his show temporarily taken off the air.
Critics have described the moves as a crackdown on free speech—ironically coming from an Administration that has promised to protect free speech. Trump himself signed an executive order upon taking office for his second term that called government censorship “intolerable,” barring federal employees from “conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen.” And Rubio said in May that freedom of speech sets the U.S. apart “as a beacon of freedom around the world,” as the State Department announced visa restrictions then on foreign nationals who “censor Americans,” including over social media posts.
Monitoring social media
The Trump Administration has increasingly surveilled people’s social media activity, both inside and outside of government.
Nearly 300 Pentagon employees were investigated over Kirk-related online posts. Three employees were “in the process of either being kicked out or leaving the military,” the Washington Post reported earlier this month. A Federal Emergency Management Agency employee and a Secret Service employee were also put on leave following comments related to Kirk last month.
The Trump Administration has also used social media screening in immigration.
A cable signed by Rubio and sent to offices in June ordered that those wishing to obtain U.S. student visas must set their social media accounts to public so that authorities can review them and assess if they “bear hostile attitudes toward our citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles; who advocate for, aid, or support designated foreign terrorists and other threats to U.S. national security; or who perpetrate unlawful antisemitic harassment or violence.” The effort came after a rise of pro-Palestinian activism, which the Trump Administration deemed antisemitic, at U.S. universities. The State Department previously used AI to screen student visa-holders’ social media for “pro-Hamas” activity as part of a reported “Catch-and-Revoke” program.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services also said it will use social media in considering immigration applications, in a bid to detect supposed “anti-Americanism” and “anti-semitic ideologies.”
At the same time, the Administration has put pressure on tech firms to take down activity that hinders its agenda. On the Justice Department’s request, Apple removed apps that would allow online social communities to track the presence of ICE officials. And Attorney General Pam Bondi posted on X on Tuesday that, upon request, Facebook removed a group page that was “being used to dox and target” ICE agents in Chicago; Meta said in a statement to the media that it removed the group for “violating our policies against coordinated harm.”
Free speech concerns
In August, the Administration announced that more than 6,000 student visas had been revoked since January—a few hundred over purported “support for terrorism.”
The U.S. also expelled South Africa’s ambassador Ebrahim Rasool in March following comments accusing Trump of leading a supremacist movement. And the State Department revoked the visas of British music duo Bob Vylan after they called for death to the military of Israel—a U.S. ally—during a performance in the U.K. in June.
The Trump Administration has argued that protected speech and ideology have not been factors in revoking visas or enacting immigration policy but rather that the issue is national security concerns. Still, such crackdowns have raised the question of whether non-citizens in the U.S. get to exercise the same First Amendment rights as citizens do.
A September 30 court ruling clarified free speech issues, after several university organizations sued the Trump Administration for allegedly targeting non-U.S. citizens for deportation merely for supporting Palestinians and criticizing Israel. The judge ruled that arresting and deporting non-citizen students for such reasons violated the First Amendment.
“This case—perhaps the most important ever to fall within the jurisdiction of this district court—squarely presents the issue whether non-citizens lawfully present here in United States actually have the same free speech rights as the rest of us,” U.S. District Judge William Young, a nominee of Republican former President Ronald Reagan, said in the ruling. “The Court answers this Constitutional question unequivocally ‘yes, they do.’”
