Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you all the latest news lines over the next few hours.
We start with news that the Trump administration has been accused of wanting to “proactively conduct reviews of social media posts and revoke visas based not on conduct but speech”.
It comes as the state department said it was reviewing the records of more than 55 million US visa holders for potential revocation or deportable violations of immigration rules, in a significant expansion of Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.
David J Bier, the director of immigration policy at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank based in DC, told the Washington Post:
I doubt that’s feasible for everyone, but I suspect that these reviews will be done in a discriminatory manner targeting immigrants with certain backgrounds and in certain visa categories or specific people they want an excuse to revoke.
In a move first reported by the Associated Press, the state department said that all of the foreigners who currently hold valid US visas are subject to “continuous vetting” for any indication that they could be ineligible for the document, including those already admitted into the country.
Should such evidence come to light, the visa would be revoked and, if the visa holder were in the United States, they would be subject to deportation.
“We are gathering more information than ever,” a senior state department official told the Washington Post, admitting it was likely that social media vetting would add more time to the review process.
It follows an announcement by the Trump administration on Tuesday that it will look for “anti-American” views, including on social media, when assessing the applications of people wanting to live in the United States.
US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), which handles requests to stay in the US or become a citizen, said it would expand vetting of the social media postings of applicants and that “reviews for anti-American activity will be added to that vetting”.
