The State Department has revoked more than 175,000 visas since President Trump returned to office — quadrupling the annual pace under Biden and proving just how far immigration enforcement had collapsed before the voters stepped in.

Biden's State Department revoked roughly 40,000 visas in all of 2024. Trump's team passed 100,000 in 2025 alone, and the monthly clip has only accelerated — from 8,000 revocations a month last year to more than 10,000 a month in 2026, according to department figures released this week. For ordinary Americans, the question isn't why the number is so high now. It's why it was ever so low.

The revoked visas belong to foreign nationals accused of crimes that would get any American locked up: assault, drunk driving, theft, drug offenses, fraud, sexual assault, child abuse. The department highlighted specific cases — a man charged with felony rape and sexual battery of a mentally disabled victim; another accused of kidnapping, trafficking, and sexually exploiting a minor; a driver arrested with heroin in his system while blowing more than three times the legal blood alcohol limit; a man who came to the U.S. to teach young students and was then arrested for sexually assaulting one.

Then there's Tou Lue Vang, a Laotian national convicted in 2005 for sexually abusing a child. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz pardoned him. The Trump administration deported him anyway.

An embassy in North Africa canceled more than 100 visas held by parents who traveled to the United States primarily so their children would be born American citizens — the birth tourism racket that has turned the Fourteenth Amendment into a loophole for passport shoppers.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has also moved against foreign nationals deemed dangerous to national security: a Cuban national tied to a Havana influence operation, Iranian nationals connected to the regime in Tehran, and a Kuwaiti national accused of voicing hostility toward the president while calling Americans the enemy.

Multiple foreign nationals who celebrated the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk had their visas pulled — including one who said Kirk "died too late" and another who declared, "when fascists die, democrats don't complain."

The Guardian framed the 175,000 figure as alarming and highlighted the case of Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish doctoral student at Tufts whose visa was revoked after she co-wrote an opinion piece criticizing the university's stance on the Gaza war. A judge later dismissed the case against her, and she returned to Turkey. The department has not disclosed how the 175,000 revocations break down by category — leaving open the question of how many stem from serious crimes versus lesser infractions like visa overstays. That's a fair demand for transparency, and the administration should provide it.

But the overall picture is clear: the immigration system spent years barely enforcing its own rules, and the backlog of violators piled up. Visa cancellations are separate from deportations, which fall to the Department of Homeland Security — and that agency says it has removed more than 605,000 people since Trump took office, what the administration calls the largest deportation operation in U.S. history.

The number that should shock Americans isn't 175,000. It's 40,000 — the annual enforcement baseline under the last administration, while fentanyl poured through the border and communities paid the price. The question now is whether this pace holds after the cameras move on.