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US immigration officials look to expand social media data collection
Headline Legal News |
2025/03/30 08:55
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U.S. immigration officials are asking the public and federal agencies to comment on a proposal to collect social media handles from people applying for benefits such as green cards or citizenship, to comply with an executive order from President Donald Trump.
The March 5 notice raised alarms from immigration and free speech advocates because it appears to expand the government’s reach in social media surveillance to people already vetted and in the U.S. legally, such as asylum seekers, green card and citizenship applicants -- and not just those applying to enter the country. That said, social media monitoring by immigration officials has been a practice for over a decade, since at least the second Obama administration and ramping up under Trump’s first term.
The Department of Homeland Security issued a 60-day notice asking for public commentary on its plan to comply with Trump’s executive order titled “Protecting the United States from Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Safety Threats.” The plan calls for “uniform vetting standards” and screening people for grounds of inadmissibility to the U.S., as well as identify verification and “national security screening.” It seeks to collect social media handles and the names of platforms, although not passwords.
The policy seeks to require people to share their social media handles when applying for U.S. citizenship, green card, asylum and other immigration benefits. The proposal is open to feedback from the public until May 5.
“The basic requirements that are in place right now is that people who are applying for immigrant and non-immigrant visas have to provide their social media handles,” said Rachel Levinson-Waldman, managing director of the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program at New York University. “Where I could see this impacting is someone who came into the country before visa-related social media handle collection started, so they wouldn’t have provided it before and now they’re being required to. Or maybe they did before, but their social media use has changed.”
“This fairly widely expanded policy to collect them for everyone applying for any kind of immigration benefit, including people who have already been vetted quite extensively,” she added.
What this points to — along with other signals the administration is sending such as detaining people and revoking student visas for participating in campus protests that the government deems antisemitic and sympathetic to the militant Palestinian group Hamas — Levinson-Waldman added, is the increased use of social media to “make these very high-stakes determinations about people.”
In a statement, a spokesperson for the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service said the agency seeks to “strengthen fraud detection, prevent identity theft, and support the enforcement of rigorous screening and vetting measures to the fullest extent possible.”
“These efforts ensure that those seeking immigration benefits to live and work in the United States do not threaten public safety, undermine national security, or promote harmful anti-American ideologies,” the statement continued. USCIS estimates that the proposed policy change will affect about 3.6 million people.
How are social media accounts used now?
The U.S. government began ramping up the use of social media for immigration vetting in 2014 under then-President Barack Obama, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. In late 2015, the Department of Homeland Security began both “manual and automatic screening of the social media accounts of a limited number of individuals applying to travel to the United States, through various non-public pilot programs,” the nonpartisan law and policy institute explains on its website.
In May 2017, the U.S. Department of State issued an emergency notice to increase the screening of visa applicants. Brennan, along with other civil and human rights groups, opposed the move, arguing that it is “excessively burdensome and vague, is apt to chill speech, is discriminatory against Muslims, and has no security benefit.”
Two years later, the State Department began collecting social media handles from “nearly all foreigners” applying for visas to travel to the U.S. — about 15 million people a year.
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Officers plead guilty in DWI police corruption probe in Albuquerque, NM
Headline Legal News |
2025/02/08 20:15
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Two former Albuquerque police officers pleaded guilty Friday to federal charges of racketeering, extortion and accepting bribes in a sweeping corruption investigation into a scheme that allegedly allowed people arrested for driving while intoxicated to evade conviction, according to court records.
The former officers worked under the Albuquerque Police Department’s driving while intoxicated unit and acknowledged conspiring with attorney Ricardo Mendez in a yearslong scheme. Federal investigators say that Mendez’s law firm offered gifts and thousands of dollars in bribes to officers in exchange for having his clients’ cases dismissed.
Officers Joshua Montaño and Honorio Alba signed agreements to plead guilty and cooperate with investigators in exchange for leniency on charges that might otherwise result in lengthy prison sentences. Attorneys for Montaño and Alba did not immediately respond to phone and email messages.
Mendez last month pleaded guilty to a slew of federal charges that include racketeering and bribery.
