USCIS Is Using Google Translate to Monitor Immigrants’ Social Media Pages

Dangerous’ or anti-American posts cannot be screened through translation services, which do not provide the full context

Alejandra Oliva
ZORA
Published in
6 min readOct 15, 2019

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Photo of a man holding  his mobile phone that says “We left Syria because of war and we want safety” on Google Translate.
Photo: NurPhoto/Getty Images

RRecently, ProPublica reported that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has been using Google Translate in order to screen refugee and asylum seekers’ social media posts for “dangerous” content. We’ve already seen one example of someone being barred from the country for social media posts — although not even his own. Ismail Ajjawi, an incoming freshman at Harvard, was barred from entering the U.S. when a Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agent found some of his friends’ posts to be “anti-American.” After keeping Ajjawi, a Palestinian student who had been living in Lebanon, detained for 5 hours without a means to contact anyone, the CBP agent called him back and yelled at him for posts that had “political points of view that oppose the U.S.” that appeared on his timeline. Ajjawi’s protests that he hadn’t liked, shared, or commented on the posts went unheeded, and his visa was canceled until Harvard officials and attorneys stepped in.

Keeping people out of the country because of their own or others’ posts criticizing America is not great policy to begin with — there’s a lot to criticize…

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Alejandra Oliva
ZORA
Writer for

Essayist, embroiderer, and translator, working for immigrant justice today and every day. | olivalejandra.com