THE SET-UP: Here’s an alarming headline from AP:
US revokes visas for 6 foreigners over Charlie Kirk-related speech
It’s true. The State Department is kicking people out of the country for engaging in “Charlie Kirk-related speech.” Apparently, the Trump regime considers “Charlie Kirk-related speech” to be unprotected speech. And it has determined that “Charlie Kirk-related speech” it doesn’t like is speech that warrants punishment. The punishment in these cases, much like the those brought against foreign students protesting the Gaza War on college campuses, is to eject the offenders from the country.
The official US State Department account on X wrote:
The United States has no obligation to host foreigners who wish death on Americans. The State Department continues to identify visa holders who celebrated the heinous assassination of Charlie Kirk.
It’s an argument Secretary of State Marco Rubio first made during the regime’s die-casting crackdown on college campuses—a visa is a revocable privilege and if we don’t like what you say, you are outta here.
Putting aside the Constitutional question of whether or not non-US citizens enjoy the same First Amendment rights as US citizens, there is another, even more alarming aspect to this story. Here’s the flashing red light in AP’s report:
The State Department said Tuesday it had determined they should lose their visas after reviewing their online social media posts and clips about Kirk, who was killed while speaking at a Utah college campus on Sept. 10.
So, not only has the regime determined Charlie Kirk-related speech to be a thought-crime, but they are “reviewing online social media posts” to find thought-criminals.
The idea that State Department staff are spending time “reviewing online social media posts” in the hopes of finding apostates is chilling.
The truth might be far worse.
According to a Wired report earlier this month, Trump’s regime is rapidly scaling-up a “24/7” social media monitoring system for ICE:
United States immigration authorities are moving to dramatically expand their social media surveillance, with plans to hire nearly 30 contractors to sift through posts, photos, and messages—raw material to be transformed into intelligence for deportation raids and arrests.
Federal contracting records reviewed by WIRED show that the agency is seeking private vendors to run a multiyear surveillance program out of two of its little-known targeting centers. The program envisions stationing nearly 30 private analysts at Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities in Vermont and Southern California. Their job: Scour Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and other platforms, converting posts and profiles into fresh leads for enforcement raids.
Although the report stipulates that the initiative is “still at the request-for-information stage,” the fact is that it isn’t the only data mining effort we know about. Back on August 21st, The American Immigration Council summarized what we knew then about the emerging dragnet:
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has partnered with Palantir Technologies—a Denver-based software company co-founded by billionaire entrepreneur Peter Thiel—to use artificial intelligence and data mining to identify, track, and deport suspected noncitizens. Palantir is slated to deliver a prototype of the ImmigrationOS platform by September 25, 2025, with the contract running through September 2027. ICE is paying Palantir $30 million for the platform.
Similar to Palantir’s other systems, ImmigrationOS will pull together vast amounts of data, detect patterns, and flag individuals who meet certain criteria, raising concerns about potential impacts on civil liberties in America. Those concerns are amplified by the revelation that Stephen Miller, the Trump administration’s chief architect of immigration policy, holds a substantial financial stake in Palantir—underscoring the potential conflicts of interest in the government’s embrace of the company’s technology.
The plan, first reported by Business Insider, has triggered lawsuits from privacy and labor rights advocates and raises serious concerns about accuracy, justice, and civil rights. For its part, Palantir says it only builds the tools, not the rules. However, the architecture of an AI system—how it integrates data, flags individuals, and triggers action—is a form of policymaking. Designing a system like ImmigrationOS means deciding which data is included, what prompts alerts, and what gets overlooked.
And today, El Pais picked up the story and added some ominous details
“Almost anything people post on social media can potentially be used against them. Any post in a WhatsApp group or on a Facebook page can put them on ICE’s radar,” explains Alberto Fox-Cahn, attorney and founder of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP), a civil rights advocacy group focused on government surveillance.
…and…
“They’re using a lot of tools to access information that people think is private.” According to the expert, accounts restricted to approved followers only offer a false sense of privacy because “ICE and other law enforcement agencies have created vast networks of fake accounts to harvest information.”
Again, the simple fact is Trump’s regime is building out a surveillance system with the stated intent of poring over millions of social media accounts. And don’t assume there are guardrails or options beyond the reach of their tentacles:
“Many people use WhatsApp, which is encrypted, without realizing that information about every communication they have is available to ICE and other law enforcement agencies,” he added.
A WhatsApp spokesperson said that the app is built to be private by design, with end-to-end encryption “so that no one outside of the chat, not even WhatsApp or Meta, can read, listen to, or share your personal messages.” The spokesperson also said that WhatApp does “not keep logs of who everyone is messaging or calling.”
But that doesn’t mean Meta is unwilling to cooperate with Big Brother. Another new report from AP demonstrated that Facebook is a willing partner:
Meta has removed a Facebook page used to track the presence of immigration agents at the request of the Department of Justice, the company confirmed on Tuesday.
Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a post on X that “following outreach” from the DOJ, Facebook removed a “large group page” that was being used to target ICE officials.
Meta said in a statement that the group “was removed for violating our policies against coordinated harm.”
Wasn’t it just a few months ago that Mark Zuckerberg went on Joe Rogan’s podcast to pitch the idea that he and his company fell victim to the Biden Administration’s arm-twisting during its Covid clampdown?
