Palestinians lose US visa privileges

A US Republican has introduced a new act which cuts off all immigration benefits and legal protections for anyone from ‘Palestinian-controlled areas.’

What she means are Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPTs) — the legally recognised term in reference to areas administered by the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Gaza.

We won’t sit back while Jewish Americans are getting attacked in our own country and wait for the next tragedy.

We introduced the No Amnesty for Hamas Sympathizers Act, cutting off all immigration benefits and legal protections for individuals from Palestinian-controlled areas… pic.twitter.com/y9LnjtUpcm

— Rep. Nancy Mace (@RepNancyMace) May 16, 2026

Meanwhile, JD Vance is encouraging British white supremacists to “keep on going” and “defend your culture”.

‘Terrorist sympathisers’

Nancy Mace bragged on X about the introduction of the ‘No Amnesty for Hamas Sympathizers Act‘. She claimed that:

This bill slams the door shut and keeps terrorist sympathizers and antisemitic extremists out.

Essentially, the bill seeks to amend several parts of the Immigration and Nationality Act

It removes temporary protected status for Palestinian nationals and refugees (who hold travel-documents). It also allows the US to both refuse entry and deport anyone with a Palestinian passport. Additionally, the Act would remove refugee status for Palestinians.

Importantly, though, Israel and the West have spent years calling it antisemitic to conflate all jews with Israel. Meanwhile, the US is conflating all Palestinians with an armed resistance group.

Hamas was formed after Israel illegally occupied Palestine. It was founded in Gaza in 1987, shortly after the first Intifada started.

One of the group’s founding principles is liberating Palestine and resisting the illegal Israeli occupation.

According to the United Nations, armed resistance is not illegal. In fact, every person living in occupied territories has that right.

Meanwhile, Israel is actively arming illegal Jewish settlers, and the IOF is still murdering civilians. Of course, a colonial government like the US supports that.

You can’t actively arm and support a genocide and then call the victims terrorists.

no one believes this anymore. you can’t kill 15,000 palestinian kids and call them the terrorists. your brand of politics is dying and your career will die with it https://t.co/6tsgt79yW8

— matt bernstein (@mattxiv) May 17, 2026

Does the US realise that if it stopped funding the Israeli government and sending weapons to the IOF, then Palestinians wouldn’t have to flee their native country?

Support for the far-right

At the same time that the US is attempting to criminalise Palestinians, JD Vance is encouraging far-right mobsters in the UK to ‘take their country back’. Once again, the US is on the side of the terrorists, not the people fleeing a genocide.

Vance appeared to align himself with Tommy Robinson’s (real name, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) supporters, who attended a rally on Saturday, 16 March. Robinson told attendees to prepare for the “battle of Britain”.

At the White House on Tuesday, Vance said:

all over the west there is this idea that the way to generate prosperity is to bring in millions and millions of unvetted people and drop them into your neighborhoods.

And we simply reject that idea.

To everybody in the UK who rejects that idea, I’d encourage them to just keep on going. It’s OK to want to defend your culture. It’s OK to want to live in a safe neighborhood.

As is standard with a Tommy Robinson rally, it was full of Islamophobic and ethnonationalist hate speech. Nine people were arrested on suspicion of hate crimes.

Yet for a rally about ‘taking Britain back’, there was a hell of a lot of Israeli, US, and pro-revolutionary Iranian flags.

The Zionist lobby and the far-right are two sides of the same coin. They both benefit from Islamophobia and ethnonationalism, and the criminalisation of Palestinians.

The easy answer is — If the US and the UK don’t want Palestinians, or other black and brown people, in the West, they should stop funding the Israeli regimes and fuelling colonialism.

Feature image via Abid Katib/Getty Images