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Inside the DHS task force scouring foreign students' social media - A critic called the review a return to “McCarthyism,” a reference to tactics used to identify alleged communists during the Cold War

A critic called the review a return to “McCarthyism,” a reference to tactics used to identify alleged communists during the Cold War.

A recently created Department of Homeland Security task force is using data analytic tools to scour the social media histories of the estimated 1.5 million foreign students studying in the United States for potential grounds to revoke their visas, three sources familiar with the operation told NBC News. “The spirit of Joseph McCarthy is alive and well in the Trump administration, which has spent months dishonestly mischaracterizing legitimate criticism of the Israeli government’s war crimes in Gaza as antisemitic, pursuing witch hunts into American colleges, and threatening the free speech rights of immigrants,” CAIR National Deputy Director Edward Ahmed Mitchell said in a statement Wednesday. “Blatant, widespread fraud has become a central part of America’s foreign student program, and the government agencies responsible for putting an end to it have been asleep at the wheel for far too long,” Feere said in an article he published with the Center for Immigration Studies in August.

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