State Department revokes 250,000 visas over security and crime concerns
The vast majority of visas revoked were tied to crimes, including fraud, sexual assault, drunk driving, and abuse of the U.S. immigration system.
The U.S. State Department has revoked 250,000 visas since January 2025, linking the visas to fraud, criminal activity, and national security threats. Fox News first reported the visa revocations Sept. 30, confirming that visa holders lost their visas due to a variety of reasons, such as violating the terms of their visas, committing crimes, encouraging violence against Americans, and committing various forms of fraud, including defrauding and abusing the U.S. immigration system.
“The primary causes for this is directly due to criminal activity as the primary causes,” State Department spokesman Tommy Piggot said in a video statement.
“When we're looking at criminal activity, what we're talking about are DUIs, assaults, and thefts,” he continued. “The bottom line here is that we are not going to allow foreigners here on visas to drive drunk on our streets, to assault our people, to steal from our stores. We are not going to allow it. When we see that criminal activity, that is grounds for revocation.”
President Donald Trump and his administration confirmed to Zeale News in August that the State Department plans to begin revoking up to 200,000 visas “on a rolling basis,” focusing predominantly on B-1 (business) and B-2 (tourism) visa holders who subsequently applied for asylum in the U.S.
While some 2,300 visas revoked so far have been in relation to birth tourism, the practice of bringing pregnant foreign nationals to the U.S. in order to give birth and obtain U.S. citizenship for their children, the vast majority have been linked to fraud, assaults, sexual assaults, child abuse, reckless driving, drunk driving, theft, embezzlement, drug crimes, and other offenses.
Immigration policy experts hailed the visa revocations as a means of bolstering national security and public safety and restoring common sense to U.S. immigration policy.
“Revoking visas is an enforcement measure that is critical to immigration integrity,” said Lora Ries, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center, in comments to Zeale News.
“We have ample evidence that, in the past, visas and other immigration benefits were erroneously granted to aliens who were not adequately vetted, who were ineligible for the benefits, and/or fraudulently obtained them,” she continued.
Ries suggested that revoking the visas of offenders and terminating immigration benefits, including asylum, lawful permanent residence, and naturalization, would “fix” many of the errors resulting from deficient vetting, fraud, and other abuses of the system.
“Then, their employers and all downstream benefit agencies and providers should be notified to terminate their employment, driver’s licenses, banking, welfare, and other benefits,” she added. “And the aliens should be removed.”
Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, told Zeale News that the visa revocations are “long overdue.”
“For decades, the State Department has washed its hands of any accountability for overly lenient visa issuance standards, and left it up to domestic immigration enforcement to deal with the millions of overstayers who have violated the terms of their visas,” she said.
Vaughan noted that an estimated 40% of illegal aliens entered the U.S. legally on various visas and overstayed those visas, accounting for millions of illegal aliens.
“The 250,000 visa revocations are a small share of the millions of overstayers, but this is a good start,” she said.
She recommended that the State Department reexamine its visa issuance standards and vetting protocols to minimize the number of potential errors and ensure that visaholders will not be a threat or a harm to Americans.
“I have recently analyzed thousands of deportation records of terrorists, transnational gang members and organized crime operatives who have been removed in the last several years, and found that a significant number of them entered with temporary visas. This indicates a concerning vulnerability in our visa policies,” she said. “The State Department is as much a guardian of our border as the Border Patrol, and the career personnel need to abandon the travel facilitation mentality in favor of the prioritization of national security concerns.”
Between Sept. 11, 2001, and the end of 2015, the U.S. only revoked 122,000 visas, making the Trump administration’s recent revocations one of the largest visa revocations in decades.
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