US court lets unions' lawsuit over AI monitoring of visa holders' social media proceed

A federal court in the Southern District of New York refused on October 1 to dismiss a lawsuit by three US labor unions against the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The UAW, CWA and AFT are challenging a program in which the agencies use AI and automated tools to monitor the social media of visa and green card holders. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which represents the plaintiffs, announced Judge Alvin Hellerstein's ruling.

The suit was filed on October 17, 2025. According to the plaintiffs, the program looks for posts expressing views the government dislikes so that their authors can lose their visas or permanent resident status. Besides the State Department and DHS, the suit names Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI). The unions rely on the First Amendment and the Administrative Procedure Act and ask the court to halt the program and bar the use of data already collected.

What the court decided

The government wanted the case thrown out before any review of the merits. The judge ruled otherwise: the unions may sue on behalf of their members, and immigration law does not stop a federal court from hearing the dispute. The core of the ruling concerns fear of consequences. The threat of losing a visa over lawful speech, Hellerstein wrote, can "deter a person of ordinary firmness from the exercise of First Amendment rights." The case now moves on to the merits.

The plaintiffs single out the role of AI. The complaint says automated tools struggle to tell protected speech from unprotected speech and sweep in more posts than manual review would. EFF attorney Lisa Femia said when the suit was filed that the scale of the spying is matched by an equally massive chilling effect on free speech. The ruling is not yet a win on the merits. It only means the government failed to end the case on procedural grounds.

Who this affects outside the US

Social media checks have long reached beyond people already living in the US. Since June 18, 2025, the State Department has required applicants for F, M and J student visas to make all their social media profiles public for consular review. Since December 15, 2025, the same rule has applied to H-1B work visas and H-4 visas for their family members. Consular officers look at posts, comments, photos and affiliations on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, TikTok and YouTube.

Tourists on the Visa Waiver Program are not affected yet. In December 2025 CBP proposed requiring ESTA applicants to provide five years of social media history, but after a wave of objections it promised in May to soften the rule and ask additional questions only of "certain populations" based on risk assessment. A revised version is expected this autumn.