He claimed to be a born-again believer in free speech. The truth is that he, like the rest of Silicon Valley, was just sucking-up to Trump. Here’s AP reporting again, this time on October 3rd:
Apple and Google blocked downloads of phone apps that flag sightings of U.S. immigration agents, just hours after the Trump administration demanded that one particularly popular iPhone app be taken down.
ICEBlock, the most widely used of the ICE-tracking apps in Apple’s app store, is among the apps that have been taken down. Bondi said her office reached out to Apple on Thursday “demanding that they remove ICEBlock” and claiming that it “is designed to put ICE agents at risk just for doing their jobs.”
Apple soon complied, sending an email Thursday to the app’s creator, Joshua Aaron, that said it would block further downloads of the app because new information “provided to Apple by law enforcement” showed the app broke the app store rules.
Up to now, the targets of the regime’s ire have been non-US citizens. But that doesn’t mean US citizens have not already been targeted. In May, The New York Times reported on the role the aforementioned Palantir already had in compiling a “master list of personal information on Americans that could give [Trump] untold surveillance power”:
The push has put a key Palantir product called Foundry into at least four federal agencies, including D.H.S. and the Health and Human Services Department. Widely adopting Foundry, which organizes and analyzes data, paves the way for Mr. Trump to easily merge information from different agencies, the government officials said.
Creating detailed portraits of Americans based on government data is not just a pipe dream. The Trump administration has already sought access to hundreds of data points on citizens and others through government databases, including their bank account numbers, the amount of their student debt, their medical claims and any disability status.
Mr. Trump could potentially use such information to advance his political agenda by policing immigrants and punishing critics, Democratic lawmakers and critics have said. Privacy advocates, student unions and labor rights organizations have filed lawsuits to block data access, questioning whether the government could weaponize people’s personal information.
But that’s not all. At the end of August, Nicole M. Bennett, Assistant Director at the Center for Refugee Studies at Indiana University, detailed Palantir’s “Gotham” platform in a piece for The Conversation:
Gotham is an investigative platform built for police, national security agencies, public health departments and other state clients. Its purpose is deceptively simple: take whatever data an agency already has, break it down into its smallest components and then connect the dots. Gotham is not simply a database. It takes fragmented data, scattered across various agencies and stored in different formats, and transforms it into a unified, searchable web.
The stakes are high with Palantir’s Gotham platform. The software enables law enforcement and government analysts to connect vast, disparate datasets, build intelligence profiles and search for individuals based on characteristics as granular as a tattoo or an immigration status. It transforms historically static records – think department of motor vehicles files, police reports and subpoenaed social media data like location history and private messages – into a fluid web of intelligence and surveillance.
These departments and agencies use Palantir’s platform to assemble detailed profiles of individuals, mapping their social networks, tracking their movements, identifying their physical characteristics and reviewing their criminal history. This can involve mapping a suspected gang member’s network using arrest logs and license plate reader data, or flagging individuals in a specific region with a particular immigration status.
That’s assuming Gotham is being used as advertised. Among the problems with Palantir is its opacity:
Because Gotham is proprietary, the public, and even elected officials, cannot see how its algorithms weigh certain data points or why they highlight certain connections. Yet, the conclusions it generates can have life-altering consequences: inclusion on a deportation list or identification as a security risk. The opacity makes democratic oversight difficult, and the system’s broad scope and wide deployment means that mistakes or biases can scale up rapidly to affect many people
It’s not the “mistakes,” though, that I find most alarming. It’s the ease with which all these tools can easily be expanded beyond law enforcement and mass deportation to include vetting the thought patterns of US citizens. With Trump’s demonstrated enthusiasm for punishing not just his political enemies, but also voters in so-called Blue States and Blue Cities, it isn’t hard to imagine his regime using these capabilities to sort us all into two camps—the supporters and sycophants he can “reward” with Federals funds and those he can “punish” because they are “the enemy within.” - jp
He Tweeted Charlie Kirk “Won’t Be Remembered as a Hero.” The State Dept. Revoked His Visa
https://theintercept.com/2025/10/15/state-department-charlie-kirk-visa-social-media-censorship/
Firing over Kirk comments violated free speech rights, Health Department officials says in lawsuit
https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2025/oct/14/firing-over-kirk-comments-violated-free-speech/
Rutherford Co. teacher fired for comments about Kirk files First Amendment lawsuit
https://www.dnj.com/story/news/2025/10/09/teacher-fired-for-comments-about-kirk-files-first-amendment-lawsuit-and-seeks-tennessee-job-back/86611139007/
Trump gets free pass to criticize others. Why punish Charlie Kirk’s critics? | Letters
https://www.heraldtribune.com/story/opinion/letters/2025/10/14/kirk-trump-publix-guns/86674867007/
New law aimed at punishing Trump protesters used against UF fans who ran onto football field
https://thebradentontimes.com/stories/new-law-aimed-at-punishing-trump-protesters-used-against-uf-fans-who-ran-onto-football-field,165475
“No Kings” Protests Set to Sweep US Even as Trump Increases Attacks on Activists
https://truthout.org/articles/no-kings-protests-set-to-sweep-us-even-as-trump-increases-attacks-on-activists/
Leaked DHS classified memo reveals new target for Trump surveillance
https://www.rawstory.com/no-kings-2674183503/
Trump’s TikTok Deal Would Further Entrench Big Tech Surveillance
https://www.techpolicy.press/trumps-tiktok-deal-would-further-entrench-big-tech-surveillance/
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https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/finance-and-economy/3851823/regulators-greenlight-erebor-bank-backed-trump-silicon-valley-allies/