US Citizenship and Green Card Applicants to Have Social Media Checked

People applying for U.S. citizenship or permanent residency may soon be required to disclose their social media accounts to the government, the newspaper writes. The Verge.

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The Trump administration may require access to social media accounts from people applying for green cards, U.S. citizenship, and refugee or asylum status. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the federal agency that oversees legal immigration, proposed the measure, calling social media information “essential to the thorough background check and screening” of all applicants for “immigrant benefits.”

USCIS said the proposed social media surveillance policy is necessary to implement President Trump’s executive order, “Protecting the United States from Foreign Terrorists and Other Threats to National Security and Public Safety,” issued on his first day in office. That order requires the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other government agencies to “identify all resources that can be used to ensure maximum screening of all aliens seeking entry into the United States or already present in the United States.”

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The public can comment on the proposed policy until May 5, 60 days after the notice is published in the Federal Register.

According to a notice in the Federal Register, USCIS will begin requiring applicants for certain immigration benefits to list their social media accounts on application forms. This will affect people applying for green cards, naturalization, asylum, refugee status, and the relatives of asylees or refugees. USCIS estimates that the proposed policy will affect more than 3,5 million people.

It’s essentially an attempt to keep up with modern realities, said Kathleen Bush-Joseph, an analyst with the U.S. Immigration Program at the Migration Policy Institute. Bush-Joseph, whose work focuses in part on efforts to modernize the U.S. immigration system, noted that the immigration system “doesn’t reflect the reality of the 21st century in important ways.”

Bush said she would be watching to see whether the new social media policy, which is being billed as a national security measure and additional vetting of immigrants, will be part of the Trump administration’s efforts to curb legal immigration. Trump suspended the refugee resettlement program indefinitely and ended Temporary Protected Status for Venezuelans and Haitians in an executive order. The Heritage Foundation’s 2025 blueprint for a second Trump administration outlines a plan to sharply curtail legal immigration. But Bush added that it was too early to say whether the USCIS social media surveillance plan would be used to deny applications for green cards, citizenship, and refugee status.

Immigration advocacy group Catalyze/Citizens said the change "weapons digital platforms" against immigrants.

“This is not immigration policy — this is authoritarianism and undemocratic surveillance,” said Beatriz Lopez, the group’s executive director. “Trump is turning online spaces into surveillance traps where immigrants are forced to monitor their every move and censor their speech or risk their future in this country. Today it’s immigrants, tomorrow it’s U.S. citizens who disagree with Trump and his administration.”

The proposed social media regulation goes beyond a policy the State Department instituted in 2019, when it required all visa applicants to disclose their social media history for the past five years. Unlike the new USCIS policy, the State Department’s social media efforts apply to foreign nationals applying for visas from abroad, not to immigrants already in the U.S. seeking to adjust their status.

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Two documentary filmmakers sued the first Trump administration over the State Department’s social media policies in 2019, arguing that they violated the First Amendment and were not necessary to protect national security interests. Requiring visa applicants to disclose their social media accounts, the complaint alleged, “makes it easier for the government to access what is essentially a living database of their personal, creative, and political activity online.”

A federal judge dismissed the case in 2023. The Brennan Center and the Knight First Amendment Institute, which filed the lawsuit on behalf of the documentarians, appealed the decision in early 2024, but the social media policy remains in place.

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