The United States is pausing all new student and exchange visitor visa interviews, which covers a broad swath of professions from doctors to camp counselors, while it studies how to expand screening of applicant's social media posts, according to a State Department cable obtained by the news hour and signed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

This comes as part of a broader crackdown on immigration and higher education by the Trump

administration.

And the larger battles with the administration have been the focus of our series this month

on Rethinking College.

Joining us now to discuss the latest is Simon Hankinson, who had a 23-year career in the State Department and is now at the Heritage Foundation, and Fanta Ave, CEO of NAFSA.

That's the Association of International Educators. Welcome to you both. Fanta, just kick us off here. For context, is there precedent for this kind of pause on all new visa interviews in these

categories? And how different is this from what we saw during COVID, for example, or during

the first Trump administration? No, I think that there's not any precedence that I can recall

in having worked in this field for over 35 years.

I think during the COVID period, you know, we understood because of COVID and because of

mobility and health issues and all of that. There were certainly complex issues that, you know,

made travel very difficult during that period of time. And so this is really, I think, in some level, unprecedented.

And that the focus is specifically on international students in FJNM is definitely the part that is very much unprecedented.

And those are, again, the types of different visa categories, FJ and M, as you mentioned there.

Simon, there are already, as you know, a number of reasons people are ineligible for these

kinds of visas that's supporting terrorism or having a criminal record.

What would this level of screening catch that previous screening didn't already?

Well, when I started doing visas in India in 2000, it was a half

sheet of paper front and back with a bit of information on it in Penn. And then over the years,

we had 9-11. All the attackers were admitted under non-immigrant visas. We asked for more

information. It got more complicated. Now it's online. So this is the next logical step. We have tools now that

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