Donald Trump is revoking immigrants’ visas to punish them for speech.
Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish doctoral student at Tufts University, co-wrote an opinion piece criticizing the university’s position on the war in Gaza. The government pulled her visa. Immigration authorities detained her. A judge later dismissed the case against her, and she returned to Turkey.
The State Department also canceled visas held by foreign nationals who commented on the killing of Charlie Kirk, including one who wrote that Kirk had “died too late.”
You may call a statement cruel. You may condemn it. You may prosecute a genuine threat. But you cannot make immigration status a punishment for speech and still claim that the system protects liberty. When the government chooses a foreign student’s visa as the price of disagreement, it teaches every other foreign student what silence costs.
The State Department has canceled more than 175,000 visas since Trump returned to office. Biden’s State Department canceled about 40,000 in 2024. Trump’s State Department canceled more than 100,000 in 2025, and the monthly pace has risen from roughly 8,000 revocations in 2025 to more than 10,000 in 2026.
The department says the cancellations target people who violated visa terms, committed crimes, defrauded citizens, called for violence, abused the immigration system, or endangered national security. Some of those cases involve grave accusations: felony rape and sexual battery involving a victim with a mental disability, kidnapping and trafficking a minor, domestic violence, drug-impaired driving, and child abuse. These cases demand serious investigation and lawful judgment.
But the department does not say how many of the 175,000 cases involve serious crimes and how many involve lesser infractions such as overstaying a visa, political speech, or other administrative grounds. It offers anecdotes where the public needs a ledger—and fear where the public needs due process.
The department waves a photograph of a murderer to convict the man who jaywalked.
The opacity is the mechanism. When you lump a rapist and an op-ed author into the same number, the rapist gives the number cover, and the op-ed author disappears inside it. Students, workers, tourists, parents, and writers of opinion pieces become a tally whose categories the public is not allowed to see.
The State Department’s continuous-vetting system screens roughly 55 million foreign nationals with valid United States visas. That is a vast administrative power. It can identify danger. It can also turn accusation into a shadow court, where an arrest becomes a verdict, a political statement becomes a security threat, and an overstay becomes evidence of a defective person.
The department’s press release closes with a sentence that does more work than its authors intended: “A US visa is a privilege, not a right.”
The sentence is true in law and murderous in practice.
A government may control entry. It may revoke permission when the law requires it. It may not turn administrative permission into a weapon against every foreign national it finds inconvenient. When the government discloses no breakdown of the cases and offers limited avenues for review, “privilege” means that a person carries a life here at the pleasure of a system with enormous discretion and little public accountability.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has also determined that some foreign nationals are deportable on “foreign policy grounds,” according to the department. The breadth of those grounds is precisely why public scrutiny matters. When the power to remove a person rests on opaque discretionary judgments, the government cannot escape moral responsibility by calling lawful presence a privilege.
Catholic Social Teaching treats the stranger as a member of the human family. The Torah says, “You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.” Leviticus says, “You shall love the alien as yourself.” The Gospel says, “I was a stranger, and you welcomed me.”
The command does not disappear when the stranger’s paperwork becomes inconvenient.
The Hebrew Bible repeats the command to love the ger, the resident alien, again and again. The frequency is the theology: when God says a thing once, listen; when God says it again and again, the forgetting is deliberate. The memory of having been the stranger is not optional. It is the precondition of every other moral act a nation performs.
A country built by strangers revoking the visas of strangers while citing the worst among them to justify the revocation of all is not practicing neutral enforcement. It is practicing deliberate unremembering. The prophets named that forgetting as sin.
We have built a country that asks migrants to work, study, heal, teach, worship, and raise children among us while keeping their lives suspended over an administrative trapdoor. We invite their labor and then call their presence conditional. We depend on their bodies and reserve the power to erase their status without showing the public what happened. Parents have even been accused of traveling to the United States mainly so their children would be born American. Suspicion expands until ordinary family decisions become evidence of moral failure.
The revocation of Iranian visas and green cards, as our coverage has shown, is part of that broader machinery—not an isolated exercise of bureaucratic discretion but a campaign to make legal status conditional on political and administrative favor. Different agencies. One moral structure.
The Department of Homeland Security deports people. The State Department cancels visas. The administration says more than 605,000 people have been removed since Trump took office, calling it the largest deportation operation in American history. Our own coverage has already shown how the administration’s removal machinery is reaching deeper into specific immigrant communities. A person becomes a case. The case becomes a number. The number becomes a triumph.
The climate this administration is exploiting was not built by this administration alone. The federal government did not begin immigration enforcement, visa cancellation, detention, or deportation under Trump. Democratic administrations also deported people and used the machinery of exclusion. The machine is older than any president.
Those of us who live in communities with undocumented neighbors and say nothing while the enforcement apparatus grows around us have helped build the conditions in which 175,000 revocations can be announced as efficiency rather than cruelty. Catholic communities have often welcomed migrants in the parish while accepting a national system that treats them as disposable outside it. We have prayed over the stranger and then looked away when the state made the stranger disappear.
The sin is not only in the official who signs the revocation. It is also in the community that calls the disappearance orderly.
That standard must apply across parties. History does not excuse the person who expands the machine. Trump is using an inherited system to build a larger instrument of fear, and that instrument now reaches political speech with open hands.
Óscar Romero stood before a government that called repression security and commanded it to stop: “In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose laments rise to heaven each day more tumultuous, I beg you, I beseech you, I order you in the name of God: Stop the repression!”
The command belongs here too.
Stop making immigration status the price of speech. Stop treating accusation as conviction. Stop turning the stranger into a warning for everyone else.
You can come back from this. You can publish the categories, the evidence, the appeals, and the outcomes. You can restore the people punished for speech. You can build an immigration system that protects the public without making any human being disposable.
Until then, the visa office is not only processing papers. It is teaching the country whom it may fear, whom it may silence, and whom it may refuse to see.
In the Gospel, the stranger waits at the gate. Christ is waiting there too.