The Brief

Gov. Gavin Newsom suggested last week that California may withhold taxes it pays to the United States if President Donald Trump slashes federal funding to the state.

It could be another front in the escalating battle between the Trump administration and the Golden State, which are at the moment wrestling over the president summoning the military to handle protests against immigration raids in Los Angeles. But how it would all work — on both sides — is anyone’s guess.

CalMatters asked several tax experts to weigh in on how the state could withhold money from the federal government. Most would not comment about what they called a “vague” threat by state officials. But they pointed out that residents and businesses pay state and federal governments directly when they file their income taxes — making it unclear what tax money California could withhold.

Newsom is not suggesting people stop paying their taxes, said Tara Gallegos, a spokesperson for the governor. But she said the state is considering “whether there are potential options that would allow it to retain some of the funding it typically sends the federal government.”

She would not provide further details and did not answer CalMatters’ question about which of his staff the governor has directed to explore those options.

California’s biggest sources of revenue are personal income tax, corporation tax and sales tax, the last of which goes to local and state governments. The state does not handle other excise taxes, such as those from airports, transportation and more, that the federal government receives, according to the Finance Department.

Newsom on Friday also floated on social media the idea that California is a “donor” state and contributes tens of billions of dollars more a year to the U.S. than it gets back, something Gallegos reiterated to CalMatters.

A study by the Rockefeller Institute of Government found that in fiscal year 2021-22, California provided about $83 billion more to the federal government than it received, nearly three times as much as the next state, New Jersey, which provided about $29 billion more than it received from the U.S.

In addition, California taxpayers contribute the most of any state to total federal taxes, according to IRS data the state’s Finance Department cited. In fiscal year 2023-24, California’s total federal taxes were $806 billion — nearly twice as much as Texas, which contributed $417 billion, and more than twice the $384 billion New York contributed.

State Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas also posted on social media last week that California must look at “every option” including withholding tax dollars, saying that “we're the nation's economic engine and the largest donor state, and deserve our fair share.” Rivas, a Salinas Democrat, was not available to answer questions, his staff said.

Some people dispute the notion of donor states.

“The governor’s long-standing complaint that California is a donor state rings hollow,” said Jared Walczak, vice president of state projects for the Tax Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based right-leaning think tank. “Unless California politicians are questioning the legitimacy of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, the complaint that California residents pay more in federal taxes than they get back is disingenuous.”

“Courts have made it abundantly clear that you can't be a conscientious objector to paying taxes,” Walczak said.

Courts have also made it tough for the White House to cancel funding.

White House spokesperson Harrison Fields confirmed in an email to CalMatters this week that the Trump administration is reviewing possible wide-ranging funding cuts to California, as reported last week by different media outlets such as CNN and the Washington Post. But Fields said no decision has been made, and would not specify which programs are being considered for defunding. In the same email, Fields said the answers were on background or off the record, which he and CalMatters did not agree to beforehand.

H.D. Palmer, spokesperson for California’s Finance Department, pointed to the Trump administration’s attempt to freeze hundreds of billions of dollars in federal grants and loans, through an Office of Management and Budget memo, which it then rescinded in late January after public outcry and court orders.

“One salient point from our high school civics lessons: The power of the purse doesn’t lie with the (presidential) administration,” Palmer said.

Palmer provided a list of state programs that receive the most federal funding, which the state is counting on in its current budget. The list includes money for health, education, highway planning and construction, disaster recovery, grants for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and more. The biggest is $100.9 billion for medical assistance programs.

He said the White House has yet to provide specifics or answer the following question: “What public policy benefit are you seeking by withholding these federal dollars from California?”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

The top authorities of U.S. cancer statistics will soon have to classify the sex of patients strictly as male, female, or unknown, a change scientists and advocates say will harm the health of transgender people, one of the nation’s most marginalized populations.

Scientists and advocates for trans rights say the change will make it much harder to understand cancer diagnoses and trends among the trans population. Certain studies have shown that transgender people are more likely to use tobacco products or less likely to receive routine cancer screenings — factors that could put them at higher risk of disease.

The change is a consequence of Trump administration policies recognizing only “male” and “female” sexes, according to cancer researchers.

Scientists said the change will affect all cancer registries, in every state and territory, because they receive federal funding. Starting in 2026, registries funded through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Cancer Institute will categorize cancer patients as male, female, or not stated/unknown. And federal health agencies will receive data only on cancer patients classified that way.

