09/15/2025
Stephen Prager
New ‘thought policing’ bill lay let Republicans strip passports from US citizens over political speech: “Marco Rubio has claimed the power to designate people terrorist supporters based solely on what they think and say,” said one free speech advocate.
Free speech advocates are sounding the alarm about a bill in the US House of Representatives that they fear could allow Secretary of State Marco Rubio to strip US citizens of their passports based purely on political speech.
The bill, introduced by Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.), will come up for a hearing on Wednesday. According to The Intercept:
Mast’s new bill claims to target a narrow set of people. One section grants the secretary of state the power to revoke or refuse to issue passports for people who have been convicted—or merely charged—of material support for terrorism...
The other section sidesteps the legal process entirely. Rather, the secretary of state would be able to deny passports to people whom they determine “has knowingly aided, assisted, abetted, or otherwise provided material support to an organization the Secretary has designated as a foreign terrorist organization.”
Rubio has previously boasted of stripping the visas and green cards from several immigrants based purely on their peaceful expression of pro-Palestine views, describing them as “Hamas supporters.”
These include Columbia protest leader Mahmoud Khalil, who was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after Rubio voided his green card; and Rumeysa Ozturk, the Tufts student whose visa Rubio revoked after she co-wrote an op-ed calling for her school to divest from Israel.
Mast—a former soldier for the Israel Defense Forces who once stated that babies were “not innocent Palestinian civilians”—has previously called for “kicking terrorist sympathizers out of our country,” speaking about the Trump administration’s attempts to deport Khalil, who was never convicted or even charged with support for a terrorist group.
Critics have argued that the bill has little reason to exist other than to allow the Secretary of State to unilaterally strip passports from people without them actually having been convicted of a crime.
As Kia Hamadanchy, a senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, noted in The Intercept, there is little reason to restrict people convicted of terrorism or material support for terrorism, since—if they were guilty—they’d likely be serving a long prison sentence and incapable of traveling anyway.
“I can’t imagine that if somebody actually provided material support for terrorism, there would be an instance where it wouldn’t be prosecuted—it just doesn’t make sense,” he said.
Journalist Zaid Jilani noted on X that “judges can already remove a passport over material support for terrorism, but the difference is you get due process. This bill would essentially make Marco Rubio judge, jury, and executioner.”
The bill does contain a clause allowing those stripped of their passports to appeal to Rubio. But, as Hamadanchy notes, the decision is up to the secretary alone, “who has already made this determination.” He said that for determining who is liable to have their visa stripped, “There’s no standard set. There’s nothing.”
As Seth Stern, the director of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, noted in The Intercept, the language in Mast’s bill is strikingly similar to that found in the so-called “nonprofit killer” provision that Republicans attempted to pass in July’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” Act. That provision, which was ultimately struck from the bill, would have allowed the Treasury Secretary to unilaterally strip nonprofit status from anything he deemed to be a “terrorist-supporting organization.”
Stern said Mast’s bill would allow for “thought policing at the hands of one individual.”
“Marco Rubio has claimed the power to designate people terrorist supporters based solely on what they think and say,” he said, “even if what they say doesn’t include a word about a terrorist organization or terrorism.”
https://www.commondreams.org/news/rubio-thought-policing-bill
As Uprights News has previously reported, Jeffrey Epstein's and Russia's Trump and GOP are using fear to chill anyone from being able to share facts and laws that prove that Trump and the GOP totally disqualified themselves from public office forever BEFORE the 2016 elections.
They need to censor anyone who tries to share facts that prove all of the same, in order to control the narrative as to what is true and what is not true, because of the false universe of false facts employed by the likes of Jeffrey Epstein's Rupert Murdoch's Fox News, in a bid to keep Jeffrey Epstein's treasonous child sex trafficking ring in power over US law, so that Trump, the GOP, and all these other traitors aren't prosecuted for treason and put to death.
Resist this political terrorism by organizing to totally destroy and dismantle Trump's and the GOP's treasonous child sex trafficking ring.
We (the people) are not afraid of you (Trump's and GOP's treasonous child sex trafficking ring), and you have overtly furthered the witness and investigator intimidation and obstruction (legal) conspiracy branches of the broader ongoing organized criminal conspiracy we have summarized in our Big Pictures link at the top of the page in the menu section, by publicly calling for the end of due process for witnesses and investigators against you, as well as calling for the end or erosion of the 1st Amendment in complete violation of your oaths of office -- to support and defend, and not attack and erode, the Constitution -- once again permanently disqualifying yourselves from public offices.
No changes you make to the US government can ever be legitimate, nor enforceable, and all of your changes are voidable.
Of course the GOP is projecting here, as they clearly engaged in terrorism in the past, and almost none of them were held accountable for that terrorism, resulting in them claiming their victims, witnesses, and investigators are the terrorists, a DARVO projection, and one of their central RICO obstruction tools.
If this bill passes, this treasonous child sex trafficking ring will be able to remove all of their witnesses, investigators, and victims from the country, while controlling communications in the US, so that only their false facts will be made available to the public, like a banana republic.
As agents of Russia, Trump and the GOP have
Sounds like we need to double or even triple our efforts to oust this treasonous child sex trafficking ring engaged in this sort of political terrorism, and as soon as possible.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/rubio-thought-policing-bill