Five months before President Trump came to office vowing “extreme vetting” for immigrants, the Obama administration added social media checks to a program that scrutinizes persons from majority-Muslim nations, newly obtained internal documents show.
Social-media screening at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services collectively encompassed aspiring immigrants such as asylees and refugees, and even some visa-holders currently in the United States. The effort going back five years had produced little actionable intelligence, according to multiple internal reviews obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.
Nevertheless, that hasn’t stopped the Trump administration’s plans to build off of the program that one critic likened to a “digital Muslim ban.”
It began in 2012, when Homeland Security laid out a policy that greenlit social media monitoring for applicant assessments. In 2014, USCIS started pilot projects to analyze the publicly available social media of small groups of would-be immigrants.
Then in July 2016, USCIS created a dedicated Social Media Branch to routinely look at certain refugee populations “identified as high risk,” though the materials do not specify which populations are “high risk.”
Around the same time, social media checks became part of the Controlled Application Review and Resolution Program, a secretive Bush-era initiative that extra scrutinizes immigrants and noncitizens from Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim and South Asian communities, according to a March 2017 overview of the effort. The ACLU and the Council on American-Islamic Relations have previously sued USCIS for allegedly unlawfully delaying applications for citizenship through the use of the program and discriminating against Muslims.
Today, the Social Media Branch continues and also helps conduct “enhanced reviews” of some refugee populations including Syrian refugees and certain asylum applications, USCIS officials tell The Daily Beast.
CULLED FROM THE DAILY BEAST
No comments:
Post a Comment