Secretary of State Marco Rubio has now revoked more than 250,000 visas since President Trump returned to office.
That is a quarter-million reminders that a visa is permission to enter the United States, not a lifetime guarantee that Washington must ignore crime, fraud, extremism or abuse of the immigration system.
The State Department says the revocations reached foreign nationals who violated visa terms, committed crimes, called for violence against Americans, defrauded Americans, abused immigration rules or endangered national security.
This did not begin as a one-week publicity stunt. The department passed 175,000 revocations in August and kept reviewing visa holders after that milestone.
The State Department described the earlier total as a direct product of President Trump and Rubio’s leadership:
Fox News reports that the new total includes visa holders accused of rape, sexual battery, drunk driving, heroin possession, fraud and other serious offenses. Officials said the administration is continuously vetting people after visas are issued instead of pretending the government’s job ends when a document is stamped.
That is the central shift.
For years, the immigration bureaucracy treated vetting as a snapshot. If someone passed on the day of an interview, later conduct too often disappeared into a maze of agencies and databases.
Rubio’s department is treating admissibility as an ongoing obligation. If the government learns that a foreign national lied, committed a serious crime, supported terrorism or used a temporary visa as a back door into permanent residence, officials can reopen the case and revoke the visa.
The department’s August announcement put the policy in plain language:
The latest 250,000 figure means roughly 75,000 additional revocations were recorded after that August benchmark.
The crackdown is broader than cancellation after an arrest.
The administration expanded online-presence reviews to more visa categories on October 1. Earlier this year it also paused immigrant-visa processing for 75 countries whose nationals were judged likely to require public assistance after arriving in the United States.
That pause covered countries including Somalia, Iran and Russia:
The State Department says the current country restrictions use security-focused screening and vetting. Its guidance lists 19 countries under full visa-issuance suspensions and another 19 under partial suspensions covering immigrant visas plus common visitor, student and exchange categories.
Turkmenistan faces a separate partial suspension. The full-restriction list includes Afghanistan, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen, while the partial list includes Cuba, Nigeria, Venezuela, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
The guidance also identifies narrow exceptions for diplomats, certain persecuted minorities from Iran, dual nationals applying with an unrestricted passport, eligible special immigrants, participants in major sporting events and lawful permanent residents. Individual national-interest exceptions remain available at the secretary’s discretion in coordination with Homeland Security.
Critics will predictably describe every revocation as cruelty. But a sovereign country is allowed to decide that foreign criminals, fraudsters and people who threaten Americans do not get to keep the privilege of entering.
American citizens do not receive a visa to live in their own country. Foreign nationals do.
That document comes with conditions, and Rubio is enforcing them.
The 250,000 total also exposes how much enforcement was previously left on the table. A system capable of finding this many disqualifying cases did not suddenly discover that misconduct exists.
It finally received an administration willing to act on it.
President Trump promised the United States would stop treating admission as automatic and start putting the safety and interests of Americans first.
Rubio’s quarter-million revocations show that promise has moved far beyond campaign rhetoric.
The post Marco Rubio Has Now Revoked More Than 250,000 Visas — Here Is Who Got Cut Off appeared first on 100PercentFedUp.com.
Continue reading...
[H/T 100PercentFedUp]