Registries currently specify whether a cancer patient’s sex is “male,” “female,” “other,” various options for “transsexual,” or that the patient’s sex is not stated or unknown.

President Donald Trump in January issued an executive order stating that the government would recognize only male and female sexes. Cancer registry officials said the federal government directed them to revise how they collect data on cancer patients.

“In the U.S., if you’re receiving federal money, then we, essentially, we weren’t given any choice,” Eric Durbin, director of the Kentucky Cancer Registry and president of the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries, told KFF Health News. NAACCR, which receives federal funds, maintains cancer reporting standards across the U.S. and Canada.

Officials will need to classify patients’ sex as unknown when a “patient’s sex is documented as other than male or female (e.g., non-binary, transsexual), and there is no additional information about sex assigned at birth,” the new standard says.

Missing the Big Picture

Researchers said they do not have high-quality population-level data on cancer incidence in transgender people but had been making inroads at improving it — work now at risk of being undone.

“When it comes to cancer and inequities around cancer, you can use the cancer registries to see where the dirtiest air pollution is, because lung cancer rates are higher in those areas. You can see the impact of nuclear waste storage because of the types of cancers that are higher in those ZIP codes, in those areas of the country,” said Shannon Kozlovich, who is on the executive committee of the California Dialogue on Cancer.

“The more parts of our population that we are excluding from this dataset means that we are not going to know what’s happening,” she said. “And that doesn’t mean that it’s not happening.”

For decades, cancer registries have been the most comprehensive U.S. surveillance tool for understanding cancer incidence and survival rates and identifying troubling disease trends. Each year, cancer cases are reported by hospitals, pathology labs, and other health facilities into regional and statewide cancer registries. The compiled data documents cancer and mortality rates among regions, races, sexes, and age groups.

Two federal programs serve as the top authorities on cancer statistics, with information on tens of millions of cases. The CDC’s National Program of Cancer Registries provides funding to organizations in 46 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the U.S. Pacific Island territories. Its data represents 97% of the U.S. population. The National Cancer Institute’s Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results program, known as SEER, collects and publishes data from registries covering nearly half the U.S. population.

The information published by cancer registries has led to changes in treatment and prevention, and the enactment of other policies designed to reduce diagnosis rates and mortality.

For example, data collected by cancer registries was essential in identifying rising rates of colorectal cancer among people younger than 50. As a result, U.S. guidelines now recommend that adults start screenings at age 45 rather than 50.

States have enacted their own measures. Lara Anton, spokesperson for the Texas Department of State Health Services, said epidemiologists with the Texas Cancer Registry in 2018 found that the state had the nation’s highest incidence rates of hepatocellular carcinoma, a liver cancer more common in men than women. The Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas initiated a statewide effort aimed at reversing rising rates of liver cancer. The Texas Cancer Registry joined SEER in 2021.

“Once a cancer patient is entered into a cancer registry, we follow those patients for the rest of their lives. Because we really need to know, do patients survive for different types of cancer and different stages of cancer?” Durbin said. “That’s incredibly important for public policies.”

The North American Association of Central Cancer Registries maintains national standards outlining what kind of data registries collect for each diagnosis. It develops the list in partnership with the CDC, the National Cancer Institute, and other organizations.

For any given patient, under NAACCR’s standards, Durbin said, registries collect more than 700 pieces of information, including demographics, diagnosis, treatment, and length of survival. CDC and NCI-funded registries must specify the sex of each patient.

The NAACCR definitions and accompanying data standards are designed to ensure that registries collect case data uniformly. “Everyone essentially follows the standards” that NAACCR develops, Durbin said. Although registries can collect state-specific information, researchers said they need to follow those standards when sending cancer data to the federal government.

In an emailed statement, Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson Andrew Nixon said, “HHS is using biological science to guide policy, not ideological agendas that the Biden administration perpetrated.”

‘Backwards’ Progress

NAACCR routinely publishes updated guidelines. But the change to the “sex” category to remove transgender options in 2026 was an emergency move due to Trump administration policies, Kozlovich said. She was among a group that had pushed for changes in cancer data collection to account for sex and gender identity as separate data points.

According to an analysis of CDC data by the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law, 2.8 million people age 13 and older identify as transgender.

Scientists and trans rights advocates said in interviews that there are troubling signs that may make transgender people more likely to develop cancer or experience worse health outcomes than others.

“Without evidence of our health disparities, you take away any impetus to fix them,” said Scout, executive director of the LGBTQIA+ Cancer Network.

