In March, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has stripped the Turkish doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk of his visa on the basis of what a court later found was nothing more than his critical element of Israel.
Now, a bill presented by the president of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Chamber rings on the defenders of civil liberties who say that this would give Rubio the power to revoke the passports of American citizens for similar reasons.
The provision, sponsored by the representative Brian Mast, r-fla., As part of a broader reorganization of the State Department, is scheduled for Wednesday.
Mast legislation says that it aims “terrorists and traffickers”, but criticisms say that it could be used to refuse American citizens the right to travel according to their speech. (The State Department declared that it does not comment on the legislation in progress.)
“Rubio claimed the power to designate terrorist supporters of people based solely on what they think.”
Seth Stern, the director of defense of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said that the bill would open the door to “reflection on the police in the hands of an individual”.
“Marco Rubio claimed the power to designate terrorist supporters of people based solely on what they think and say,” said Stern, “even if what they say does not include a word about a terrorist organization or terrorism.”
Waves “terrorist” designations
Mast, for her part, publicly expressed his support for “launching terrorist sympathizers of our country”. At the time, he spoke of the expulsion of Mahmoud Khalil, a holder of the Palestinian green card that the Trump administration held and tried to deport according to what the criticisms of the decision said they were his pro-Palestine opinions.
The new mast bill claims to target a close set of people. A section grants the Secretary of State the power to revoke or refuse to issue passports for people who have been convicted – or simply charged with material support for terrorism. (The Mast office did not respond to a request for comments.)
Kia Hamadanchy, a principal lawyer for the American American Liberties Union, said that the language would fulfill little in practice, because the terrorist convictions are delivered with rigorous prison terms and that pre-processors are generally refused to release on bond.
The other section completely bypasses the legal process. The Secretary of State would rather be able to deny passports to people they determine “knowingly helped, helped, encouraged or provided material support to an organization that the secretary has appointed as a foreign terrorist organization.”
The reference to “material support” disrupted defenders who have long warned that the government can abuse statutes criminalizing the “material support” to the terrorists – first succeeded after the bombing of the federal building of Oklahoma City in 1995 and hardened after the attacks of September 11 – to punish the speech.
Some of these fears have been confirmed. The Supreme Court judged in 2010 that even advice on international law to designated terrorist groups could be classified as material support.
The government has even judged a woman who was kidnapped and forced to cook and clean the Salvado -ian guerrillas a material supporter of terrorism, in order to justify her expulsion.
Since the attacks in Hamas on October 7, pro-Israeli legislators have taken attempts to extend the scope and use of anti-terrorist laws.
The Anti-Diffamation League and Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights under the law suggested in a letter last year that students for justice in Palestine provided “material support” in Hamas thanks to its activism on the campus.
The legislators also tried to adopt a bill “non -profit killer” which would allow the secretary of the Treasury to strip groups of their charity status if they were considered as a “organization of terrorist support”. The bill was beaten by a coalition of non-profit groups, more recently during the debate on the so-called major bill.
The Mast bill contains a strangely similar language, said Stern.
“It is an angle that the legislators on the right seem determined to continue – whether by the bill of non -profit killers of last year, or a bill like this,” said Stern.
The provision is particularly threatening journalists, said Stern. He noted that Senator Tom Cotton, R-Ark., In November 2023, demanded a “survey on national security” of the Ministry of Justice on the Associated Press, CNN, the New York Times and Reuters on the images of independent photographers of the attacks of October 7.
Rubio also revoked the Öztürk visa on what seems to be nothing more than a editorial it wrote for the student newspaper of Tofts University in 2024 – which did not mention Hamas – calling on the school to depart from companies linked to Israel.
Since its entry into office, Rubio has also added groups to the list of foreign terrorist organizations of the State Department at a stocky pace, which is largely focused on the gangs and drug cartels which were previously the field of the criminal legal system.
Exception of freedom of expression?
There is an ostensible safety valve in Mast’s Bill. Citizens would have the right to call on Rubio within 60 days of the refusal or revocation of their passports.
This made it possible to comfort the Hamadanchy of ACLU, which helps to rally the opposition to the bill.
“Basically, you can return to the secretary, who has already made this decision and try to appeal. There is no standard. There is nothing,” he said.
Hamadanchy said that the provisioning provisioning to the Secretary of State the discretionary power on passports seemed to be an attempted contradiction to be forced to provide evidence of legal violations.
“I cannot imagine that if someone really provided material support for terrorism, there would be a case where it would not be prosecuted-it simply does not make sense,” he said.
While the bill on the “non-profit killer” attracted only a handful of opposition to the right of the conservatives with a libertarian spirit such as the representative Thomas Massie, R-Ky., Stern said that the Republicans should be just as concerned about the potential violation of civil freedoms in the bill on passports.
The law, he said, will also grant an almost uncontrolled power to a Democratic secretary, he said.
“Lately, it seems that the law is so convinced that it will never be out of power that the idea that one day the shoe could be on the other foot does not resonate,” said Stern. “What prevents a future democratic administration from appointing an anti-abortion activist, a supporter of the West Bank colonies, an anti-vacuum to be a supporter of terrorism and target them in the same way? The list is endless.”
