On August 10, 2026, the State Department announced that it had revoked more than 175,000 visas since the start of Trump's second term, from foreign nationals it said “violated the terms of their visas, committed crimes, called for violence against U.S. citizens, defrauded Americans, abused our immigration system, or endangered national security.” The Hill reported the pace at more than 10,000 revocations a month in 2026; the department had announced in January that it revoked more than 100,000 visas over the previous year.
The department said “the majority of these visas were revoked due to law enforcement encounters for a range of criminal activity,” naming assault, driving under the influence, theft and drug crimes as the leading causes, and attributed the revocations to its “continuous vetting” program. Its examples included people charged with rape, kidnapping and child sexual abuse, an embassy in North Africa revoking more than 100 visas for “birth tourist” parents, and, according to The Hill, “multiple foreign nationals who celebrated the assassination of Charlie Kirk,” one of whom said Kirk “died too late.”
The announcement did not break down the revocations by visa class or say how many rested on speech rather than conduct. The Hill reported that the reliance on “law enforcement encounters” raised concern among some immigration lawyers that visas were being revoked for minor encounters or for charges that never went through the judicial process. The department pledged to “continue to identify, investigate, and revoke the visas of foreign nationals who threaten the safety of the American people.”
Update (October 2, 2026): On September 30, the State Department told Fox News it had revoked more than 250,000 visas during Trump's second term, including 2,300 tied to birth tourism. Spokesperson Tommy Pigott called it “a historic milestone.”
Correction (October 2, 2026): This entry compared the 2026 pace with “roughly 8,000 across all of 2025.” That figure appears in The Hill's report but conflicts with the department's January announcement, cited in the same article, that it revoked more than 100,000 visas in 2025, so the comparison was replaced with the January figure.