What constitutes anti-Americanism? What precisely are those “ideologies or activities?” Without clear instructions, how are individuals involved in the immigration process supposed to identify it? The ambiguity might be intentional. According to practitioners consulted by The Verge three weeks later, determining how to advise clients or how to be adequately prepared for this standard remains nearly impossible. Pittsburgh-based immigration lawyer Adam S. Greenberg noted, “The problem that I have been stating is that it’s entirely pretextual anyway, that having something be this vague is not a bug, it’s not a problem, it’s exactly what they’re going for. Because if they have it vague, then they can say that somebody can be disqualified for any reason they want.”

An example of where the administration might set boundaries can be seen when Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau indicated that individuals “praising, rationalizing, or making light of” Charlie Kirk’s assassination could be denied visas or lose their status, without citing specific authority. This uncertainty fosters self-censorship, causing people to delete their accounts or posts, or refrain from posting altogether out of fear that they might have to report them to the government, potentially influencing their immigration status, said Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

“Fear about whether this would impact applications has lingered for some time, since March or possibly earlier, due to the administration’s antisemitism policy,” pointed out New York-based immigration attorney and scholar Cyrus Mehta, referring to an earlier announcement that the administration would examine applicants’ social media for alleged antisemitic content. “The anti-Americanism policy really kind of flows from the antisemitism policy.”

Mehta mentioned attending several naturalization interviews after the announcement without it being a topic of discussion. However, clients remain anxious and lawyers puzzled. “I don’t know how it’s going to be applied. It might be applied more vigorously, and I think it’s far more insidious than the antisemitism … It’s really vague, it’s really broad.” He emphasized that the belief in free speech held by many attorneys contradicts the advice they might have to provide to their clients.

Broad and discretionary immigration policies meant to confuse applicants have been characteristic of Donald Trump’s approach since his first term. The public charge rule, for instance, left immigrants at risk of status denial through extremely subjective evaluations of their potential dependency on public assistance, considering not only current but potential future benefits usage, like food stamps. Though no one was ultimately denied status based solely on this expanded analysis, partly because a federal judge blocked it during COVID, a 2024 Urban Institute report found widespread hesitance among immigrant families with different statuses to utilize safety net benefits they were eligible for, including those not part of the public charge calculation.

The idea at least in part was for people to overcorrect, and overcorrect they did. Now, Trump officials are doing the same but for speech. This is not the first immigration effort targeting what very much seems like protected speech, following the now-notorious detention of former Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil and others involved in campus protest and activism, which shocked observers earlier this year. This does, however, seem far more expansive, and comes on the heels of Homeland Security and the State Department announcing that visa adjudications would require applicants to both share all their social media handles and set their accounts to be publicly visible, which together suggest that online criticism of the administration could now effectively be an obstacle to status. “It has clearly altered behavior. A lot of people say, ‘Well, I make sure that I don’t post anything.’ I’ve never really had that reaction before,” said Mehta.

The guidance does not specify how exactly government adjudicators would assess applicants for “anti-American” sentiment, though there are some concerning clues in other recent immigration actions. In April, the administration abruptly began mass-terminating thousands of student visas across the country before just as abruptly reversing course as it faced dozens of lawsuits and court losses. It soon emerged in court that administration officials had simply run international student information data through a federal crime information database and then directed the terminations without ever confirming if the data was accurate or if identified students had actually committed offenses that could trigger loss of status. Activists and lawyers worry that a similar approach could be used to identify supposed anti-American ideology.

“We can make guesses based on the half-assed technical implementations that the Trump administration has made since February. Especially the behavior of DOGE is usually to essentially create enormous troves of data and merge them all together in a deeply undifferentiated way,” said Galperin. “You get a lot of extremely inaccurate or useless data, and then either just do a search for incendiary keywords — which is how you end up getting funding pulled for talking about transitions or transgenic mice — and then there’s just feeding the entire thing into AI and having AI make the determination, or have AI write a summary, which, again, you are feeding garbage into a garbage machine that will then spit out more garbage.”

USCIS did not respond to a list of detailed questions, including how it defined anti-Americanism, what criteria it was giving its adjudicators, and if it would use any automated tools to evaluate applicants.

At least the students with canceled visas were able to pursue legal action on the basis that the government obviously lacked any real rationale to attempt to terminate their status. When it comes to the initial issuance of benefits like work and student visas or even permanent residency, the government under the law gets quite a fair bit of leeway, and doesn’t always have to explicitly lay out the reason for a denial. That opens up the possibility that applicants could be denied on this anti-American basis and not even know it.

“Adjustment [to permanent residency] is discretionary. Extensions of status are discretionary. Waivers are discretionary. They don’t have to provide their reasoning,” said Greenberg. While a federal court could in theory point out that a denial violates the First Amendment, there are limited avenues for people to actually appeal these decisions or get clarity on why they were denied, especially at consulates abroad.

“I think, for example, students applying for the visa to study in the US are particularly vulnerable,” said Mehta. “It would be very difficult for everybody to bring lawsuits. So a lot of people are trying to conform. A lot of people are basically avoiding, you know, posting.”