The Trump administration is preparing to revoke the business and tourist visas of as many as 200,000 foreigners who entered the United States as temporary visitors and later sought asylum, escalating its campaign to restore control over an immigration system systematically abused for years.

If carried out at the projected scale, the action would amount to the largest mass visa revocation in American history.

State Department documents cited by the Associated Press show the measure would apply to B1 and B2 visas issued between 2016 and 2026. Officials expect the State Department and Department of Homeland Security to carry out the revocations jointly and on a rolling basis.

“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,” State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott said. He declined to give a final number because the review is still underway.

B1 visas are intended for temporary business travel, while B2 visas cover tourism, family visits and medical treatment. Applicants are expected to prove they plan to leave the United States rather than use temporary admission as an entry point for permanent settlement.

Current applicants are also asked to affirm that they do not intend to seek asylum once inside the country. For Trump officials, the contradiction is obvious — someone who tells the U.S. government he is coming temporarily and then immediately seeks a permanent foothold has changed the terms under which he was admitted.

Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau made the administration’s case directly on Monday. “People in the US and all over the world are fed up with bogus asylum claims,” he wrote on X.

“Asylum isn’t supposed to be a loophole to circumvent immigration law,” Landau added. He said the system had been swamped by claims that can remain unresolved for years, giving foreign applicants time to obtain work permits, establish themselves in American communities and make removal increasingly difficult.

The administration argues that asylum was designed as an emergency refuge for people facing genuine persecution over race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group. It was never intended, officials say, to function as an alternative immigration track for foreign visitors who simply want to remain in America.

Landau highlighted Colombian national Humberto Coral as an example. Coral entered on a tourist visa in 2015, filed for asylum shortly before the visa expired and subsequently obtained employment authorization that he reportedly renewed for years.

Landau accused Coral of spending his extended stay promoting Colombia’s far-left government and attacking U.S. immigration enforcement, including accusing American authorities of operating “concentration camps.” The administration has pointed to the case as evidence of how a nominally temporary visit can turn into a decade-long presence through the asylum backlog.

Visa cancellation would not automatically mean that every affected foreigner is immediately deported. Those with active asylum cases could remain in immigration proceedings, but they would lose the separate visitor status under which they originally entered the United States.

The distinction is part of a wider Trump strategy aimed at closing off overlapping legal channels that officials say allowed temporary visitors to turn short stays into effectively indefinite residence. Rather than treating visas, asylum, employment authorization and deportation as disconnected bureaucracies, the administration is increasingly linking them into a single enforcement system.

The State Department has already revoked roughly 175,000 visas during the past 18 months. Many involved foreign nationals accused or convicted of offenses ranging from drunken driving and robbery to rape and other serious crimes.

That campaign reflects a broader nationalist premise now driving federal immigration policy — admission to the United States is a privilege, not an entitlement. Foreigners who commit serious crimes, violate the terms of their visas or have no legal right to remain are increasingly being targeted for removal rather than accommodated indefinitely.

The administration has applied the same approach to so-called birth tourism. Officials have moved against foreign women who allegedly use temporary visas to enter the country for the purpose of giving birth and securing American citizenship for their children.

Trump has separately sought to restrict birthright citizenship itself, although courts have blocked several of those efforts. The visa crackdown, by contrast, gives the administration another avenue to target what it describes as deliberate exploitation of American immigration law.

Work authorization has become another front in the fight. Foreign nationals with pending asylum applications can eventually become eligible to work legally, meaning a weak asylum claim can still provide years of access to the American labor market while immigration courts work through massive backlogs.

That issue became particularly visible in commercial trucking. Asylum applicants holding federal employment authorization had been able to qualify for non-domiciled commercial driver’s licenses until federal regulators tightened the rules earlier this year.

Indian nationals were among the populations that recorded a dramatic rise in asylum filings during the Biden administration. Homeland Security figures showed applications from Indian citizens jumping from 4,330 in fiscal 2021 to 41,030 in fiscal 2023.

That logic also feeds directly into the growing remigration agenda on the American right: identify foreigners who have no valid claim to remain, revoke immigration privileges that were obtained or used improperly, deport criminal aliens and return rejected applicants to their home countries through lawful proceedings.

If the State Department ultimately reaches the 200,000 figure, the action would mark one of the clearest signs yet that Trump’s second-term immigration doctrine is moving from border enforcement toward a broader principle — America decides who enters, America decides who stays, and temporary admission will no longer be treated as a one-way ticket to permanent residence.

The post Trump Admin To Carry Out Largest Mass Visa Revocation in American History appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.