By Robert Barba | The Wall Street Journal
The State Department will review the social-media accounts of foreign student visa applicants, and applicants will be expected to have all social media profiles set to “public.”
“The enhanced social media vetting will ensure we are properly screening every single person attempting to visit our country,” a senior State Department official said.
Consular officers will be on the lookout for indications of hostility toward the United States. Failure by applicants to leave their social-media accounts open for public view will be seen by the State Department as an effort to evade or hide certain activity.
With the guidance now released, the department said the scheduling of visa applications could resume. Last month, the administration said it wasn’t scheduling any new student-visa interviews while it prepared new vetting standards, including of applicants’ social-media accounts.
The new guidance applies to applicants seeking F, M or J visas, which are for educational or cultural exchange purposes.
The Trump administration has increased scrutiny of foreign students—including moving to deport students that participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations and threatening to revoke the visas of students with “connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields.”
In May, the Department of Homeland Security said it would suspend Harvard University’s authority to enroll foreign students because it said it believed the Ivy League school had failed to create a safe campus environment for students, especially Jewish ones. It alleged that many “anti-American, pro-terrorist agitators” on campus were foreign students. A federal judge temporarily blocked the suspension days later.
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