The U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced on Thursday, October 29, that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has taken nearly 2.2 million immigration enforcement actions since January 20, 2025, aimed at revoking or terminating the immigration status of people inside the United States. DHS described the total as nearly seven times the number of such actions taken during the final two years of the Biden administration combined. The tally was set out in a DHS statement released on October 29 and reported the same day by VisaVerge, which said it checked the figures against DHS, and in reporting first carried by The Telegraph and The Daily Wire.
Source: VisaVerge — USCIS Reports 2.2 Million Immigration Actions Since 2025 (Oct 29, 2026)
The announcement matters because USCIS is the agency most immigrants deal with on paper — work permits, status extensions, green-card and citizenship applications — rather than at the border. A tally built from this agency's actions reaches people already living and working inside the country, including long-settled families in diaspora-heavy states such as California, New York, New Jersey and Texas.
Five kinds of action inside one tally
DHS listed five categories inside the 2.2 million figure: Temporary Protected Status (TPS), nonimmigrant status applications, Notices to Appear, work authorization, and parole. The categories are different kinds of agency decisions grouped into a single count — a point DHS itself made in the release, and one readers should keep in mind: the figure is a count of actions taken to revoke or terminate status, not a count of completed removals.
Source: VisaVerge summary of the DHS statement (Oct 29, 2026)
On TPS, the department said it is ending what it called misuse of the programme and is pursuing termination efforts involving more than one million foreign nationals from 13 countries. TPS is a humanitarian status Congress created for people whose home countries are hit by war or disaster. Some of the administration's terminations are being held up by litigation, so not every person counted in that category has lost status today.
On status applications and court process, DHS counted denials of applications to extend or change nonimmigrant status where the agency finds no legal basis, and Notices to Appear — the charging documents that place a person into removal proceedings before an immigration judge. An NTA does not itself deport anyone; it starts a court case in which the person can contest removal, but it puts their stay in the United States formally at risk.
On work authorization, the department included its ending of automatic extensions of employment authorization documents (EADs), saying applicants must now be screened and vetted before a work permit is renewed. The release gave no separate count for this category. For diaspora households — including Punjabi families working in trucking, warehouses, farms, stores and care work across the Central Valley and other hubs — a lapsed or delayed work permit can mean a job paused even while a family's case is still being decided.
On parole, DHS said it is ending categorical parole programmes and returning parole decisions to case-by-case review. One ended programme, created under the Biden administration, had allowed roughly 500,000 Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan and Venezuelan migrants to fly directly into the United States with sponsors.
"President Trump promised the American people that our immigration laws would be enforced, and these numbers reflect the scale of that commitment. Those who abuse or flagrantly disregard our immigration system are now on notice that these violations of law will not be tolerated or overlooked. Securing our border was only the beginning. We are restoring integrity to the entire immigration system and putting the safety of our American citizens first." — Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, in the DHS statement.
What the tally does not show
The announcement does not establish that every one of the 2.2 million actions ended in a lost status. The Daily Wire, citing DHS, said it was unclear whether all 2.2 million people in the count had lost their status. DHS also stressed that its count comes on top of actions tallied by other agencies: a September ICE report put deportations at roughly 421,182 between October 2025 and August 24, 2026, and the White House said earlier this month that the administration had revoked more than 300,000 visas — a figure it said included roughly 4,000 tied to birth tourism and 6,000 held by foreign students who had committed crimes or had ties to terrorism. DHS did not fold those numbers into the USCIS tally.
Source: VisaVerge — visa revocations and ICE removals sit outside the tally (Oct 29, 2026)
What happens next
The fights now move through courts and inboxes. TPS terminations that are blocked by litigation stay blocked until judges rule; people who receive a Notice to Appear get immigration-court dates rather than immediate removal; and work-permit holders face renewal screening without the automatic extension many previously relied on. DHS presented the tally as an ongoing programme, not a finished one, saying the agency is using its authority to deny applications it considers meritless, terminate benefits it considers unlawfully granted, begin removal proceedings and revoke approvals it considers improper. Anyone who receives a USCIS notice about their own status can seek advice from an immigration lawyer before deadlines in the notice expire.