“A political witch hunt”
CITR’s lawsuit is the latest salvo in a yearslong battle over how the internet should be moderated, and by whom—a question that has become increasingly political and entangled in allegations of censorship.
For years, Trump and his allies have claimed to be victims of a vast conspiracy between government agencies, civil society groups, academics, and Big Tech platforms to specifically censor conservative voices online. According to this narrative, a so-called “censorship-industrial complex” helped the Biden administration subvert First Amendment protections on speech by allegedly outsourcing censorship to these groups.
The State Department claims Rubio was able to implement the immigration policy because the Immigration and Nationality Act authorizes him to “render inadmissible any alien whose entry into the United States ‘would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.’” Before the current Trump administration, the statute was rarely invoked, and when it was, it was typically with more limited, specific criteria, rather than its current application against anyone who has participated in alleged censorship—an action that has no legal definition.
The administration first deployed the policy in July 2025, when Rubio issued a statement announcing the revocation of visas for Alexandre de Moraes, the lead justice on the Brazilian Supreme Federal Court, and “his allies on the court” who were involved in prosecuting Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s former president. The prosecution was a “political witch hunt,” said Rubio, calling it evidence of a “censorship complex so sweeping that it not only violates basic rights of Brazilians, but also … targets Americans.”
Then, in early December, the State Department issued instructions to embassies to reject H-1B visa applications from individuals who had worked specifically in fact-checking, online trust and safety, and mis- or disinformation research, as Reuters first reported.
A few weeks later, on December 23, the agency announced visa restrictions for five Europeans whom it accused of censoring Americans. This included two CITR members: Imran Ahmed, founder and CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which documents hate speech on social media platforms, and Clare Melford, cofounder of the Global Disinformation Index, which ranks websites according to how often they publish hate speech and disinformation. Also banned were the former European Union commissioner Thierry Breton, a key architect of the European Union’s Digital Services Act (which the State Department has called “Orwellian” and an example of censorship), and Josephine Ballon and Anna-Lena von Hodenberg, co-CEOs of HateAid, a German nonprofit that fights online hate speech.
Ahmed, who lives in the US with his American wife and child, quickly filed his own lawsuit to stave off deportation and halt the policy. A preliminary injunction preventing his detention and deportation is in place as the lawsuit continues.
