This week, the Coalition for Independent Technology Research (CITR) won a key battle in its fight to reverse a visa-restriction policy that the Trump administration had used to attempt to revoke green cards and deport non-US citizens who work on misinformation, disinformation, fact-checking, content moderation, compliance, and trust and safety.
In an opinion published Tuesday, US District Judge James Boasberg granted a preliminary injunction blocking the State Department from enforcing the policy until the CITR’s lawsuit is resolved.
On its face, the policy does not require visa denials or deportations. Instead, it authorizes immigration investigations into individuals suspected of helping foreign adversaries attempt to manipulate public opinion by suppressing US speech.
Over the course of the litigation, the State Department so far has failed to prove that any of the five researchers explicitly targeted under the policy had any connection to a foreign power attempting to censor Americans or manipulate US public debate. Left unchecked, the State Department’s authority seemingly had “no clear stopping point short of the [content moderation] field itself,” Boasberg said.
The attacks on trust and safety workers just doing their jobs are particularly concerning, since Secretary of State Marco Rubio threatened that his department “stands ready and willing to expand” the list of targeted researchers, Boasberg said. That’s why Boasberg paused the policy’s enforcement broadly, rather than limiting the injunction to only CITR members, as the State Department had requested. As the judge explained:
“A lawful permanent resident working on a platform’s trust-and-safety team, a noncitizen researcher urging stronger disinformation labels, a compliance employee helping apply moderation rules, or an advocacy leader pressing advertisers away from sites that spread falsehoods could reasonably understand the policy to place their immigration status at risk—not because they wield foreign sovereign power or facilitate its censorship, but simply because they work in content moderation.”
According to Boasberg, the State Department was putting “its enforcement thumb against one side of the scale” in an ongoing, heated public debate over how much content moderation is permissible before platforms cross a line into censorship. In line with President Trump’s views, any noncitizen researcher who favors more moderation would seemingly be more likely to be penalized under the policy than a researcher who favors less moderation, Boasberg suggested.
