MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
The Trump administration is preparing to revoke up to 200,000 immigration visas.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
If the United States really revoked that many, it would be the largest revocation effort in U.S. history. Immigration attorneys are questioning how much it would really affect immigrants.
MARTIN: NPR immigration correspondent Sergio Mart铆nez-Beltr谩n is here now to talk more about this. Good morning, Sergio.
SERGIO MART脥NEZ-BELTR脕N, BYLINE: Good morning, Michel.
MARTIN: So why does the government want to revoke so many visas?
MART脥NEZ-BELTR脕N: The Trump administration says they are tackling immigration fraud. And the State Department is working with the Department of Homeland Security to identify and revoke the visas of immigrants who came to the U.S. for tourism and business and later claimed asylum. Tom Pigott, a spokesperson for the State Department, says getting a visa to later seek asylum is fraud, and that's because people applying for a tourist visa have to say why they're coming to the U.S. And the government is arguing that if the person did not tell the immigration officer they were planning on claiming asylum, they have essentially lied, and that's enough to revoke a visa.
MARTIN: Do we have a sense of how many people will be affected?
MART脥NEZ-BELTR脕N: You know, Pigott says the 200,000 revocations will not happen in one fell swoop but on a rolling basis. Still, Michel, for many immigration attorneys, this latest move is performative. Here's what California-based attorney Nicolette Glazer told me.
NICOLETTE GLAZER: This is a completely empty effort. It doesn't have any consequences. The way I understand the law and the way the law has been applied since at least I started practicing, which was about 25 years ago, this revocation of a visa has zero relevance for anything that can happen on this side of the entry, meaning with respect to status, any applications for relief or anything like that.
MART脥NEZ-BELTR脕N: If an immigrant overstays their short-term visa, they are already breaking the law. So this new policy is just revoking visas that are already invalid.
MARTIN: So, Sergio, circling back to something the administration has said regarding fraud, is it true that fraud is rampant in immigration?
MART脥NEZ-BELTR脕N: So fraud does happen in the immigration system. People sometimes misrepresent material facts to get a benefit or a status they would not be eligible for otherwise. And there's this narrative out there that people apply for asylum to buy time and be able to eventually adjust their status. But even a report from the Government Accountability Office from 2015 shows that termination-of-asylum cases due to fraud are extremely rare. The State Department, though, has been using the specific case of Beto Coral. He's a Colombian national who came to the U.S. in 2015. And a few months before his stay was set to expire, he applied for asylum.
MARTIN: But that suggests that people's status could change while they're here, couldn't it? I mean, circumstances could lead them to become targeted in such a way that would lead them to apply for asylum. But having said that, could this policy change lead to more people being arrested?
MART脥NEZ-BELTR脕N: Yeah, presumably. For the last year and a half, the Trump administration has been trying to arrest, detain and deport as many immigrants as possible, even when they are legally present in the US or in the process of adjusting their status. Last month, Michel, the Trump administration arrested nearly 50,000 immigrants. That's a monthly record in the second Trump term, according to an analysis by The Associated Press of arrest data. Many of these arrests have happened through partnerships between ICE and local law enforcement agencies across the country, which is a low-profile strategy that has proven to be very effective.
MARTIN: That is NPR's Sergio Mart铆nez-Beltr谩n. Sergio, thank you.
MART脥NEZ-BELTR脕N: You're welcome. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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