The White House said it is preparing to revoke the visas of up to 200,000 foreigners, in what it described as the largest mass revocation in U.S. history.
The measure, which the White House announced on social media on Tuesday, would target asylum seekers who hold U.S. visas, according to Associated Press. It would escalate President Donald Trump’s push, in his second term, to reduce the number of foreign citizens living in the U.S., and is likely to face legal challenges.
Why does the United States want to revoke foreigners’ visas and who is in danger?
Asylum has become a politically hot topic in recent years, as millions of people crossed the border illegally and asked for humanitarian protection, further straining an already collapsed federal immigration court system.
The Trump administration’s push to increase immigration arrests included those who entered with a visa and have a pending asylum case, and those waiting for other immigration benefits, including green cards.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has repeatedly noted that having a pending asylum case does not protect a foreigner from arrest. Revoking valid visas could increase the number of people that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal immigration agencies seek to detain as part of their mass deportation campaign.
ICE accelerated the pace of detentions in recent weeks. In July, its agents made nearly 50,000 arrests, a Trump administration record, according to federal data compiled by the Deportation Data Project at the University of California, Berkeley and UCLA.
Visa holders seeking humanitarian protection file their cases with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), which currently has a backlog of around 1.4 million asylum cases. The federal immigration court, under the Department of Justice, has a backlog of approximately 3.1 million cases, including up to 2.3 million asylum cases, according to court data compiled by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.
Last month, USCIS announced that it would allow asylum officers to refer cases to immigration court without interviewing the foreigner. At the same time, the administration achieved a record number of deportation orders in the courts, while the Department of Justice moved forward with the dismissal of judges considered too inclined to grant asylum or other immigration benefits.
Source: Bloomberg Mercury