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The US embassy in London is preventing top-level business executives from travelling to America over minor criminal offences, as Donald Trump’s clampdown on immigration extends to the UK.
People looking to travel to the US on tourist and business visas who have police cautions or petty offences on their records — some dating back as far as the 1970s — are frequently being turned down, according to immigration lawyers and visa consultants.
Lawyers said tech and C-suite executives were among those to have had visas denied apparently on the basis of comparatively minor, historic offences such as cannabis use, bar fights and driving under the influence of alcohol, in a sign of how far-reaching the US anti-immigration drive has become. Some of those denied visas had arrests on their records but not convictions.
The London embassy has been refusing visas under the so-called 214(b) rule — a catch-all category that allows consular offices to deny travel because a person “did not sufficiently demonstrate” that they qualify, without giving a reason. Some clients have received visa refusals after indications that they would be approved, lawyers said.
They said this approach began last summer in the wake of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s “catch-and-revoke” policy aimed at rescinding visas from any foreigner caught breaking the law. Such refusals were far more unusual before Trump’s second term began in January last year, lawyers said.
London is the largest visa post for the US in Europe, with more than 150,000 non-immigrant visas issued by the embassy in 2024, according to the most recent data from the US Department of State. Anyone who is not eligible for an Esta — an automated 90-day travel permit available to citizens of countries such as the UK — must apply for a visa through their local embassy.
Nationals from countries such as India, South Africa and Brazil cannot travel on Estas so must apply through embassies. People from eligible countries with a criminal record — including arrests and cautions without charge — are also unable to secure Estas if the infractions relate to certain activities including drug use.
“In our experience, anybody that has a criminal irregularity — no matter how minor — is unlikely to obtain a visitor visa, and in some cases even a work visa, from London right now,” said Christi Jackson, head of the US practice at Laura Devine Immigration in London. “We are telling clients with existing visas that they should guard them with their lives.”
One lawyer said they were now turning away clients with any criminal history, telling them that the US is not issuing visitor or business visas to such applicants.
Another lawyer said they had managed to get visas approved for a while last year by sending them to other embassies, suggesting that the issue was London-specific, but the administration has since clamped down on those routes.
The embassy also stopped publishing a monthly log of the number of visas it was issuing in June last year.
“The most remarkable aspect of this has been that people who had previously been given visas in the past, with the same history, are being refused today,” said Steven Heller, a US immigration lawyer in the UK.
The US Department of State said: “The Trump administration is upholding the highest standards of national security and public safety through the visa process . . . [the US] will not tolerate foreign visitors violating our laws.”
Trump’s crackdown on immigration came to a head in recent weeks after federal agents fatally shot a nurse, Alex Pretti, in Minneapolis, the second US citizen to be shot and killed by federal agents in the city this year. The deaths sparked a wave of protests across the country and forced the president to soften his rhetoric on the issue.
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have been deployed en masse across America to sweep up undocumented foreigners, often backed up by National Guard troops.
International travel to the US has plunged over the past year since Trump came into power. The number of foreign visitors travelling to the US in 2025 was down 4.2 per cent — the first annual decline since the Covid-19 pandemic. In contrast, international travel worldwide increased by 4 per cent.
“The US is a huge financial hub in the world and people need to go there for business,” said Paul Samartin, a US immigration lawyer in London who represents high-net-worth individuals. “It’s a problem.”