A study published in 2022 found that transgender and gender-diverse populations were two to three times as likely as cisgender people to report active use of cigarettes, e-cigarettes, or cigars. Tobacco use is a leading cause of cancer and death from cancer.

A Canadian study concluded in 2019 that transgender patients were less likely to receive recommended screenings for breast, cervical, and colorectal cancers. And a 2023 study from researchers at Stanford Medicine found that LGBTQ+ patients were nearly three times as likely to experience breast cancer recurrence as cisgender heterosexual people.

Scarlett Lin Gomez, an epidemiologist at the University of California-San Francisco and the director of the Greater Bay Area Cancer Registry, said that for at least 10 years the NCI had been interested in improving its ability to monitor cancer burden across patient populations with different sexual orientations and gender identities. Cancer registries are a logical place to start because that is what they’re set up to do, she said.

There’s been “slow but good progress,” Gomez said. “But now we’ve completely, personally, I think, regressed backwards.”

The decision not to capture transgender identity in cancer patients is just one change registries have confronted under the Trump administration, according to scientists leading surveillance efforts and state health agencies. An HHS mandate to reduce spending on contracts led to funding cuts for cancer registries in NCI’s SEER program. Scientists said CDC funds for registries haven’t been cut; however, the White House’s proposed fiscal 2026 budget aims to eliminate funding for the National Program of Cancer Registries.

Among the Trump administration’s other actions targeting trans people are canceling research grants for studies on LGBTQ+ health, dismantling the National Institutes of Health’s office for sexual and gender minority health, and stopping specialized services for LGBTQ+ youth on the 988 national suicide prevention hotline.

Without data, researchers can’t make a case to fund research that may help trans patients, Gomez said. “It’s erasure.”

California’s last nuclear power plant overcame a regulatory hurdle on Thursday when the California Coastal Commission voted to approve keeping the plant open for at least five years.

It was one of the final obstacles the controversial Diablo Canyon Power Plant had to clear to continue operating amid renewed opposition. The decision was conditioned on a plan that would require Pacific Gas & Electric, which owns the plant, to conserve about 4,000 acres of land on its property. That would prevent it from ever being developed for commercial or residential use.

The plant, located along the San Luis Obispo shoreline, now awaits federal approval for a 20-year relicensing permit.

“I don’t think, unfortunately, that anything will be happening to Diablo Canyon soon,” due to the growing energy demands of artificial intelligence, Commissioner Jaime Lee said before voting to approve the permit. Nine of the 12 voting members approved the plan.

The deliberations reignited decades-old concerns about the dangers of nuclear power and its place in the state’s portfolio of renewable energy sources. Diablo Canyon is the state’s single-largest energy source, providing nearly 10% of all California electricity.

Defeated in their earlier attempts to shut the plant, critics of Diablo Canyon used months of Coastal Commission hearings as one of their last opportunities to vocalize their disdain for the facility. Some Democratic lawmakers supported the plant but pushed for PG&E to find more ways to protect the environment.

Sen. John Laird, Democrat of San Luis Obispo County and former secretary of the California Natural Resources Agency, said on Thursday he approved of the new plan but pushed the commission to require the utility to conserve even more of its total 12,000 surrounding acres.

“If what comes out of this is the path for preservation for 8,000 acres of land, that is a remarkable victory,” Laird said.

Democratic Assemblymember Dawn Addis, whose district encompasses the plant, had also urged the commission in a letter to approve a permit “once it contains strong mitigation measures that reflect the values and needs of the surrounding tribal and local communities who depend on our coastal regions for environmental health, biodiversity and economic vitality.”

A long history of controversy

Founded in 1985, the plant’s striking concrete domes sit along the Pacific coast 200 miles north of Los Angeles. The facility draws in 2 million gallons of water from the ocean every day to cool its systems

And it has remained shrouded in controversy since its construction 40 years ago. Environmentalists point to the damage it causes to marine life, killing what the Coastal Commission estimates are 2 billion larval fish a year.

The commissioners on Thursday were not deciding whether to allow the plant to stay open but were weighing how best to lessen the environmental impacts of its operation. A 2022 state law forced the plant to stay open for five more years past its planned 2025 closure date, which could have led to significant political blowback against the Coastal Commission if it had rejected the permit.

Gov. Gavin Newsom reversed a 2016 agreement made between environmental groups and worker unions to close the plant after the state faced a series of climate disasters that spurred energy blackouts. Popular sentiment toward nuclear energy has also continued to grow more supportive as states across the country consider revitalizing dormant and aging nuclear plants to fulfill ever-increasing energy demand needs.

