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He researches antisemitism for a living. Why does the State Department want to kick him out of the country?
(JTA) — For years, Imran Ahmed has presented his research on how tech platforms enable the spread of antisemitism to receptive audiences across the ideological spectrum.
He’s worked with the Anti-Defamation League and Jewish Federations of North America; the latter credits Ahmed with the backbone of much of its own policy proposals. He’s appeared at a conference organized by the first Trump administration, with Mike Pompeo, the former secretary of state, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also in attendance.
He’s joined Republicans in advocating for an end to Section 230, a law granting special protections to social media platforms. During the first Trump administration, on the strength of his research, the British-born Ahmed received a priority visa as an “alien of extraordinary ability” — the so-called “Einstein visa,” after the German-born Jewish physicist.
All of that only added to Ahmed’s befuddlement when, just before Christmas, the current Trump State Department announced it would be revoking his visa because of what Secretary of State Marco Rubio tweeted were “egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship.”
“It is confusing,” Ahmed told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Friday, speaking from his home in Washington, D.C. “Certainly there was some alarm.”
The confusion came not least because Ahmed, as a legal permanent resident, no longer has a visa to revoke. He received an EB-1 visa, which provides a fast pathway to permanent residency, in January 2021, at the end of Trump’s first term and now has a green card.
Ahmed was different from the four other digital anti-hate activists named in the State Department announcement, all of whom are based in Europe. Since 2021, his organization, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, has been registered as a U.S. nonprofit — a status that he notes should confer First Amendment protections. Last year, the group reported $4.2 million in revenue.
Ahmed has received no formal notification of an effort to revoke his residency. Neither Rubio’s own tweet, nor a State Department press release announcing the sanctions, mentioned him. There’s just a tweet, from a State Department undersecretary, mentioning him by name as a “key collaborator with the Biden Administration’s effort to weaponize the government against U.S. citizens.”
The State Department did not answer questions about Ahmed’s case. “The Supreme Court and Congress have repeatedly made clear: the United States is under no obligation to allow foreign aliens to come to our country or reside here,” a spokesperson told JTA in a statement.
At a time of aggressive immigration enforcement activity that has ensnared others with green cards, Ahmed isn’t taking changes. He sought (and was granted) a legal restraining order to prevent the government from seizing him and moving him to an immigrant detention facility without trial, as officials have done to an estimated 59,000 migrants in the last year. On Monday he returned to court, petitioning to make the order permanent.
“We want to make sure that they can’t take me away from my friends, family and support network,” he said. He’s optimistic on that front. “I have faith in the courts, and I have faith that the rule of law is still intact in the United States.”
What happens next is anyone’s guess. But Ahmed’s ordeal has cast a cloud of uncertainty over the work of a trusted Jewish communal ally — and further muddled the Trump administration’s own stated commitment to fighting antisemitism.
“Absolutely fascist — and dangerous — effort by the admin to ban my colleague Imran Ahmed and others from the US,” Amy Spitalnick, head of the Jewish Council of Public Affairs, wrote on X last week.
Ahmed partnered with Spitalnick’s group on a report about the rise of antisemitic influencers on X after Oct. 7. “He’s dedicated his career to fighting online hate and extremism,” Spitalnick recently told JTA, noting the two had first connected after the 2017 “Unite the Right” march in Charlottesville, Virginia, during which one counter-protester was killed.
A columnist at Britain’s Jewish News also criticized the Trump administration’s targeting of Ahmed: “Imran Ahmed was a friend to America and an important voice in debates about free speech,” wrote David Hirsh. “He obeyed the law, just as the Americans he worked with obey the law, and he should be treated the same, while working in and contributing to the United States of America.”
The Trump administration has taken special pains to prevent immigration by Muslims, last month blocking visas for passport holders from 20 mostly Muslim countries and targeting Afghans especially after an Afghan national shot and killed a National Guard member in Washington in November.
Ahmed’s parents are Afghan, and in his column Hirsh called Ahmed, “a brilliant Muslim Brit.” Ahmed, who was born in England, has said that he now considers himself an atheist.