Clients would pay Mendez or his associate an attorney retainer fee in cash, court records said. Then Mendez would pay officers in cash — $5,000 or more — or in the form of gifts or legal services to not appear in court as a necessary witness to the driving incident, resulting in the dismissal of the case. |
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Trump suspends US foreign assistance for 90 days pending reviews
Headline Legal News |
2025/01/24 17:55
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President Donald Trump signed an executive order temporarily suspending all U.S. foreign assistance programs for 90 days pending reviews to determine whether they are aligned with his policy goals.
It was not immediately clear how much assistance would initially be affected by the Monday order as funding for many programs has already been appropriated by Congress and is obligated to be spent, if not already spent.
The order, among many Trump signed on his first day back in office, said the “foreign aid industry and bureaucracy are not aligned with American interests and in many cases antithetical to American values” and “serve to destabilize world peace by promoting ideas in foreign countries that are directly inverse to harmonious and stable relations internal to and among countries.”
Consequently, Trump declared that “no further United States foreign assistance shall be disbursed in a manner that is not fully aligned with the foreign policy of the President of the United States.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio told members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during his confirmation hearing last week that “every dollar we spend, every program we fund, and every policy we pursue must be justified with the answer to three simple questions:
“Does it make America safer? Does it make America stronger? Does it make America more prosperous?” he said.
The order signed by Trump leaves it up to Rubio or his designee to make such determinations, in consultation with the Office of Management and Budget. The State Department and the U.S. Agency for
International Development are the main agencies that oversee foreign assistance.
Trump has long railed against foreign aid despite the fact that such assistance typically amounts to roughly 1% of the federal budget, except under unusual circumstances such as the billions in weaponry provided to Ukraine. Trump has been critical of the amount shipped to Ukraine to help bolster its defenses against Russia’s invasion.
The last official accounting of foreign aid in the Biden administration dates from mid-December and budget year 2023. It shows that $68 billion had been obligated for programs abroad that range from disaster relief to health and pro-democracy initiatives in 204 countries and regions.
Some of the biggest recipients of U.S. assistance, Israel ($3.3 billion per year), Egypt ($1.5 billion per year) and Jordan ($1.7 billion per year) are unlikely to see dramatic reductions, as those amounts are included in long-term packages that date back decades and are in some cases governed by treaty obligations.
Funding for U.N. agencies, including peacekeeping, human rights and refugee agencies, have been traditional targets for Republican administrations to slash or otherwise cut. The first Trump administration moved to reduce foreign aid spending, suspending payments to various UN agencies, including the U.N. Population Fund, and funding to the Palestinian Authority.
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Man accused of stalking Caitlin Clark proclaims himself ‘guilty as charged’
Headline Legal News |
2025/01/21 17:57
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One day after Michael Thomas Lewis was charged with felony stalking of Indiana Fever star and WNBA rookie of the year Caitlin Clark, the 55-year-old Texas man shouted “guilty as charged” as soon as he sat down in a courtroom Tuesday.
Lewis is accused of repeated and continued harassment of the 22-year-old Clark beginning on Dec. 16, the Marion County prosecutor’s office wrote in a court filing.
WISH-TV of Indianapolis reported that Lewis behaved “very erratically” in his first court appearance and, at times, appeared to be laughing and joking while noting he had not been taking his medication while jailed or while living out of his car.
Prosecutors said they were seeking a higher than standard bond because Lewis traveled from his home in Texas to Indianapolis “with the intent to be in close proximity to the victim.” Lewis was ordered held on a $50,000 bond, and if the bond is posted, he will be required to wear an ankle monitor and remain in Indiana.
The court also filed a not guilty plea on Lewis’ behalf, and Judge Angela Davis suggested Lewis “remain silent” in jail and only speak with his attorney.
Lewis received a no-contact order and the stay-away order sought by prosecutors that bars him from being within 500 feet of either of the two arenas where the Fever play their home games.
His pretrial hearing will be held remotely on March 31.
In one post on X, Lewis said he had been repeatedly been driving by Gainbridge Fieldhouse, the Indiana Pacers’ home arena where the Fever also play. In another, he said he had “one foot on a banana peel and the other on a stalking charge.” Other messages directed at Clark were sexually explicit.
