The Trump administration is preparing visa sanctions on China over Beijing’s slow acceptance of deported nationals, a senior administration official said.
The planned move, first reported by Reuters, was confirmed by the State Department to The Epoch Times.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said China accepted approximately 3,000 deportees via charter and commercial flights early in 2025. However, in the last six months, China has curtailed acceptance of its nationals, the official said.
China “refuses to fully cooperate with the United States to take back its citizens,” the official said, calling it a breach of Beijing’s international obligations and responsibilities to its citizens.
Some of the Chinese deportees were convicted criminals, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) said in June 2025, when announcing the deportation of 122 illegal immigrants to China on a special high-risk charter flight. Among them were a 47-year-old man convicted of murder, a 49-year-old man convicted of drug trafficking, a 27-year-old man convicted of rape, and a 55-year-old man convicted of human smuggling.
The official said that unless China stepped up cooperation on deportations, the United States would consider raising cash bond requirements for visa applicants, as well as denying more visas and imposing stricter entry controls at the border.
“Inaction by the Chinese government will jeopardize future travel for law-abiding Chinese citizens,” the official said.
The warning to China’s communist regime comes just days before President Donald Trump’s scheduled trip to China on May 14-15, for meetings with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
Trump is expected to bring up the deportation issue while meeting Xi. China’s human rights violations will be on the agenda, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on May 5.
On May 4, Trump said he would talk to Xi about Jimmy Lai, a jailed Hong Kong democracy activist who was sentenced in January to 20 years in prison.
The official said there are more than 100,000 Chinese nationals in the United States unlawfully. Over 30,000 have final removal orders, and U.S. authorities have detained more than 1,500 of them pending deportation. Most of those detained have committed other crimes, the official said.
A Hartford federal court sentenced a Chinese illegal immigrant to 30 months in prison in April, for running a scheme that used stolen identities to apply for loans to buy luxury cars for resale.
Another Chinese illegal immigrant was sentenced to 57 months in prison in Boston in August 2025, for being involved in an international money laundering and drug trafficking organization.
Other countries with large numbers of undocumented people in the United States, including India, are working closely with U.S. authorities, the official said.
The United States is asking Beijing to issue travel documents and allow U.S.-funded Customs and Border Protection charter flights carrying deportees to land in China.
Under Section 243(d) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, the United States can impose visa sanctions on countries designated as uncooperative, officially known as “recalcitrant,” in complying with U.S. repatriation requests. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has routinely applied the designation to China.
Since the Obama administration, U.S. officials have said they believe China has deliberately slowed the issuance of travel documents for deportees, either because it is reluctant to accept them or because it seeks to use the issue as leverage in its dealings with Washington.
The United States and China restarted cooperation on the deportation of Chinese illegal immigrants in May 2024, nearly two years after Beijing suspended the agreement in retaliation for then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) trip to Taiwan.
In July 2024, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced that it had carried out its first large-scale deportation flight of Chinese nationals since 2018. The flight carried 116 Chinese nationals.
Reuters contributed to this report.