His allies see his case as part of a different Trump administration priority. Spitalnick told JTA the targeting of Ahmed was “all part of the broader weaponization of the federal government to go after perceived political enemies and advance an extremist agenda, which in this case is to push back against any regulation of tech.”
In the State Department’s targeting of him, Ahmed sees the handiwork of his longtime foes: the tech “oligarchs” who control the social media giants he seeks to rein in.
“This is quite clearly an attempt to silence the work that we do studying and exposing the way that social media platforms encourage, amplify and reward — with money — antisemitism and other forms of hate,” he said. “These guys have been lobbying aggressively in Washington long before President Trump was president. They’ve been invited to the White House and treated like demigods for decades now.”
Fighting antisemitism is central to the CCDH’s origin story, Ahmed said. A former staffer with the British Labour Party with plans to run for office himself, he quit after the 2015 ascension of Jeremy Corbyn, whom Ahmed calls “an avowed antisemite.” (Corbyn, who came to lead Labour amid a party overhaul that saw a massive influx of antisemitic sentiment, was suspended by his party over his handling of the antisemitism issue before ultimately being expelled in 2023.)
Ahmed wanted to understand why what he perceived as a newfound flurry of antisemitic social media activity seemed to follow Corbyn and his allies. He was also disturbed by the 2016 murder of Labour parliamentarian Jo Cox by a far-right figure associated with neo-Nazi groups who had been radicalized online. Together, he reasoned, there was something yet undiscovered about the role social media was playing in pushing out antisemitism across the political spectrum.
“This has always been an organization that, at its heart, has been trying to answer the question, how is it that ancient lies about Jews have been able to gain such purchase in our society?” he said. “And what can we do to change that?”
In the years since Ahmed founded the CCDH (which he relocated to the United States after receiving his green card), his group has published a series of papers on the various ways social media algorithms promote and reward antisemitism and other forms of hate speech. With the ADL, they published a 2023 report on Iranian state media’s use of social media to spread antisemitism. In November, with JFNA, they released a report on how Instagram has effectively monetized antisemitic content.
Ahmed presented those findings at JFNA’s annual meeting, in front of federation heads from around the country; he credits his work with helping groups like JFNA focus more of their attention on the problem of social media algorithms instead of individual bad actors online. A JFNA representative recently told JTA that Ahmed’s research has been integral to the umbrella group’s crafting of its own online antisemitism policy proposals.
“He is a valuable partner in providing accurate and detailed information on how the social media algorithms have created a bent toward antisemitism and anti-Zionism,” Dennis Bernard, a JFNA lay leader who heads their government relations efforts, told JTA.
Ahmed’s work has made him enemies, too. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and head of X, sued the CCDH in 2023, alleging that it violated the X’s terms of service in gathering data for a report on its amplification of hate content. A judge threw the case out, but Ahmed isn’t so sure Musk — who wielded tremendous power over the federal government at the helm of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency and remains close with administration figures, including the president — has moved on.
“I think it’s incredibly telling that the earliest and most vociferous reactions [to the visa sanction] were actually from people like Elon Musk, who himself has spread antisemitic lies and presided over the descent of this platform formerly known as Twitter into a hellscape of antisemitism,” he said. On X, Musk responded to news of the visa sanctions with fire emojis.
If the State Department is indeed targeting activists like Ahmed as a matter of policy, it would seem to be at odds with its newly confirmed special antisemitism envoy, Yehuda Kaploun. He recently indicated that he, too, wanted to see more restrictions on social media platforms that promote antisemitism.
“It makes it very confusing for them to claim foreign policy problems, which is what they’ve claimed, when U.S. foreign policy is to reduce antisemitism,” Ahmed said.
Another possibility: that the State Department’s targeting of Ahmed has to do with something else entirely. In her post blasting him, the public diplomacy undersecretary Sarah Rogers focused on a different research project the CCDH had undertaken during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Ahmed’s group, Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), created the infamous ‘disinformation dozen’ report, which called for platforms to deplatform twelve American ‘anti-vaxxers’, including now-HHS Secretary @SecKennedy,” Rogers wrote. She was referring to a 2021 CCDH report finding that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and 11 other anti-vaccine activists were responsible for more than 65% of all anti-vaccine content on social media. Kennedy, now Trump’s secretary of health and human services, also celebrated the visa restrictions on Ahmed and the others.
