President Trump's immigration executive order caused more than 100,000 visas to be revoked, government lawyer Erez Reuveni revealed Friday in a federal courtroom in Alexandria, Virginia. Per The Daily Beast's Betsy Woodruff, there was an "audible gasp" in the courtroom when Reuveni announced the number during a hearing for a lawsuit filed for two Yemeni brothers who were put on a return flight to Ethiopia after arriving Saturday at Dulles International Airport in Washington, D.C.:
Moreover, Woodruff reported, the visas were not "just deemed unusable for 90 days," the length of Trump's executive order banning people from seven Muslim-majority nations from entering the U.S. These visas, per a Trump lawyer, "no longer exist," Woodruff wrote on Twitter.
Though Trump signed the executive order last Friday, it was not made clear until Reuveni's reveal Friday how many visas it affected. On Monday, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said just over 100 people were "temporarily inconvenienced." Becca Stanek
The Week
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Update 1:14 p.m. ET: The State Department clarified that 60,000 visas were revoked by Trump's immigration executive order, not 100,000, as the government lawyer stated earlier. That lawyer's tally apparently did not account for "diplomatic and expired visas," the State Department said.