In its crackdown on immigration law loopholes expanded under the Obama administration, President Trump’s team has targeted so-called “fiancee visas,” blamed in the 2015 San Bernardino, Calif., terrorist killings.

According to a new analysis, the Trump administration has slashed the visas sometimes fraudulently used by immigrants to gain U.S. citizenship by a third.

Under the Obama administration, some 90 percent of the visa requests were granted, but the total has been cut to 66 percent, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services data analyzed by the Center for Immigration Studies.

What’s more, said CIS expert David North, of those, another 20 percent were denied when newly mandatory overseas interviews of the “fiancees” were conducted.

He said that it used to be that the so-called “K-1” visas were easy to get. But after the San Bernardino shooting that included the killer’s wife granted one, and growing examples of fraud, the administration sought to trim them.

There have been many stories of “fiancees” using the visas to gain U.S. citizenship by defrauding Americans. One common story is they claim they plan to get married and once in the U.S. claim abuse and seek citizenship on their own.

Under Obama, the immigrant didn’t even face an overseas interview to see if the relationship was real. That has changed, wrote North for CIS.

Now the two step-process is much tougher. He wrote:

The K-1 decision numbers are now much different than they were in the past. There are two sets of them. The first deals with the initial step in the process, the petition. In FY 2016, USCIS approved 90.5 percent of the petitions it received; then in FY 2017, which was mostly under the Trump administration, that figure fell to 66.2 percent.

The second step — the one involving the overseas interview — showed in the latest data available that in FY 2016 the denial rate was about 20 percent, a huge increase from the 2015 rate of less than 1 percent. Bear in mind that the 20 percent denial rate was laid on cases that had been 100 percent cleared by USCIS. The two agencies are moving in the same direction with, State backstopping DHS.

Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner's "Washington Secrets" columnist, can be contacted at pbedard@washingtonexaminer.com