Ahmed dismisses the idea. “The pandemic is long over, so it would be very odd to be targeted for work that we did four years ago. That seems implausible to me,” he said.
He is convinced, instead, that he’s being singled out because he seeks to put guardrails on the big technology platforms more generally.
In their case to the judge for the restraining order, Ahmed’s lawyers — including prominent Jewish attorneys Roberta Kaplan and Norm Eisen — brought up one striking comparison: to the pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, a green-card holder detained for months for what the U.S. government argued was exhibiting support for terrorism. Ahmed insists his case and Khalil’s are nothing alike in substance; the government has so few cases of threatening the citizenship of green-card holders that a legal comparison just made sense, he said.
While Spitalnick has vocally rebuked the Trump administration over its targeting of Ahmed, his other Jewish partners have remained relatively quiet. Many Jewish organizations have found themselves torn since Trump took office as the administration has taken an aggressive stance on fighting antisemitism while also pursuing policies that Jewish communities have historically opposed, including barring immigration.
Bernard, while praising Ahmed’s work, also said JFNA would review its collaboration with him and, “if there’s something there we don’t know about,” would “terminate our relationship.”
The ADL, which has found itself in the Trump administration’s crosshairs, has not made any public statement about Ahmed’s case and did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
Ahmed isn’t bothered by any of this, though he is grateful for the Jewish support he has received. He says he’s received “hundreds of texts” from Jewish supporters, and even spent his first “Jewish Christmas” with some last month, chowing down on Chinese food and watching American football. Despite their years of collaboration, he didn’t expect the big Jewish names to come rushing publicly to his aid.
“I’m not asking anyone else to fight this fight for me,” he said, worried the spectacle will “distract us from the job” of pressuring tech platforms. “They’ve made this about me as a person. And when they can’t defeat the message, they go after the messenger.”
The post He researches antisemitism for a living. Why does the State Department want to kick him out of the country? appeared first on The Forward.
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Why I’m vibing with the pope’s first big statement
I have long been obsessed with the Vatican and the inner workings of the papacy. (I majored and did my Master’s in religious studies.) But usually other people are not as tickled as I am by analyzing the newest theological statements from the Holy See.
Not this week. Pope Leo XIV just put out his first encyclical — the term used to refer to official statements outlining the church’s stance on a topic — and it has gone viral. “Spitting fire right out the gate,” said one of many similar trending posts, as though the encyclical was a rap song.
The topic is buzzy: AI, which the pope casts as one of the greatest threats to human flourishing and morality. (The encyclical is titled “Magnifica Humanitas,” or “Magnificent Humanity” in English, if that gives you the gist.) “Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur,” it opens, “ is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together.”
The document notes many of the concrete risks of AI — sexual abuse, distortion of facts, job loss — and calls for pragmatic solutions. But it is, at its heart, a testament to what makes humans human, written with palpable adoration for the people of the world: our creativity, our empathy, even our weaknesses. It’s a declaration that machines can never have the ineffable qualities of God’s children.
Structuring our world around technology, Leo writes, reduces “creation to an object of exploitation and human beings to mere cogs in a system driven toward ever greater efficiency.”
Later, in a paean to the importance of deep thought over easy answers, he goes on: “The speed and ease with which answers or summaries can be obtained risk extinguishing the desire to ask questions,” he writes, calling on the world “to protect our young people from the promise of the perfect machine” and warning against rendering “human thought seemingly superfluous precisely when it is most needed.”
“Magnificatus Humanitas” is a major statement, both in length — more than 43,000 words — and in symbolism. A pope’s first encyclical indicates the issues they believe are most important to the church, and signals the likely direction of their papacy.
That direction, for Pope Leo, is to be a voice for moral leadership, writ large. He addressed the encyclical not only to Catholics or even Christians, but “to all men and women of goodwill,” and cited thinkers like Hannah Arendt and J.R.R. Tolkien alongside the Bible.
It’s a declaration of a new — or, arguably, very old — relevance for religious leaders. As people rush through our increasingly fast-paced, frantic world, striving to keep up with the newest technology or geopolitical shift affecting markets and jobs, the slow-moving, zoomed-out perspective of religious leaders seems to be more and more important.
