US "Catch and Revoke" AI program flags foreign students for visa revocation
The U.S. State Department's "Catch and Revoke" program uses AI with natural language processing to scan social media and news reports to identify foreign students suspected of Hamas support for visa revocation. Civil rights advocates reportedly warn the system relies on simplistic keyword matching that may conflate political criticism with terrorism support and lacks transparent appeals processes.
What happened
The U.S. State Department launched a program called 'Catch and Revoke' that uses AI tools focused on natural language processing and keyword-based pattern recognition to analyze social media posts, news reports, and public data for phrases, hashtags, or imagery interpreted as endorsing Hamas or other designated terrorist groups.
Terms like 'intifada' or 'from the river to the sea' are flagged, alongside contextual sentiment assessments. The unspecified AI scanned news reports and social media accounts of approximately 100,000 people in America's Student Exchange Visitor System, starting from October 7, 2023.
Reported impact
Civil liberties advocates warn the programme undermines First Amendment principles by outsourcing the policing of speech to potentially error-prone AI, and critics highlight concerns about the tools' reliance on simplistic keyword matching and their potential inability to distinguish between nuanced political discourse, such as criticism of Israeli policies, and genuine terrorist sympathies.
Foreign students, including doctoral candidates, face immediate visa cancellations without transparent appeals processes, and potential bans on future entry to the US.
Index analysis
The AI system relies on keyword matching that may conflate criticism of Israel with terrorism, raising concerns about false positives given that large language models are prone to hallucinations and false positives and every AI system is encoded with the biases of the people who created it.
Critics stress that the programme risks eroding democratic norms by potentially conflating criticism of Israel with terrorism, and undermining freedom of speech and assembly principles.
Governance controls
The Trump administration framed the policy as a national security necessity, citing the US Immigration and Nationality Act's broad authority to revoke visas if holders 'threaten public safety', and claimed the programme leverages the efficiency of AI to analyse 'publicly available information' at scale.
No transparent appeals process is available to students facing visa cancellations under the programme.
Classification
Sources and evidence
This record was researched and written by the Index, based on the following original reporting.