State Department to revoke up to 200,000 visas tied to asylum claims, largest such action in US history

The State Department is preparing to revoke the business and tourism visas of as many as 200,000 foreign nationals who entered the United States as short-term visitors and later applied for asylum, according to internal department planning documents and two U.S. officials who described the effort in reporting published this week. If carried out at that scale, it would be the largest single mass revocation of visas in American history.

State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott confirmed the coordination between his agency and the Department of Homeland Security, saying the government is working to "identify and revoke the nonimmigrant visas of foreigners who have come to the United States claiming to be short-term visitors, but then file for asylum to stay here permanently." The visas in question are B-1 and B-2 visitor visas, the ordinary category issued for business trips, tourism, family visits and medical care, and the review covers those issued between 2016 and 2026.

Officials cautioned that the process will unfold incrementally rather than in a single sweep, and that losing a visitor visa does not by itself trigger deportation or cancel a pending asylum application. People affected would instead lose their underlying visitor status while their asylum cases continue to move through the immigration court system, a process already backlogged by years in many jurisdictions.

How the policy took shape

The B-1/B-2 action is the latest and largest step in an escalating vetting campaign the administration has pursued since 2025. That August, the department said it had begun "continuous vetting" of all roughly 55 million valid U.S. visa holders, screening social media activity, home-country criminal records and other data for evidence of fraud, overstays or security concerns — a marked expansion from vetting that had previously focused mainly on student and exchange visitors. Earlier this month the department disclosed it had already revoked more than 175,000 visas over the prior 18 months, citing criminal conduct such as assault, drunk driving, theft and fraud as the leading grounds.

The new action differs from those earlier revocations in that it targets a specific legal maneuver rather than criminal conduct: entering on a visa that requires visitors to demonstrate they do not intend to stay permanently, then filing for asylum once inside the country. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau framed the distinction bluntly in a social media post, writing that "people in the US and all over the world are fed up with bogus asylum claims" and that "asylum isn't supposed to be a loophole to circumvent immigration law." Pigott has separately characterized the practice in similar terms, describing it as a form of fraud that provides grounds for revocation under existing visa rules.

Screening for the new round reportedly began after the State Department obtained data from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services identifying visa holders who had filed asylum applications — a data-matching exercise between the two agencies that officials say will continue on a rolling basis rather than concluding in a single announcement. Current applicants for B-1 and B-2 visitor visas must already affirm they do not intend to seek asylum and must demonstrate sufficient ties abroad to establish they intend to return home, the same standard officials now argue was violated by people who later changed course after arriving.

The action also lands amid a broader run-up in visa restrictions the administration has pursued since returning to office in January 2025, including expanded social media screening for applicants, new bond requirements in some visa categories, and outright suspensions of visa issuance to nationals of several countries. Officials have periodically publicized revocation totals throughout that period — first in the tens of thousands, then past 175,000 by this month — but the asylum-linked B-1/B-2 review is the first to target a specific category of visa holder by the legal status of their case rather than by individual conduct.

Who could lose status

The pool of roughly 200,000 is an estimate rather than a finalized list, and the department has declined to say how it will be refined or how many people will ultimately be affected. Because the review spans a full decade of visa issuance, it is expected to reach visa holders from a wide range of countries with large asylum caseloads in U.S. immigration courts, including Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, China, Russia and several Central American and West African nations, though the administration has not released a country-by-country breakdown. Coverage of the plan has noted that the figure is a working internal estimate that officials say could shift as the cross-agency data matching continues.

Anyone whose B-1 or B-2 visa is revoked would lose the visitor status that technically permits short trips in and out of the country, even though many affected people no longer rely on that status day to day once an asylum case is pending. Their asylum applications themselves are adjudicated separately, through the immigration court system overseen by the Justice Department's Executive Office for Immigration Review, and a revoked visa does not by itself alter the outcome of that case. It can, however, complicate travel, work authorization renewals and other status questions that depend on having a valid underlying visa, and it removes a fallback option for anyone whose asylum claim is later denied.

The scale of that court system underscores how large a share of pending immigration cases the policy could eventually touch. Immigration courts were carrying a backlog of roughly 3.2 million active cases as of the end of June, according to data compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, and more than 2.3 million of those cases involve immigrants who have formally filed for asylum. Visa holders swept into the new revocation effort would be drawn from within that population, though officials have not said what share of pending asylum filers might ultimately be affected.

Legal and political reaction

Reaction has split along familiar lines. Administration officials describe the move as an integrity measure closing a loophole in the asylum system, while immigration attorneys and researchers have questioned both its legal foundations and its practical effect. Los Angeles immigration attorney Nicolette Glazer told reporters the action was "largely performative," arguing that visa overstays are already grounds for removal under existing law and that the revocations create no new enforcement authority. "It doesn't have any consequences," she said, describing the announcement as "political spin."

"Asylum isn't supposed to be a loophole to circumvent immigration law." — Christopher Landau, Deputy Secretary of State

Migration researchers have raised a related concern about the legal theory underpinning the policy. Rut Bermejo Casado, a migration researcher who has studied the plan, has pointed to three practical effects: a revoked visa does not itself end an asylum claim, since applicants remain dependent on how their case is eventually decided; the action could draw courts into weighing whether the government may penalize people specifically for exercising a legal right to seek asylum, regardless of how they entered the country; and the exercise will require extensive data matching across agencies before it produces any actual removals. Because the policy would apply retroactively to visas issued as far back as 2016, attorneys expect litigation seeking to narrow or delay its implementation, echoing legal fights that have followed other large-scale immigration enforcement actions since 2025.

What happens next

The State Department has said revocations will proceed on a "rolling basis" rather than all at once, with the total number of people affected described as "dynamic" and subject to change as the data-matching process continues. No fixed timeline for completing the review has been made public, and officials have not said whether individual visa holders will receive advance notice before their visas are canceled.

For now, the practical consequences remain limited for most people caught up in the review: their asylum cases proceed on the same immigration court timeline as before, and revocation alone does not place anyone into deportation proceedings. But immigration attorneys are advising clients with pending asylum claims and open B-1/B-2 visas to review their paperwork and travel plans, anticipating that the coming weeks will bring both formal notices from the government and the first legal challenges to a policy that, if fully carried out, would touch more visa holders than any single revocation action in the country's history.

Much will depend on how aggressively the two agencies move to translate revoked visa status into actual immigration enforcement, and on how quickly advocacy groups and affected visa holders can get a legal challenge in front of a federal judge. Past rounds of Trump administration visa and travel restrictions have drawn court challenges within weeks of taking effect, and lawyers who work with asylum seekers say they expect this one to be no different, particularly given its retroactive reach back to visas issued a decade ago.