The State Department announced Tuesday that it has revoked visas from more than 100,000 foreign nationals who have been arrested or convicted of crimes in the United States. The crimes range from DUI and child abuse to assault, domestic violence, and sexual assault.
The department announced the action on X, framing it in terms that left zero room for ambiguity.
"A U.S. visa is a privilege, not a right. In this Trump Administration's first year, we revoked over 100k visas from the Worst of the Worst - DUI, child abuse, and assault."
That is not a negotiating posture. It is a statement of completed action.
Numbers matter. But individual cases land harder, because they have victims.
The State Department highlighted three examples among the revocations, according to Just the News:
These are the people who held valid U.S. visas. They entered this country through a system that welcomed them, and they repaid that welcome with violence against the most vulnerable: women, children, and communities that trusted the system to screen out predators.
The State Department put it plainly:
"Aliens who take advantage of America's hospitality while violating our laws and threatening the safety of our citizens will have their visas revoked."
For years, the default posture in Washington was to treat visa revocation as some extraordinary, politically fraught step requiring layers of bureaucratic agonizing. What the Trump administration has demonstrated is that it can be exactly what it should be: routine enforcement applied at scale.
There is a simple principle at work here, one that somehow became controversial in the immigration debates of the last decade: the United States is not obligated to host foreign nationals who commit crimes on American soil.
"The United States has no obligation to host criminals who endanger the American people."
That sentence should not require courage to say. And yet for a long stretch of American politics, it did. The previous era of immigration enforcement treated every removal, every visa revocation, every deportation as a crisis of conscience rather than a basic function of sovereignty. Advocacy groups and sympathetic media framed enforcement as cruelty. The result was a system that bent over backward to protect the status of people who had forfeited any reasonable claim to it.
What changed is not the law. The legal authority to revoke visas from criminal foreign nationals has existed for decades. What changed is the willingness to use it.
Over 100,000 revocations in the administration's first year is not a symbolic gesture. It is an operational commitment. It signals to every foreign national holding a U.S. visa that criminal conduct carries consequences beyond whatever the local court system imposes. It also signals to American communities, the ones absorbing the costs of crimes committed by people who should never have retained legal status, that the federal government is paying attention.
The State Department noted that President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio "will defend our borders and our citizens by enforcing our immigration laws." The emphasis on enforcement is worth pausing on. Not new legislation. Not a comprehensive reform package. Not another round of negotiations with lawmakers who have spent decades proving they cannot close a deal on immigration. Enforcement of existing law.
That distinction matters because it removes the excuse that Congress must act first. The tools already exist. The question was always whether anyone in the executive branch would pick them up.
A visa revocation is the beginning of a process, not the end. Revocation strips legal status. What follows, whether it is departure, removal proceedings, or detention, depends on the individual case and the broader enforcement machinery. The 100,000 figure represents a cleared legal pathway: these individuals no longer have a valid claim to remain.
Critics will try to muddy the waters by noting that some of these foreign nationals were arrested but not convicted. That distinction matters in a courtroom. It matters less when the question is whether a guest in this country, here on a revocable privilege, should retain that privilege after multiple arrests for domestic violence or an arrest for sexually assaulting a child. The standard for visa eligibility is not "beyond a reasonable doubt." It never was.
A hundred thousand visas revoked. Three women sexually assaulted by one visa holder. A child victimized by another. Communities that deserved better from a system designed to protect them.
The system is finally doing its job.