The 2022 law authorized a $1.4 billion loan to be paid back with federal loans or profits.

Groups such as the Environmental Defense Center and Mothers for Peace opposed the permit outright, citing concerns about radioactive waste, which can persist for centuries, and its cost to taxpayers.

“We maintain that any extension of Diablo is unnecessary,” and that its continued operations could slow the development of solar and wind energy, Jeremy Frankel, an attorney with the Environmental Defense Center told the commission Thursday.

The California Public Utilities Commission last year approved $723 million in ratepayer funds toward Diablo Canyon’s operating costs this year. It was the first time rate hikes were spread to ratepayers of other utilities such as Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric and was authorized by lawmakers because the plant provides energy to the entire state.

How the plant will be funded has also garnered scrutiny in the years since Newsom worked to keep it open. Last year, the Legislature nearly canceled a $400 million loan to help finance it.

As much as $588 million is unlikely to come back due to insufficient federal funding and projected profits, CalMatters has reported.

Proponents of the plant pointed to its reliability, carbon-free pollution and the thousands of jobs it has created.

Business advocacy groups emphasized their support for the plant as boosting the economy.

“It is an economic lifeline that helps keep our communities strong and competitive,” Dora Westerlund, president of the Fresno Area Hispanic Foundation, said at a November meeting.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

There is a new cost to hiring an international worker to fill a vital but otherwise vacant position in a California classroom: $100,000.

In September, the Trump administration began requiring American employers to pay a $100,000 sponsorship fee for new H-1B visas, on top of already required visa application fees that amount to $9,500 to $18,800, depending on various factors. These visas allow skilled and credentialed workers in multiple job sectors to stay in the U.S.

Most foreign workers on H-1Bs in California work in the tech sector. But California also relies on H-1B visas to address another issue: a nationwide teacher shortage and a high demand for staff in dual-language education and special education in K-12 districts.

Data from the California Department of Education shows school districts filed more than 300 visa applications for the 2023-24 school year, double the amount from just two years earlier. Educators and school officials say its overseas workers on visas are highly skilled, instrumental in multilingual education, and fill historically understaffed positions in special education.

Now education leaders are sounding the alarm that the high additional fee for overseas workers will worsen the strain on California’s public education system.

International employees fill a much-needed gap for school districts

California continues to face an ongoing teacher shortage. In 2023, California K-12 schools staffed 46,982 positions with employees whose credentials did not align with their job assignments, according to data from the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing. Another 22,012 educator positions were left vacant that year. Of total misassignments and vacancies, around 28% were in English language development and 11.9% were in special education.

California school districts have also resorted to hiring teachers who haven’t yet obtained certain credentials, according to a study by the nonprofit Learning Policy Institute. Facing a need for teachers, school districts have found that trained professionals from other countries are willing — and qualified — to take classroom jobs that would otherwise go unfilled.

A student letter written for H.R., a physical education teacher.

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Books on physical education in the office of H.R. at a high school in the West Contra Costa Unified School District, on Nov. 7, 2025.

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In 2023, in the Bay Area east of San Francisco, West Contra Costa Unified School District had 381 misassigned positions and 711 vacancies, according to the commission. So the district turned to foreign educators, hiring about 88 teachers on H-1B visas — a majority from the Philippines, Spain and Mexico — to teach in mostly dual-language and special education programs, said Sylvia Greenwood, the assistant superintendent for human resources at the district.

“With our shortages in special ed, they were a good fit for our district. And so, therefore, we kept that pipeline open and brought teachers here from the Philippines to support our students and our students with special needs,” Greenwood said.

The decline in the number of credentialed special education teachers continues to worsen. Between 2020 and 2024, the number of credentials earned to teach special education decreased by almost 600 across California, according to data from the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing. The number of temporary permits and waivers granted by the commission increased by about 300 during the same period.

Francisco Ortiz, the president of United Teachers of Richmond and a teacher at Ford Elementary School in West Contra Costa, said the workload for teachers in the district will increase if West Contra Costa Unified is unable to bring in new international teachers.

This would create “greater instability” for students, he said, adding, “It's going to have a great impact in special education, which is already on fire.”

California school district officials say they are unsure they can pay the new fee to fill hiring gaps with international employees. West Contra Costa officials said they do not know yet who will be responsible for paying the new fee: the district, international teachers themselves or another party.

