The figure, announced Tuesday, marks a sharp acceleration since summer and lands in the state that hosts more international students than any other.
By Staff Reporter
The Trump administration has revoked more than 300,000 visas since President Trump returned to office in January 2025, the State Department said on Tuesday, a figure that officials described as the fastest pace of revocations in the department’s history.
“With over 300,000 revocations, the Trump administration has revoked more visas at a faster pace than any administration in history,” Tommy Pigott, a State Department spokesman, said in remarks first reported by The New York Post; he announced the figure on X as well. “Let the message be clear: we have zero tolerance for foreigners here on visas who break the law, commit fraud, or undermine our national security.”
The announcement did not say how many of the revoked visas belonged to people living in California, which nationalities were most affected, or how many of the visas were for students, workers or tourists. The department has not published a breakdown by state.
A rapid climb
The new total reflects a marked acceleration. In January, the department said it had revoked more than 100,000 visas, then a record, Al Jazeera reported. In an update issued on Aug. 10, the department put the figure at more than 175,000, according to Reuters. The Post reported that the department had confirmed as many as 250,000 revocations last month.
That arithmetic implies that roughly 125,000 visas were revoked in a little more than two months since August — a pace well above the department’s average over the first year and a half of the administration.
A State Department official told Al Jazeera that “the vast majority of these revocations were due to criminal activity, public safety concerns, immigration violations, fraud or misrepresentation, or other information indicating the individual was no longer eligible for a visa.” The official said more than 4,000 revocations involved people “who engaged in or facilitated birth tourism,” and that, among the revocations, 25 percent were for assault and related crimes, 22 percent for driving under the influence, 7 percent for theft and 7 percent for substance abuse or distribution. The Post described those percentages as applying to visas pulled in 2025.
Those categories leave most of the total unexplained in public. Neither the department’s statement nor the official’s account specified how many revocations involved people who had been charged or convicted, as opposed to arrested or flagged through other information.
The other side
Rights advocates have criticized the campaign. Reuters reported that advocates say the broader immigration crackdown has violated due-process and free-speech rights, and singled out revocations of the visas of foreign students who protested Israel’s military campaign in Gaza and of foreigners over social media comments about the assassination of the conservative commentator Charlie Kirk. Al Jazeera reported that rights groups and experts have condemned the administration’s expanded social media screening of visa applicants as a threat to free speech.
The administration says the revocations are a matter of security and lawfulness. “We are taking, and will continue to take, action to keep our borders, and our nation, secure,” the department said in a statement to Al Jazeera.
Why California is exposed
No state has more at stake in the State Department’s visa decisions. California hosted 139,351 international students in the 2024-25 academic year, the most of any state, according to the Open Doors 2025 state fact sheet published by the Institute of International Education. Students from China made up 35.4 percent of that total and students from India 20.9 percent. The University of California, Berkeley, enrolled 12,020 international students, second in the state only to the University of Southern California. NAFSA, the association of international educators, estimated that those students spent about $6.25 billion in the state.
The state’s universities have already felt earlier rounds of enforcement. In April 2025, Stanford reported that eight visas had been revoked, affecting six current students and two recent graduates; the university said at the time that the cases were “limited in number and are not widespread.” KCRA reported that at least 12 international students at the University of California, Davis, had their visas revoked that spring without explanation.
The pressure has since widened from individual students to institutions. On Oct. 8, Vice President JD Vance announced a federal investigation into whether Stanford, Caltech, UC Davis and six universities outside California had overused the J-1 exchange visa, The Los Angeles Times reported. “They are using these visas way too much,” Mr. Vance said. A Stanford spokesperson told The Times that the university “complies with all applicable visa laws, including those relating to J-1 visas. We will cooperate with the investigation.” A UC Davis spokesperson said the university “carefully complies with all federal laws and regulations for visas.”
The same day, the administration suspended Microsoft, the San Jose-based Adobe and six information-technology firms from the Labor Department’s permanent labor certification program, a step toward employer-sponsored green cards. California, according to The Times, drew more new J-1 research scholars in 2025 than any other state, 3,211.
What comes next
The revocation total is likely to be read on two tracks in California. For universities, the question is whether a steady drumbeat of enforcement news — revocations, the J-1 inquiry, a rule capping student stays at four years that a federal judge has temporarily blocked — will further depress applications from China and India, the state’s two largest sources of international students. Updated Open Doors enrollment figures are expected next month.
For the State Department, the number serves as a public marker of an enforcement priority it has said it will continue. The department has not said whether it will release figures by visa category, nationality or state, information that would allow California institutions and lawmakers to gauge how much of the 300,000 falls within their borders.
