The Trump administration is keeping its word, at least when it comes to immigration. The State Department has revoked more than 85,000 visas since President Donald Trump took office in January 2025, marking one of the most sweeping enforcement pushes in modern immigration policy and more than doubling the total number of revocations carried out in all of 2024.
A senior State Department official confirmed the figures to reporters on Tuesday, describing a year-long effort that has prioritized both criminal and public-safety concerns across multiple visa categories. Nearly half of the actions stem from criminal convictions — including driving under the influence, assault, and theft.
“Some of the top reasons why we revoked the visas were DUIs, assaults, and theft, which together account for almost half of the revocations in the past year,” the official told The Epoch Times. “These are people who pose a direct threat to our communities’ safety, and we do not want to have them in our country.”
Roughly 8,000 of the cancellations involve student visas, with the remainder tied to a mix of previously cited risk factors: alleged terrorism connections, visa overstays, and broader public-safety concerns. Officials did not release a detailed breakdown of affected countries or regions.
The surge reflects intensified screening measures rolled out by the Trump administration in early 2025, including an expanded review of visa applicants’ public social-media activity. The State Department has defended that strategy as a necessary extension of existing vetting tools, arguing that public online behavior is often critical to identifying individuals who may be inadmissible on national-security or criminal-safety grounds.
That approach has provoked criticism from some Democratic lawmakers and civil-liberties advocates, who warn that revocations tied to online speech risk punishing political expression protected in the United States. Department officials reject those objections, maintaining that decisions rest on statutory inadmissibility standards, not viewpoint-based policing.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has taken an unusually public posture on visa enforcement. In September, Rubio confirmed that revocations were already underway for foreign nationals accused of celebrating online the attempted assassination of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk. By October, the department said it had stripped visas from six individuals connected to those statements.
The same enforcement lens is expanding beyond individual incidents. Rubio said last week that visa restrictions would soon apply to Nigerian nationals accused of carrying out anti-Christian violence, signaling a willingness to use visa policy as a targeted sanction for foreign religious persecution.
The State Department reiterated the broad scope of its vetting strategy in a December 3 public statement, emphasizing that it “uses all available information in visa screening and vetting” and conducts “thorough vetting of all visa applicants, including online presence review” for student and exchange-visitor categories.
As of early November, internal reporting placed the year-to-date total at approximately 80,000 revoked visas, suggesting that the final weeks of the year added another 5,000 cases as the department continued to process backlogged enforcement files.
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