“We are a district that is dealing with a structural deficit as well, and so that cost, in a lot of ways, is going to be very difficult for our district or really any school district, to be able to take that on,” said Cheryl Cotton, the superintendent for West Contra Costa.

Pasadena Unified, in Southern California, filed about a dozen applications for H-1B visa sponsorships in 2024. Now the district, facing a $27 million budget deficit, will require those applying for H-1B visas to pay for it themselves, according to district spokesperson Hilda Ramirez Horvath. She said foreign employees will also no longer receive other types of financial support, including legal or filing fees related to immigration processing.

Language programs benefit from international teachers

District officials are also worried about the cultural costs of losing international educators. Educators on H-1B visas make dual-language public schools possible, giving families in California a unique multicultural education that sticks with their children for life.

Kelleen Peckham, a mother to two children in West Contra Costa, said she chose to transfer her daughter to Washington Elementary School in Richmond because it has a dual-language immersion program that teaches students to speak and read Spanish.

Peckham also plans to send her son, who will start kindergarten next year, to the same school even though it takes the family an extra 15 minutes to drive there.

“My husband's family is from Mexico, and so [their] grandmother, on one side, only speaks Spanish,” Peckham said. “It's important for [them] to be able to communicate with [their] family and extended family.”

She said if the dual-language immersion program at Washington Elementary doesn’t survive, she would consider transferring her children back to the school in their neighborhood.

First-grade students walk to their classroom at the start of the day during summer session at Laurel Elementary in Oakland on June 11, 2021.

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Fee spells ‘Keep Out’ to foreign workers

Within weeks of the fee’s announcement, a coalition of international worker groups, unions and religious organizations sued the Trump administration, alleging the fee would inhibit staffing in education, medicine and ministry services.

“It’s essentially a giant ‘Keep Out’ sign for prospective individuals looking to utilize the visa process to be able to come to the United States and fill these roles and provide these services,” said Laura Flores-Perilla, an attorney with the Justice Action Center, a Los Angeles-based immigration litigation group representing the coalition in its lawsuit.

“It's not just going to hurt these individuals who have this pathway to do this, but it's also going to hurt employers within the United States,” Flores-Perilla said.

Although the fee only applies to new visa applicants, many international teachers are feeling less welcomed to work and live in the states. A.F., an international elementary school teacher in the West Contra Costa Unified School District, said many teachers are still concerned the federal government will announce new policy changes that could force them to leave the U.S.

“I feel like it's a form of discrimination to impose [a] $100,000 fee for teachers,” A.F. said.

A.F., an elementary school teacher who works on a H-1B visa at West Contra Costa School District, writes out a list of grammar rules he will teach his students the next day.

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A.F., who is currently on an H-1B visa, asked to only give his initials because he fears speaking publicly will affect his ability to receive a green card in the future. He immigrated from the Philippines to California five years ago on a J-1 visa before transferring to an H-1B visa at the beginning of 2025. J-1 visas allow visitors to temporarily stay in the U.S. to participate in certain programs, including teaching, studying, conducting research and more, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

A.F. said the district previously paid for all of his immigration costs for his H-1B visa, which amounted to more than $3,700 for processing fees and an immigration attorney.

The future is uncertain for H-1B visa hopefuls

H.R., a physical education teacher in West Contra Costa who works on a short-term J-1 visa, said he moved his family from Mexico to the U.S. three years ago to work at one of the district’s high schools because he felt it would be safer to raise his daughter in the U.S. H.R. requested to use only his initials because he doesn’t want to jeopardize his ability to apply for the H-1B visa in the future.

“My biggest reason [for moving] is my daughter,” he said. “Me and my wife decided that it would be a good chance for her [and] a big opportunity to learn the language and to grow up in a different environment.”

H.R. can’t apply for the H-1B visa because he missed the deadline and West Contra Costa Unified is now unlikely to pay for his immigration fees. After his visa expires in June 2026, H.R. will move back to Mexico with his family and reapply for the J-1 visa in hopes of returning to California.

“Everybody says here that they need teachers in California … but they don't want to do anything to [help us stay] here,” H.R. said.

H.R., a physical education teacher at a high school in the West Contra Costa Unified School District, on Nov. 7, 2025. H.R., who immigrated to the U.S. two years ago, may have to return to his home country due to a new H-1B visa fee implemented by the Trump administration.

