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Acting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Director Todd Lyons announced that federal investigators have uncovered more than 10,000 foreign students connected to “suspect employers” as part of another potentially massive fraud scheme, this time involving the federal STEM Optional Practical Training (OPT) extension program.
At a news conference Tuesday, Lyons said the cases uncovered thus far are “just the tip of the iceberg.”
OPT is a U.S. immigration program that lets international students on F-1 visas work temporarily in the country in jobs related to their field of study. Lyons said that when the program was first created under the Bush administration and expanded under the Obama administration, the Department of Homeland Security expected “only a few thousand foreign students would receive training approval before returning home.”
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“Instead,” Lyons said, that OPT “ballooned into an uncontrolled guest worker pipeline with hundreds of thousands of foreign students working in the United States.”
He added that “as the program size exploded, so has the fraud.”
“Today, we are announcing we have identified over 10,000 foreign students who claim to be working for highly suspect employers, and that’s just among the top 25 OPT employers. This is only the tip of the iceberg,” he said.
“We’ve dramatically expanded our oversight of OPT and can report that we found fraud nationwide.”
According to Lyons, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) officers have visited “problematic OPT worksite employers” in Virginia, Texas, Georgia, Illinois, New York, New Jersey, North Carolina and Florida. He said that many of the suspicious employers include nongovernmental organizations.
According to Lyons, investigators have “discovered empty buildings and locked doors at addresses where hundreds of foreign students are allegedly employed.” Investigators have also found hundreds of foreign students listed as working out of residential addresses.
“In many places,” he continued, “multiple OPT employers claim to operate from the same address, but none actually lease the facility.”
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“When someone does open the door, their statements are inconsistent, or they claim no knowledge of the business,” said Lyons.
The ICE director also said investigators uncovered what he referred to as “phantom employees,” who he said are foreign students who obtained work authorization through OPT but never actually showed up for work at the sites they claimed to work out of.
“This is not accidental,” Lyons concluded. “This is deliberate, coordinated and criminal.”
He added that “this fraud is not victimless,” calling it a “blatant attack on the goodwill of the American people.”
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Vice President JD Vance, who President Donald Trump appointed “fraud czar,” celebrated the discovery in an X post as “another great win for our fraud task force.”
Vance wrote that the administration “will not tolerate foreign nationals abusing our visa system at the expense of the American people.”
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