State Department Says 175,000 Visas Revoked Since Trump's Return

More than 175,000 is the number that now defines American visa policy under Donald Trump’s second presidency. It is not an annual total or a proposal or a target. It is the State Department’s own count of U.S. visas already revoked since Trump returned to office, a figure more than four times the roughly 40,000 revocations recorded in 2024 and larger than the roughly 100,000 recorded in the administration’s first year alone. ^{2 7}

The announcement came on August 10, 2026, from the Office of the Spokesperson of the U.S. Department of State. ² It was the department’s first comprehensive tally of revocations in this administration, and it was immediately picked up across American, British, Qatari, Hong Kong and other international outlets between August 10 and August 12, with the Guardian following on August 11. ^{4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 3} The breadth of that coverage matters because, so far, there is no independent count to test it against. What the public has is the department’s statement and the reporting that quoted it. ²

In the department’s language, the revocations applied to foreign nationals who violated visa terms, committed crimes, called for violence against U.S. citizens, defrauded Americans, abused the immigration system, or endangered national security. ² That formulation was quoted verbatim by Fox News and echoed by Al Jazeera, Reuters and Latin Times, an unusual degree of textual consistency that shows how closely the first wave of coverage tracked the official release. ^{6 5 9} The department added that the majority of these visas were revoked due to law enforcement encounters for a range of criminal activity. ²

For scale, Newsweek’s comparison put the Biden State Department’s 2024 total at approximately 40,000 visas revoked. ⁷ Against that baseline, 175,000 is more than a quadrupling, and it already exceeds the approximately 100,000 revocations recorded during the Trump administration’s first year in 2025. ⁷ The State Department said 2026 is on pace to surpass last year’s record, a signal that the current trajectory is still rising rather than plateauing. ⁸ In other words, the second year is adding revocations faster than the first, even after a first year that itself dwarfed the prior annual pace. ^{7 8}

A central driver cited by the department is continuous vetting. ⁶ State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott said more than 100,000 visas had been revoked under the department’s continuous vetting program, a system in which existing visa holders are screened on an ongoing basis rather than only at application or entry. ⁶ Pigott identified driving under the influence offenses among the primary criminal offenses prompting action, a detail that widened public understanding of the program beyond high-profile national security or violent-crime cases. ⁶ The department’s broader description of continuous vetting targets includes crimes, fraud, DUIs, assault, student visa violations, social media screening and national security concerns. ^{6 10 11}

Traditional visa screening is largely front-loaded: an applicant is checked, interviewed, approved or denied, then checked again at the border. Continuous vetting breaks that model by treating a visa as conditional after issuance, subject to revocation if new law enforcement information, fraud indicators, status violations or security flags emerge. ^{6 10 11} That is why Pigott’s figure matters. If more than 100,000 of the more than 175,000 revocations came through continuous vetting, then most of the total did not come from consular refusals up front but from pulling back documents people already held. ^{6 2}

The human department behind the tally is led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and both the Guardian and Time paired news of the tally with images of Rubio alongside Trump on August 7, 2026, just days before the release. ^{3 4} Visa and vetting policy sits with the executive branch, and the State Department explicitly framed the results as occurring under President Trump, a contrast with the prior pace under former President Joe Biden that Newsweek quantified. ^{2 7} For students, workers, tourists and families, revocation in practice means loss of legal permission to enter, with downstream effects on studies, employment, travel and family unity that depend on individual circumstances the aggregate tally does not describe. ²

What the tally does not show is as important as what it does. No source in the reporting file provides a breakdown by visa category, which means the public cannot see from these sources how many revocations involved student visas versus tourist, work or other classifications. ^{6 10 11} Nor do the sources provide a reliable breakdown by reason beyond the department’s general statement that the majority followed law enforcement encounters for a range of criminal activity. ² That leaves unanswered how many cases stemmed from DUIs, assault or other criminal allegations versus technical visa violations, fraud findings or security flags. ^{6 10 11}

Other specifics that circulated alongside the video version of this story are also not verifiable from these sources. The research file is explicit: no source here provides the monthly over-10,000 rate, an exact figure for visa holders under continuous screening, a separate removals figure handled by homeland security authorities, or any independent confirmation beyond the department’s own tally. ^{2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11} That does not mean those numbers are wrong. It means a reader who never presses play should understand what is firmly sourced — the 175,000-plus total, the 40,000 comparison for 2024, the roughly 100,000 first-year and continuous-vetting figures, and the on-pace-for-a-record statement for 2026 — and what remains department assertion without a second count. ^{2 7 6 8}

The distinction between revocation and removal is also worth keeping clear. A visa revocation withdraws permission to seek entry or remain in status on that visa. It is an action of the State Department, which issues visas. ² Removal, detention and deportation involve separate homeland security and immigration enforcement authorities and separate data systems, and this State Department release does not present itself as a count of removals. ² Conflating the two would overstate what the 175,000 figure proves about people physically taken into custody or flown out of the country, just as treating every revocation as a serious criminal case would overstate what the department actually said, which was that the majority followed law enforcement encounters for a range of criminal activity without publishing the distribution. ²

For now, the record shows an administration that has made revocation a routine instrument of immigration control rather than an exceptional one. More than 175,000 cancellations, more than 100,000 through continuous vetting, DUIs named as a primary trigger, and a current year on pace to break last year’s record together describe a system designed for volume and speed. ^{2 6 8} Whether that volume reflects better detection of genuine threats and fraud, a wider net that catches minor or stale offenses alongside serious ones, or both, cannot be resolved from a top-line number. ²