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Manuel Orbegozo

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At the Los Angeles Unified School District, spokesperson Christy Hagen said in an email to CalMatters that the recent visa changes have not yet impacted the school’s hiring of educators on H-1B visas. Hagen said the district’s immigration experts were “still evaluating the effect of this order.”

Maria Miranda, a representative for United Teachers Los Angeles — the union for Los Angeles Unified teachers — said the district had, as of mid-November, not provided any guidance to its educators or schools on how H-1B visa hopefuls would be supported.

Flores-Perilla, the attorney bringing the lawsuit against the Trump administration, says no hearings have been set in their case yet. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has now also brought a lawsuit over the $100,000 fee, arguing that the proclamation overrides provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act and harms U.S. employers.

For now, districts will have to wait on the results of either lawsuit to potentially see some relief in immigration costs.

“It's absolutely unfeasible to be able to pay this fee [and] to be able to actually bring in prospective employees in their fields and industries, so it's going to hurt everyone,” Flores-Perilla said.

Sophie Sullivan and Alina Ta are contributors with the College Journalism Network, a collaboration between CalMatters and student journalists from across California. CalMatters higher education coverage is supported by a grant from the College Futures Foundation.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

The Trump administration is proposing new rules that would further tighten its grip on who's allowed into the U.S., asking visitors from several dozen countries that benefit from visa-free travel to hand over their social media history and other personal information.

The new conditions were unveiled in a notice from the Department of Homeland Security earlier this week and are open for public comment and review for 60 days before going into effect.

The proposed measure applies to citizens from the 42 countries that belong to the visa waiver program and currently don't require visas for tourist or business visits to the U.S. Those foreign citizens would now have to submit five years' worth of their social media activity to be considered for entry.

They'd also have to provide emails they have used for the past 10 years, as well as phone numbers and home addresses of immediate family members. Officials would also be able to scrutinize IP addresses and metadata from electronically submitted photos.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection said the mandatory social media requirement is designed to comply with President Donald Trump's January executive order "to protect its citizens from aliens who intend to commit terrorist attacks, threaten our national security, espouse hateful ideology, or otherwise exploit the immigration laws for malevolent purposes." However, they have not defined what type of online activity may constitute a threat.

Under the current visa waiver program, tourists can bypass the visa application process, which can take months to years. Instead, they pay $40 and submit an online application using the Electronic System for Travel Authorization, or ESTA. It's accessible to citizens of U.S. allied countries, including Australia, France, Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom. But that system may also get an overhaul if the latest changes take effect. The notice proposes eliminating online applications, moving to a mobile-only platform.

This is the latest step in the Trump administration's escalation of restrictions and surveillance of international travelers, foreign students and immigrants. In June, the State Department announced it will begin reviewing the social media accounts of foreign students. Earlier this month, the department instructed its staff to reject visa applications — primarily H-1B — from people who worked on fact-checking, content moderation or other activities, citing it as "censorship" of Americans' speech.

These latest proposed changes are not that different from those already in place for visa applicants, Marissa Montes, a professor at Loyola Law School, and director of the Immigrant Justice Clinic, told NPR.

"It's always been something that the government can ask for and has asked for in the past," Montes said. "The question is, how will [ESTA applicants] be screened by CPB? Will it be something they have to submit ahead of time or will it be an officer at a point of entry? We still don't know how the administration expects to implement this."

In the past, she said, such screenings occurred at the point of entry and that "it's always been discretionary if the officer wants to ask for it or not."

What is most troubling, Montes added, is that there are no explicit guidelines defining what qualifies as harmful to the United States.

"The problem is that when it comes to immigration policy and directives like this is that it's very broad and discretionary, meaning that the agent that is receiving this order has a lot of discretion to then interpret what can be viewed as anti-American," she said. "But we have seen that be interpreted as anything that goes against the Trump administration or is going against a value of the Trump administration."

Montes said she advises her clients to be mindful of not just their own online posts, but also posts they've liked, commented on and re-posted, which can be grounds for a denial or even a permanent ban from the U.S. For example, if someone has posts regarding casual drug use, or pictures of firearms, they can be viewed as a potential threat to the government. She said agents are also on the look out for posts that can be construed as pro-socialist or communist.

She cautions people not to eliminate their social media presence entirely, saying it's "become a red flag" for officials.

"Our immigration laws bar certain types of conduct because of immigration bias … so you really have to be careful about what you put out there," she warned. "As I always tell my clients, if I can find the information, the government certainly can."

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