The social media posts “actually caused Caitlin Clark to feel terrorized, frightened, intimidated, or threatened” and an implicit or explicit threat also was made “with the intent to place Caitlin Clark in reasonable fear of sexual battery,” prosecutors wrote in the Marion County Superior Court filing.
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Trump asks the Supreme Court to block sentencing in his hush money case
Headline Legal News |
2025/01/07 06:51
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President-elect Donald Trump is asking the Supreme Court to call off Friday’s sentencing in his hush money case in New York.
Trump’s lawyers turned to the nation’s highest court on Wednesday after New York courts refused to postpone the sentencing by Judge Juan M. Merchan, who presided over Trump’s trial and conviction last May on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. Trump has denied wrongdoing.
The justices asked for a response from prosecutors by Thursday morning. Trump’s team sought an immediate stay of the scheduled sentencing, saying it would wrongly restrict him as he prepares to take office. While Merchan has indicated he will not impose jail time, fines or probation, Trump’s lawyers argued a felony conviction would still have intolerable side effects.
The sentencing should be delayed as he appeals the conviction to “prevent grave injustice and harm to the institution of the Presidency and the operations of the federal government,” they argued.
The emergency motion is from lawyers John Sauer, Trump’s pick for solicitor general, who represents the government before the high court, and Todd Blanche, in line to be the second-ranking official at the Justice Department.
They also pointed to the Supreme Court ruling giving Trump and other presidents broad immunity from prosecutions over their actions in office, saying it supports their argument that his New York conviction should be overturned.
Their filing said the New York trial court “lacks authority to impose sentence and judgment on President Trump — or conduct any further criminal proceedings against him— until the resolution of his underlying appeal raising substantial claims of Presidential immunity, including by review in this Court if necessary.”
The Republican president-elect’s spokesman, Steven Cheung, called for the case to be dismissed in a statement. Trump simultaneously filed an emergency appeal in front of New York’s highest court.
The Manhattan district attorney’s office, meanwhile, said it will respond in court papers. Trump’s convictions arose from what prosecutors said was an attempt to cover up a $130,000 hush money payment to porn actor Stormy Daniels just before the 2016 presidential election.
Daniels claims she had a sexual encounter with Trump in 2006. He denies it.
The Supreme Court’s immunity opinion came in a separate election interference case against him, but Trump’s lawyers say it means some of the evidence used against him in his hush money trial should have been shielded by presidential immunity. That includes testimony from some White House aides and social media posts made while he was in office.
Merchan has disagreed, finding they would qualify as personal business. The Supreme Court’s immunity decision was largely about official acts of presidents while in office.
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Amazon workers strike at multiple facilities as Teamsters seek labor contract
Headline Legal News |
2024/12/21 06:20
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Workers at seven Amazon facilities went on strike Thursday, an effort by the Teamsters to pressure the e-commerce company for a labor agreement during a key shopping period.
The Teamsters say the workers, who authorized strikes in the past few days, are joining the picket line after Amazon ignored a Sunday deadline the union set for contract negotiations. Amazon says it doesn’t expect an impact on its operations during what the union calls the largest strike against the company in U.S. history.
The International Brotherhood of Teamsters say they represent nearly 10,000 workers at 10 Amazon facilities, a small portion of the 1.5 million people Amazon employs in its warehouses and corporate offices.
At one warehouse, located in New York City’s Staten Island borough, thousands of workers who voted for the Amazon Labor Union in 2022 and have since affiliated with the Teamsters. At the other facilities, employees - including many delivery drivers - have unionized with them by demonstrating majority support but without holding government-administered elections.
The strikes happening Thursday are taking place at one Amazon warehouse in San Francisco, California, and six delivery stations in southern California, New York City; Atlanta, Georgia, and Skokie, Illinois, according to the union’s announcement. Amazon workers at the other facilities are “prepared to join,” the union said.
“Amazon is pushing its workers closer to the picket line by failing to show them the respect they have earned,” Teamsters General President Sean M. O’Brien said in a statement.
The Seattle-based online retailer has been seeking to re-do the election that led to the union victory at the warehouse on Staten Island, which the Teamsters now represent. In the process, the company has filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Board. |
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