Trump Admin Moves to Cancel 200,000 Visas in Biggest Mass Revocation in US History
The State Department and DHS are targeting foreigners who entered on tourist or business visas and later filed for asylum, in a sweep officials call the largest visa cancellation ever carried out.
The Trump administration is preparing to revoke roughly 200,000 visas from foreign nationals who arrived in the U.S. as tourists or business travelers and later applied for asylum — a rolling purge that officials are calling the largest mass visa cancellation in American history.
The plan targets B1/B2 visas issued between 2016 and 2026, according to reporting from Bloomberg. A State Department spokesperson framed the effort as closing a loophole: the goal, the official said, is to catch people "who have come to the United States claiming to be short-term visitors, but then file for asylum to stay here permanently."
The rollout won't happen all at once — officials say it will unfold over the coming weeks — and it builds on a series of earlier tranches this year that had already pulled tens of thousands of visas, first around 80,000, then more than 95,000, then over 100,000, according to NPR. This latest wave would roughly double the total number of visas pulled this year.
What Revocation Actually Means
Losing B1/B2 status doesn't equal automatic deportation — people whose visas are revoked can still have pending asylum cases move forward in immigration court. But it strips the underlying visitor status while that process plays out, a legal limbo that immigration attorneys say adds pressure and risk for people who are, in many cases, mid-way through a yearslong asylum backlog.
Immigrant-rights advocates have already signaled they expect legal challenges once the specifics of the rollout are formally announced, arguing that mass-revoking status from people actively pursuing a legal asylum claim punishes them for using the system as designed. The administration counters that the visas were never meant to be a backdoor into permanent asylum filings in the first place, per Al Jazeera.
The move lands squarely in the middle of the run-up to the midterms, adding fuel to an immigration debate that has already been a defining fight of Trump's second term. Expect both a formal announcement with fuller details in the coming weeks and, almost certainly, court fights soon after.