The State Department announced on Monday that it has revoked over 175,000 visas since President Donald Trump returned to office last January.
The department stated that the revocations targeted foreign nationals who had “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.” According to the department, the “majority” of the visas were revoked due to “criminal activity.”
Trump has launched an aggressive crackdown on both legal and illegal immigration in his second term, vowing to deport the “worst of the worst” from the U.S.Â
Data have shown, however, that the majority of the people who have been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the second Trump Administration have had no criminal convictions. The Administration’s immigration enforcement tactics, meanwhile, have drawn widespread outcry and official pushback, with courts striking down a number of its moves as violating longstanding laws and protests breaking out around the country following the killings of multiple U.S. citizens.
The department offered multiple examples of people whose visas have been revoked and the reasons why in its Monday release, though it did not provide any evidence or identifying information about the cases it referenced.Â
“The Trump Administration is protecting our nation and its citizens by upholding the highest standards of national security and public safety through our visa process,” a State Department spokesperson tells TIME in a statement, saying that the Secretary of State has “broad discretionary authority to revoke visas.”
Here are some of the groups of people who have been included in the Trump Administration’s sweeping visa cancellations, according to federal officials.Â
Most of the visas were revoked as a result of “law enforcement encounters for a range of criminal activity,” the State Department said.
It listed “assault, driving under the influence, theft, and drug crimes” as the “leading causes,” while noting that a “significant share” of the cancellations were also due to “reckless driving, sexual assault, child abuse, fraud and embezzlement, and other crimes.”
The department listed among its individual examples foreign nationals who it said were charged with violent and sexual offenses including instances of “rape and sexual battery – including of a victim who was mentally disabled”; kidnapping and human trafficking; domestic violence; and “sodomy of a child.”
Multiple other people whose visas were revoked, it said, were involved in fraud schemes—which Trump has made it a major focus of his second term agenda to c. One person “built a company on lies,” the department alleged, “faking revenue and fooling investors to swindle millions of dollars from clients.” In another of the examples it offered, the department said the visa holder “helped orchestrate a massive Medicaid scam – billing for over $5 million of fake services.”
Trump has made cracking down on fraud a major focus of his second term agenda. And foreign nationals have in multiple instances been targeted in the Administration’s anti-fraud campaign.Â
In one notable instance, the President accused Somalis in Minnesota of being involved in a welfare fraud scandal in Minnesota amid his immigration crackdown in the state, marking just the latest instance in which Trump has gone after the state’s sizable Somali community. “Somali gangs are terrorizing the people of that great State, and BILLIONS of Dollars are missing,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post. Democrats have condemned Trump’s targeting of the community.
In still another alleged instance cited by the State Department in its Monday release, someone had their visa revoked after they were arrested “for driving with heroin and a blood alcohol level more than 3x the legal limit.”
The State Department said that it had revoked the visas of "multiple foreign nationals who celebrated the assassination of Charlie Kirk,” including one who allegedly said of the conservative commentator, “when fascists die, democrats don’t complain,” and another who said Kirk “died too late.”
