The Trump administration is preparing to revoke the business and tourism visas of up to 200,000 foreigners who have applied for or are currently seeking asylum in the United States. If it happens, the move would be the largest single mass revocation of visas in U.S. history, a sweeping act of bureaucratic force aimed at people already trapped inside the immigration machine.
Who Has the Power
Unless challenged or revised, the State Department is expected to announce in the coming weeks the revocation of so-called B1 and B2 visas issued between 2016 and 2026 whose holders have sought asylum or are now seeking asylum, according to State Department documents obtained by The Associated Press and two U.S. officials. The action will be taken in coordination with the Department of Homeland Security. That means two arms of the federal apparatus are moving together against people whose only offense, in the government’s telling, is trying to stay alive by changing status inside a system that already polices every step.
State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott said, "We are coordinating with DHS 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." He declined to comment on the number of visas that might be revoked, saying, "as the process will be ongoing, the number of revocations remains dynamic and will be done on a rolling basis." Rolling basis. Dynamic. The language of administration always sounds cleaner than the violence it organizes.
The revocations would not necessarily result in immediate deportation, the officials said. Most of those with asylum cases currently pending would be recategorized but would lose their status as business or tourism travelers, according to the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the revocations are not final yet. Even before any removal, the state can strip people of the paper categories that let them move, work, or wait. The paperwork is the leash.
Who Gets Crushed
B1 visas are generally issued for business trips and B2 visas are generally issued for tourism, family visits or medical care. It was not immediately clear from the documents or the officials how many of these visa holders are seeking or have sought asylum in the United States and would be affected by the revocations. That uncertainty sits at the center of the plan: a mass action built on broad screening, broad suspicion, and broad power over people whose cases are still unresolved.
Current applicants for B1 and B2 visas are asked to affirm that they will not apply for asylum in the United States and prove that they intend to return to their home countries. The state wants a promise up front, then reserves the right to punish anyone whose life later makes that promise impossible. That’s not neutrality. It’s control.
In the past 18 months, the State Department has revoked about 175,000 visas for people who have been convicted or accused of crimes ranging from drunken driving to rape and robbery, as well as for people who have spoken out publicly against U.S. policies, particularly in the Middle East. The same machinery that claims to sort out “crime” also reaches for dissent. The line between security and suppression gets thinner every time the bureaucracy decides it can.
What They're Calling 'Order'
Since President Donald Trump took office for his second term last year, his administration has steadily ramped up restrictions on visa applicants, demanding more information about their social media histories, requiring the posting of expensive bonds for the processing of visas, and outright banning the issuance of visas to citizens of certain countries. Each new hurdle costs money, time, and access. The people at the bottom pay for the state’s obsession with sorting, filtering, and excluding.
In a social media post on Monday, Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau called out people who he said try to use tourist and business visas to get into the United States and then apply for asylum. "People in the US and all over the world are fed up with bogus asylum claims," Landau wrote on X. "Asylum isn't supposed to be a loophole to circumvent immigration law." Landau cited the case of a Colombian citizen who came to the U.S. in 2015 on a tourist visa and then applied for asylum. The official line is always the same: reduce human survival to a loophole, then treat the closing of that loophole as public service.
The administration has also moved to crack down on so-called birth tourism, a practice the administration claims is used by foreign pregnant women to come to the United States to give birth so that their child will benefit from birthright citizenship. Trump has tried several times to end birthright citizenship, but those challenges have been rejected by courts, including the Supreme Court. Even when the courts block one route, the state keeps testing another. The apparatus doesn’t stop; it just changes tactics.
The State Department documents obtained by the AP suggest screening of current B1 and B2 visa holders began after the State Department received information about asylum requests from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. That’s the trail: one agency feeds another, and the people caught in between are left to absorb the consequences.
The revocation plan, if carried out, would be the largest single mass visa cancellation in U.S. history. For the people targeted, the message is plain enough. The state can hand out papers, then take them back when those papers stop serving its purposes.