Three labor unions represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation sued the Trump administration on Thursday over a program that is searching the social media posts of visa holders, arguing that the practice violates the First Amendment rights of people legally in the United States.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in New York, asks a judge to block the administration from engaging in “viewpoint-based investigation and surveillance.” It also asks for a court order to purge any records created so far under the administration’s program.
The Trump administration has said it is scouring social media for posts that it deems hostile or threatening and then using that information as a basis to revoke some people’s visas. President Donald Trump announced the basis for the policy in January in an executive order targeting noncitizens in the country who “bear hostile attitudes” or support “threats to our national security,” and the Department of Homeland Security in April said it was screening foreign nationals’ social media activity for antisemitism.
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller said in July that there are administration officials “working continuously” to revoke the visas of foreigners who “espouse hatred for America or its people.” And in a thread on X this week, the State Department highlighted six examples of visas it said it had revoked from foreign nationals for celebrating the shooting death last month of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
There are more than 55 million people who have valid U.S. visas, including those for tourism, studying or work, according to The Associated Press, putting a huge swath of the population under potential social media monitoring.
A federal judge in Boston ruled last month that the deportation policy violated the free speech rights of foreign students studying the United States who had expressed support for Palestinian rights, but the judge’s 161-page order did not address the administration’s monitoring of social media that led up to the deportation proceedings. A separate lawsuit pending in federal court in California is also challenging deportation orders.
The latest lawsuit makes a different argument than the other two lawsuits: In addition to challenging the deportations of visa holders, it targets the Trump administration’s mass searches of social media, saying it amounts to an unlawful program of widespread surveillance and suppresses dissent.
“They’re deploying a variety of automated and AI tools in order to scan and review speech online, at a mass scale that wouldn’t be possible with human review alone,” said Lisa Femia, a staff attorney for the San Francisco-based EFF, a nonprofit focused on digital rights and online civil liberties.
“This sweeps in a lot of speech,” she said. “A lot of this is core political speech that is absolutely protected by the First Amendment.”
In addition to lawyers from EFF, the plaintiffs are represented by lawyers from Muslim Advocates, a legal group for American Muslims, and by the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic, a student law clinic at Yale Law School.
State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott said Thursday that the administration believes it has a firm legal basis.