ICE Retracts Threat To Stop Illegal ‘Ideas’ at the Border
The Trump administration insists that its crackdown on pro-Palestinian students is not an attack on freedom of thought. “This is not about free speech. This is about people that don’t have a right to be in the United States to begin with,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in defense of detaining Columbia University protest spokesman Mahmoud Khalil in March.
But on Thursday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) said that its job was to stop ideas along with people. “If it crosses the U.S. border illegally, it’s our job to stop it. People. Money. Products. Ideas,” said the since-deleted social media graphic.
After the statement sparked an uproar, ICE quickly claimed that it was a mistake. “That post was sent without proper approval and should never have been shared,” ICE Media Operations Unit Chief Mike Alvarez tells Reason via email. “‘Ideas’ should have said ‘intellectual property.'”
Mistake or not, the post reflects the Trump administration’s philosophy that free speech stops at the border. The same day as the ICE post, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it would begin screening foreign students’ and immigrants’ social media accounts for “antisemitic ideolo
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