As 2025 draws to a close, it’s time to assess how much damage Donald Trump and his minions have inflicted on our country. It’s frankly too much for one article. But there’s one aspect that stands above the rest because it reaches into our pockets, our phones, our families, our border crossings, and the quiet corners of our lives here in New England: the piercing of privacy. The federal government is now amassing an unimaginable volume of data about all of us — and using centralized databases and analytic tools to tighten its totalitarian grip. It’s not the ghost of Stalin or Hitler — it’s their logic, newly efficient. Orwell feared a state that sees everything. Huxley feared a public that feels nothing. We’re living at the intersection.
Let’s begin where this becomes visible on the ground — not in Washington, but in St. Albans, Vermont. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office sits behind a flat parking lot half-filled with Subarus and pickup trucks. Early this year, in that lobby, Mohsen Mahdawi waited for the final procedural step toward becoming an American. He never reached the interview window. Federal agents detained him in front of families rehearsing their oaths. A federal judge later ordered his release, ruling the government had failed to justify even two weeks of custody.² His life was interrupted not by crime, but by digital suspicion.
Stories like his travel through New England differently than headlines. They appear in the pauses between sentences at a café in Norwich or a church office in Lewiston. “They tell us not to go alone anymore,” one immigration lawyer in Manchester said privately. When people begin fearing daylight appointments at federal buildings, a democracy is already shifting underfoot.
To the west, the same shift is underway in California. In San Jose, where parking lots are filled with Teslas instead of Subarus, H-1B visa holders — many of them engineers running the software that now surveils others — have been told their online lives are subject to continuous social-media review.³ One engineer told a journalist, “I didn’t leave one surveillance state to live inside a digital one.” The irony lands harder when you stand beneath a billboard advertising “freedom to innovate.”
This surveillance doesn’t stop at the southern border — or even at America’s coastline. Millions of Canadians cross into the U.S. each year under the Visa Waiver Program. That program is now under discussion to be folded into the same continuous-vetting system that currently monitors 55 million people.⁹ A Canadian posting criticism of Trump on Facebook in Fredericton could, in theory, be flagged before crossing into Maine — because computers don’t respect sovereignty.
The border, in 2025, isn’t a fence. It’s whatever screen you’re holding at the moment your number is pulled.
In June, the State Department issued a policy requiring all international students and exchange-visitor visa applicants to undergo a “comprehensive and thorough online presence review.”³ Applicants must make accounts public. Posts must be open. Silence is the safest choice. A Stop AAPI Hate briefing advised students that private accounts may themselves be interpreted as evasive.⁴ A nineteen-year-old in Delhi deletes a protest photo before applying to Bowdoin — not because she regrets it, but because she believes America now interprets curiosity as danger.
And here in Boston — in the dorms of Northeastern, where hallways smell like pepperoni and winter jackets drying on radiators — a Saudi freshman put it into a sentence his American roommates didn’t laugh at: “I keep two Instagrams now: one for immigration and one for life.” That line tells us more about 2025 than any federal register entry.
The Brennan Center — which avoids incendiary language — described the government’s new capability as a “dragnet” that fuses scraped social-media data with biometrics, academic records, and commercial broker files.⁵ A dragnet isn’t a metaphor. It’s a system that catches everyone connected to someone it wants. And because data is relational, privacy can evaporate because someone you love applied for a visa. A U.S. citizen in Portland, texting her cousin in Jordan who attends UNH, can have her number pulled into a government graph without ever crossing a border.
Perhaps the clearest signal of how executive power now works came in December — far from New England — when Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a lawful U.S. permanent resident, was barred from re-entering the country.⁷ The State Department accused him of “extraterritorial censorship” — their term for his advocacy for European online-safety regulation.⁷ A federal judge issued an injunction preventing his detention or deportation.⁷ Freedom shouldn’t require a lawsuit. His infant child didn’t understand why fatherhood must be litigated.
Far from Boston or San Jose, in Johannesburg, a South African music executive learned his visa had been revoked because he posted celebratory comments about Charlie Kirk’s death. TIME reported that six foreigners lost visas because they “celebrated” online.⁸ There’s no moral defense for celebrating death. But the legal question remains: since when did an emoji become evidence?
And finally — because even a minimalist version of this story needs its New England cadence — a last image. A man steps out of detention into a Brooklyn street, steam from a halal truck rising around him like breath in winter. A reporter asks what changed most. “You start to speak less. Even when you’re free.”¹ Silence isn’t a neutral state. It’s a scar. And it’s spreading.
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Bibliography
1. “Mahmoud Khalil (activist).” Wikipedia. Summary of detention, judicial criticism, and release on bail.
2. “Detention of Mohsen Mahdawi.” Wikipedia. Recap of arrest at Vermont USCIS office and judge-ordered release.
3. U.S. State Department. “Announcement of Expanded Screening and Vetting for Visa Applicants.” June 18, 2025. Online-presence review directive.
4. “2025 Immigration Updates: Impact on Students and Workers.” Stop AAPI Hate briefing. Note on private accounts treated as evasive.
5. Brennan Center for Justice. “The Government’s Growing Trove of Social Media Data.” Continuous vetting and surveillance analysis.
6. U.S. State Department. DS-160 / DS-260 social-media identifier requirement (2019).
7. Reuters. “Judge grants injunction blocking US from detaining British anti-disinformation activist.” December 25, 2025.
8. TIME. “Trump Administration Says It Revoked Visas of 6 Foreigners Who ‘Celebrated’ Charlie Kirk’s Death on Social Media.”
9. GoElite. “State Department visa revocations top 80,000 in 2025.” Reporting on scale of revocation and continuous vetting.
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