The Vatican held massive authority both moral and military for much of Western history. But its sway faded in the modern age. As democracy rose, Christianity broke into factions and religion’s prominence weakened, leaving the Church without the same ability to bestow a divine mandate on nations and rulers.
So many modern popes have kept their sights more narrowly focused on the theological. Even Pope Francis, who was a liberal, modernizing force for the church, and spoke out strongly on topics like the environment and immigration, focused three of his four encyclicals on Christian theological concepts like the Sacred Heart and Christianity as the world’s guiding light.
Pope Leo, however, seems to have found his way to modern, secular relevance by speaking out clearly on major issues of the day. He notes that he drew inspiration for “Magnificatus Humanitas” from Pope Leo XIII, an influential pope in the late 1800s and the inspiration for the modern Leo’s own papal moniker, whose 1891 encyclical “Rerum Novarum,” on the economy and conditions of the working class, was criticized for insufficient focus on the Gospel. The current pope’s own document is remarkably concrete and political.
Making political statements isn’t new for Leo, but the encyclical canonizes his boldness into an official form. In the past few months I’ve written about the ways in which Pope Leo has used sermons and statements to directly counter those made by U.S. leaders. After Pete Hegseth made a speech implying the U.S. military is doing God’s will, the pope gave a homily saying that prayers for war cannot be heard by God. He has made strongly worded comments about the rights of immigrants as Trump announced increased ICE raids, and made a point of appointing foreign bishops in American parishes. He has refused to visit the U.S. despite the fact that he is American and has been invited numerous times, including for the nation’s 250th birthday; he is instead planning to visit an island that serves as a refugee landing point in the Mediterranean.
It’s not all that surprising that Leo is making pronouncements on the justness of wars; popes have always given commentary on the world, albeit often less pointedly. Of course, Catholics have always looked to the pope for moral leadership — though that is increasingly under question, as renegade Catholics doubt the pope. (Even J.D. Vance, a Catholic convert with a book coming out about his conversion, has warned the pope to be “careful” with his theological interpretations — a near heretical statement. That’s how Protestantism came about.) The difference today is that everybody is listening.
I think the reason is that there is a certain ineffable quality that can’t be accounted for in so much of modern-day discourse in our metrics-focused world. Everything needs to be provable with a statistical analysis or some quantifiable indicator, or it needs to be as profitable as possible to extract value. But so much of what is most valuable in the human experience is intuitive — experiences and emotions like love, joy, transcendence. Connection with each other. Religious leaders have been honing the language to talk about these qualities for centuries, and they guard one of the only arenas in which the intangible remains central.
Of course, there are also plenty of issues with religious institutions, and the Vatican in particular is famous as a site where abuses of power were hidden and protected. But “Magnifica Humanitas,” and its virality, points toward a new relationship with religion, and a newly important role for it to play.
Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking, a hope for my own increased importance as a religion reporter.
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How can I live freely as a Jew in a world where strangers rip my mezuzah off my doorframe?
Twice, the mezuzah on my front door was ripped off.
The first time, I was shocked. The second time, I made a decision that still pains me. I did not put it back up.
This was before the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023.
That is the part I keep coming back to. The fear did not begin after the Hamas attacks. It was already there, intruding with the quiet calculation of whether a small Jewish symbol on my home made me less safe.
A mezuzah is not a political statement. It makes no argument about a government or a war. It is a sacred object, a marker of memory, a tiny declaration that says: Jews live here. I thought about that mezuzah again recently when the Anti-Defamation League released its annual audit showing that antisemitic physical assaults in the United States reached record highs in 2025. That increase reflects something many Jews already feel in daily life: the slow erosion of ease, the daily calculation of whether to speak up or stay quiet — things I have felt since the first time my mezuzah was violently torn off my doorframe.
Since then, the realm in which I feel safe as a visibly Jewish person has been shrinking from all directions.
After the Oct. 7 attack, the bulletin boards in my apartment building began filling with calls to boycott Israel. Campaign flyers for a Jewish political candidate who came to speak there were defaced with Hitler mustaches. I learned to scan the walls before I scanned my mail.
This was not happening on a campus quad or in some distant place. It was happening where I live.
