AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.

After Mahmoud Khalil was detained two weeks ago, President Trump warned he was the, quote, “first arrest of many to come.” Trump’s warning comes as the State Department has launched a program to use artificial intelligence to scrape the social media accounts of foreign nationals, including students, to identify possible targets for deportation.

We’re joined right now by Faiza Patel, senior director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program. Her new piece for the Brennan Center is headlined “U.S. AI-Driven 'Catch and Revoke' Initiative Threatens First Amendment Rights.”

Thanks so much for being with us, Faiza. Explain what is going on.

FAIZA PATEL: So, one thing that’s going on is something that’s been going on for a really long time, which is that government agencies have been collecting social media information. They have been scraping social media. They’ve been keeping tabs on what Americans are saying. And this is something that started during, really, the end of the Obama administration, continued through the first Trump administration and continued through the Biden administration.

And I think it’s important to also understand two things. One is, “AI-driven” sounds really fancy. I mean, basically, what they’re going to be doing is keyword searches. And we’ve seen this play out with their attempts to identify so-called DEI initiatives, which led to things like, you know, removing information about the Enola Gay. So, I think you have a sense of sort of —

AMY GOODMAN: The plane that dropped the bomb on Japan.

FAIZA PATEL: Precisely.

AMY GOODMAN: And they took out the word “gay”?

FAIZA PATEL: Well, they just took out the whole reference, right? I mean, you see this playing out. I mean, they make a lot of really rudimentary mistakes — right? — because there’s no context, there’s no understanding. You’re doing keyword searches, and you’re taking things offline, in the case of the DEI stuff.

But when you translate that over to the social media-scraping context, you can understand how that will work out, right? Because they will be looking for certain terms, and they will be targeting people based on this speech. And that can sweep very, very broadly. In the current context, where they’re, you know, going after pro-Palestinian protests, you’ve got to ask — right? — “Is the fact that I liked a 'free Palestine' post going to be enough to have me deported?” I mean, foreign students are running scared because they may have done something very innocuous on social media, and now they’re in the crosshairs.

But I also think it’s important to remember that, you know, the focus on Palestinian — pro-Palestinian speech is sort of the tip of the iceberg. If you look at the executive order that Trump put out, which sort of previews this program, it’s not just about what he characterizes as pro-terrorist, pro-Hamas speech, it’s also about anything that the administration considers as being basically un-American, right? And so, that covers a vast swath of speech. It covers all kinds of protest activity, from environmental, pro-migrant, pro-democracy, pro-voter. You know, it’s a wide space that can be covered here.

AMY GOODMAN: Are you concerned about this latest news we had in headlines? President Trump rescinded an executive order targeting the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison after meeting in person with its chair. Under the deal, the law firm will provide $40 million in free legal services supporting Trump’s agenda, including his “Task Force to Combat Antisemitism.” This is a law firm. And yet we just had a Jewish UCLA student, Israeli American Jewish UCLA student, saying it’s antisemitic to go after Jewish students who are protesting against Israel’s war on Gaza.

FAIZA PATEL: I mean, I think there’s a lot of concern, overall, that civil society institutions have been crumbling almost in the face of pressure from the Trump administration. And I think that sweeps across the board, to media organizations that have settled lawsuits with him, universities that — I mean, there was a report in The Wall Street Journal that Columbia was going to accede to the demands from the Trump administration. And there has been a lot of pressure on the law firms, as well. So, this is — you know, you can’t look at any one of these things in isolation. I think it’s an overall attack on civil society institutions that could potentially block his agenda.

AMY GOODMAN: So, it’s a “catch and revoke” program. Explain that further and how that fits into the First Amendment and privacy rights.

FAIZA PATEL: Sure. So, I mean, this is a play — right? — on “catch and release,” which was basically the term that was used to describe the policy of sort of apprehending people at the border who are asylum seekers and then releasing them into the country because our immigration court system just really doesn’t have the capacity to address their claims in a timely fashion, and we don’t actually have detention capacity, either. So, it’s a play on that term.

And what that means is, I mean, the “catch” part is basically, “We’re going to figure out who was involved — and currently we’re looking at pro-Palestinian protests — who was involved in these protests.” And they have a few different sources for that. There are some organizations that have been doxxing people who took part in protests, and they claim to have provided that information to the State Department and to DHS. So that’s one source.

The other source is going through social media. Now, they have an advantage when it comes to foreigners when going through social media, because since the last — oh gosh, I’m going to space on the time, but I think like seven years or so, the State Department has been collecting social media handles from everybody who applies for a visa. That’s 14.7 million people a year, roughly. And they actually now want to expand that program to another 33 million a year, which includes people who are in the United States who may be applying for immigration benefits — you know, I’m here on a student visa, I get a job, I want to apply for a work visa. So, they’re trying to extend that. This is all like this whole complex.

So, once they know your social media handle — right? — they can track what you say online very, very easily. Now, you can create new handles, but, you know, that gives them a baseline to start from. And that means that everybody’s speech can be monitored. And it’s not actually just the person whose handle you have, right? It’s not just Khalil, for example, in this case. If they were monitoring him, they would also be then figuring out who his networks are, who the people are in the United States who are his friends, who are his work colleagues, who are his teachers. It’s a very pervasive effort.

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, Trump’s proposal for a new travel ban that would target citizens of dozens of countries? Draft list of recommendations suggests a red list of 11 countries, including Afghanistan, Bhutan, Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen.

FAIZA PATEL: I mean, this is, you know, a redo of what he did in his first term. And I think one of the things that’s super scary about it is that he’s also directed the secretary of state to go back and look at people who got visas in the previous four years under the Biden administration and see if they can be deported, too.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you for being with us. And Faiza Patel is senior director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program. Her new piece for the Brennan Center, we’ll link to, “U.S. AI-Driven 'Catch and Revoke' Initiative Threatens First Amendment Rights.”

Coming up, we look at the newly declassified JFK assassination documents. We’ll speak with Peter Kornbluh. Stay with us.