US to revoke visas from 200,000 foreigners, White House says

Alicia A. Caldwell and Sonya Dymova, Bloomberg News on Aug 25, 2026

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WASHINGTON — The White House said it is set to take away as many as 200,000 visas from foreigners, in what it called the largest mass revocation in U.S. history.

The move, which the White House previewed on social media Tuesday, is expected to target asylum-seekers who hold U.S. visas. It would escalate President Donald Trump’s second-term drive to reduce the number of foreign citizens living in the U.S. and is likely to face legal challenges.

State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott said the agency is working with the Department of Homeland Security to cancel visas belonging to foreigners who came to the U.S. as short-term visitors and then applied for asylum. The revocations are being made on a rolling basis, he said.

“Obtaining a visa in order to seek asylum is fraud — which is grounds for visa revocation,” Pigott said in a statement. “We are making clear that a visa is a privilege — not a right.”

Asylum has become a hot-button political issue in recent years as millions of people crossed the border illegally and asked for humanitarian protection, further clogging an already backlogged federal immigration court system.

The Trump administration’s push to increase immigration arrests has included those who entered on a visa and have a pending asylum case and those waiting for other immigration benefits, including green cards.

The Department of Homeland Security has repeatedly said a pending asylum case doesn’t shield a foreigner from arrest. Revoking valid visas could increase the number of people Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal immigration agencies seek to target for arrest as part of their mass deportation campaign.

ICE has ramped up the pace of apprehensions in recent weeks. In July, agents made nearly 50,000 arrests, a Trump administration record, according to federal data compiled by the Deportation Data Project at the University of California Berkeley and UCLA.

Visa holders who ask for humanitarian protections start their cases with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, where there is currently a backlog of roughly 1.4 million asylum cases. The federal immigration court, run by the Justice Department, has a backlog of roughly 3.1 million cases, including as many as 2.3 million asylum cases, according to court data collected by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.

Last month USCIS announced it would allow asylum officers to move cases to immigration court without interviewing petitioners. At the same time, the administration has won a record number of deportation orders in court, as the Justice Department has moved to fire judges seen as granting too many approvals for asylum or other immigration benefits.