What State’s New Mass Visa Revocation Effort Means for Asylum Policy | American Enterprise Institute

The Trump administration announced this week that it is planning to revoke as many as 200,000 visas for foreigners who came to the U.S. on business or as tourists and then applied for asylum. Though it sounds dramatic—media reports said it could be the largest “mass visa revocation in U.S. history”—the measure’s real-world impact is unclear.

The asylum process can take years. So, asylum applicants awaiting a decision have presumably been here much longer than the six-month visits usually allowed by business or tourist visas. This also applies to those who came on multiple-entry visas, which can be granted for up to 10 years. Any “overstay” renders the visas void under existing law.

For technical reasons, this visa revocation might help U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services rapidly deny more of the 1.4 million asylum requests currently pending before it and expedite their transfer to Justice Department immigration courts for a final ruling. How much difference this makes will only be evident once we learn exactly how many visas State revoked.

Symbolically, though, it calls out an oft-exploited loophole in the asylum law: the statute says anyone can apply if they are in the U.S., “regardless of [immigration] status.” Therefore, many seek it after arriving on business or tourist visas—which, under the law, they could only get because they convinced a U.S. consular officer that they wouldn’t try to stay permanently.

“People in the U.S. and all over the world are fed up with bogus asylum claims,” said Deputy Secretary of State Chris Landau in a social media post. “Asylum isn’t supposed to be a loophole to circumvent immigration laws; rather, it’s supposed to provide a narrow safe harbor for persons persecuted because of their ‘race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.’”

Landau flagged the case of a Colombian who came to the U.S. as a tourist in 2015, applied for asylum and then spent much of his time posting on social media about alleged U.S. repression of Latinos.

If Landau really wanted to dramatize what can go wrong, he could have cited Mohamed Sabry Soliman, who stands accused of the June 1, 2025 firebomb attack on pro-Israel demonstrators in Boulder, Colorado. An Egyptian national, he entered the United States on a tourist visa on August 27, 2022, applied for asylum a month after his arrival, got a work permit and settled into a new life with his family in the U.S.

It certainly does seem contradictory to allow people to seek what they know is supposed to be a temporary, nonimmigrant visa—and then leverage that into permanent, or quasi-permanent residency. Among other things, it’s unfair to legitimate asylum seekers to let sketchy ones clog up the bureaucracy. If you deceive a consular officer about your intentions, chances are your claim of persecution will be phony, too.

But there’s a catch: asylum law has long sought to protect people who are so desperate to escape persecution that they resort to falsifying documents or other deceptions. American Varian Fry heroically helped Jews get out of Vichy France by procuring fake passports and other documents.

Under long-standing U.S. immigration-court precedent, an asylum seeker’s deception, use of a false document, or bypassing normal refugee procedures may count against the applicant but does not automatically disqualify him. The case, In the Matter of Pula, involved a member of Yugoslavia’s Albanian minority who crossed Europe and then flew to New York using a fake authorization he purchased in Brussels. The Board of Immigration Appeals found his fear of persecution was real and justified his subterfuges.

However, the Pula case was decided in 1987, long before the changes in technology, travel, and international boundaries that facilitated mass migration. In that year, the U.S. government received 26,107 new asylum requests; in 2024, the number reached 419,000—not including over 850,000 filings by people who have been ordered removed and are seeking what is known as “defensive” asylum.

The caseload is unmanageable, to the detriment of both the U.S. public and asylum-seekers themselves. In a separate effort to curb asylum claims from tourist or business visa holders, the Trump administration has instructed consular officers to ask visa applicants whether they fear “harm or mistreatment in returning to his or her country.” The idea is to build a record against phony applicants—though it can’t prevent people from later claiming, legitimately or otherwise, that conditions back home have changed since they got their visas.

Asylum system-gaming is a real problem, one that probably can’t be fixed definitively without legislation from Congress. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is addressing it with executive action—accompanied by characteristic rhetorical excess. Still, in this instance, they have a point.