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Under prior administrations, the State Department issued monthly reports on immigrant and nonimmigrant visa issuances to ensure public transparency regarding U.S. visa issuances with little time lag. For example, data from April 2026 would typically be made available by mid to late May 2026. This data is broken down along a number of key categories, including nationality and visa category.
However, coinciding with the imposition of the Trump administration’s June 2025 travel ban (Proclamation 10949) that targeted Iranians and many other nationals, the regular reporting on visa issuances halted. At the end of 2025, no data had been published by the State Department on the past eight months of visa issuances. Only recently has the State Department begun to publish monthly visa issuance data again, with four months of data – June 2025 through September 2025 – recently published and showing the ban’s effect. This lag time of more than a half a year has limited the public’s understanding of the impact of major immigration changes that have gone into effect.
The limited data published thus far shows that nonimmigrant visa issuance to Iranians fell off a cliff, to effectively zero. While this impact had been anticipated by experts given the breadth of the ban, the data confirms these assumptions and shows its stark impact. Whereas more than 1,000 visitor visas (B1/B2) were regularly issued to Iranians on a monthly basis during Fiscal Year (FY) 2024, this number plummeted throughout the Trump administration, with only 98 visitor visas issued in June 2025, followed by zero in July 2025 and two in both August and September 2025.
Likewise, issuances of student visas to Iranians (F1/F2) fell to near zero even amid what is typically the peak of student visa issuances in the summer months. In contrast to 1,297 Iranians receiving visas between June and September 2024, with a peak of 497 in August 2024, the State Department issued only 13 student visas total across June and September 2025: 12 in June, when the travel ban went into effect, one in July and zero across August and September.
This effective elimination of Iranian student visas is all the more shocking when coupled with the fact that the final travel ban from the first Trump administration included an explicit carveout for Iranian nationals to continue to receive student visas, irrespective of other restrictions. This exception, which suggested that it was in the national interest to continue the issuance of visas to Iranian students, was not included in this current iteration of the travel ban on Iranians.
Overall, nonimmigrant visa issuances to Iranians fell to only 95 in September 2025, or just 4 if you exclude G category visas granted to employees of international organizations. By contrast, September 2024 saw the issuance of 1,664 nonimmigrant visas to Iranian nationals.
Yet, simply measuring figures from the second Trump administration against the Biden administration is insufficient given that visa issuances under Biden never recovered from the first Trump administration. Pathways for Iranians to travel to the United States have been gradually closed off across the two Trump administrations, with a brief interlude under President Biden. Under the Obama administration, nonimmigrant visa issuances to Iranians were on an entirely different level, with more than 20,000 visitor visas and 3,000 student visas regularly issued to Iranians in a single fiscal year. Now, if post-ban trends continue, cracking 100 visa issuances in either category across an entire year may be in doubt.
For the months we have data in 2025, the issuance of immigrant visas to Iranians continued to some extent, with certain categories seeing dips while other categories saw little overall impact. However, it is highly possible that immigrant visa issuances to Iranians have seen a dramatic dip in recent months, particularly given that the Trump administration removed key exemptions to the ban in December 2025. This includes the exemption that allowed for the continued issuances of immediate relative visas.
Beyond the data, each visa denied by the State Department represents real human impact: students and medical professionals facing mounting financial crises because their work authorization and visa are in limbo, grandparents who are denied visas to visit their newborn grandchildren, aunts and uncles denied visas to attend a wedding and friends who are unable to travel to the “land of the free.” Many members of the Iranian-American community are in the United States today because either they or one of their family members secured a student visa, attended an American university and pursued the American dream after earning their degree. Titans of industry have touted the contributions of Iranians to their companies and the American economy. Yet, the door for Iranian students is being shuttered as well.
There has never been a valid security basis for the travel ban. Yet this policy continues to have an outsized toll on the Iranian-American community and individuals in Iran hoping to reconnect with their loved ones here or pursue their studies in the United States. As a result of the ban, the Iranian-American community is more isolated from their compatriots in Iran than ever before.