Then, among my mother’s things, I found a Star of David necklace from the 1930s — marcasite set against black onyx, delicate and old. A boyfriend had given it to her when they were both 14.
I put it on in Florida, where I spend much of my time caring for my mother. I loved wearing it. It felt like more than jewelry. It felt like inheritance, memory, and a small way of carrying my family with me.
But when my mother knew I was going back to New York, she told me to take it off.
My mother is 102. She is not easily frightened. She has lived long enough to know when the temperature in the room has changed. She was not making a political argument. She was trying to protect her daughter.
I still wear that Star of David. But I admit I am selective. In New York, there are moments when I leave it visible and moments when I tuck it under my shirt. That calculation itself tells me something about the world I am moving through.
Recently, in a private Facebook group for women essayists, I shared a personal piece I had written for the United Kingdom-based Jewish Chronicle about how Oct. 7 changed life for my mother and me. It was not a political manifesto. It was a reflection on fear, Jewish identity, aging and visibility.
And still, I was attacked by other writers.“What about Gaza?” I was asked. The message was clear: even my personal Jewish pain had to pass a political test before it could be acknowledged.
That is the narrowing.
This ugliness is coming from more than one direction now. It stems from old conspiracy theories on the right and newer moral certainties in some of the progressive spaces where I once felt most at home. Different language brings about the same result: Jews become less human, less particular, less entitled to fear.
That collapse is what frightens me most: the definitional collapse between Jew and Israeli; Israeli and Israel’s government; Jewish symbol and political provocation; mezuzah and target.
As Jews like me reckon with that collapse, we must reckon with how much we’ll go along with it.
Right now, too often, Jews are being asked to choose between our own safety and our compassion for others. We should be able to prioritize both. I am a Zionist. I believe in the right of the Jewish people to a homeland. I also believe Palestinians are human beings who deserve freedom, dignity, and protection from suffering.
These beliefs should not cancel each other out. They should make us more careful, more humane, more committed to truth.
Yet now we must choose between speaking about antisemitism and being accused of indifference to other hatreds. That is no way to live.
Since Oct. 7, I have found myself going to synagogue on Shabbat, something I never did before. I was a High Holiday Jew. Now I seek out rooms where I do not have to explain why this moment feels frightening. I have learned where I feel seen. I have learned who can hold my fear without turning it into an argument.
The mezuzah I did not put back up is small. It fits in the palm of my hand.
But what it represents is not small: memory, faith, survival, home, and the right to be visibly Jewish without fear.
When I did not put it back up, I told myself I was being practical. But now — after Oct. 7, the bulletin boards, my mother’s warning, and the explosive allegations I’ve seen travel through respected media without sufficient care or verification — I understand it differently.
I was not just protecting a doorframe. I was learning to shrink.
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Podcast: A lively conversation in Yiddish with actress Lea Koenig
ס׳איז לעצטנס אַרויס אַ פּאָדקאַסט מיט דער באַליבטער אַקטריסע אין ישׂראל, ליאַ קעניג, וועלכע איז הײַנט צום בעסטן באַקאַנט ווי די ייִדיש־רעדנדיקע באָבע פֿונעם פּערסאָנאַזש שלום שטיסל אין דער ישׂראלדיקער טעלעוויזיע־סעריע „שטיסל“.
אינעם שמועס באַטייליקן זיך אויך יניבֿ גאָלדבערג — דער מחבר פֿון אַ נײַער ביאָגראַפֿיע וועגן איר אויף ענגליש; דער איבערזעצער און דראַמאַטורג מיכל יאַשינסקי, און דער ייִדישער זינגער און קולטור־טוער חיים וואָלף. דעם פּאָדקאַסט האָט טראַנסמיטירט די באָסטאָנער ראַדיאָ־פּראָגראַם „דאָס ייִדישע קול“.
ליאַ קעניג גיט איבער אירע זכרונות במשך פֿון איר לאַנגער קאַריערע אין ייִדישן טעאַטער, ווי אויך אינעם העברעיִשן טעאַטער, טעלעוויזיע און קינאָ. כּדי צו הערן דעם פּאָדקאַסט, גיט אַ קוועטש דאָ.
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