Federal investigators have uncovered potentially massive fraud in a program allowing foreign students to stay in the U.S. after graduating.
At a Tuesday news conference, acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Director Todd Lyons announced that the feds “have identified over 10,000 foreign students who claim to be working for highly suspect employers” under the STEM Optional Practical Training (OPT) program.
📺WATCH: New ICE HSI data shows rampant foreign student fraud — ICE director says these probes are only the beginning.
➡️We’ve identified over 10,000 foreign students who claim to be working for highly-suspect employers.
➡️We’ve discovered empty buildings and locked doors at… pic.twitter.com/RS51VLKM1V
— U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (@ICEgov) May 12, 2026
Lyons said that the cases uncovered are “just the tip of the iceberg.”
“Certain F-1 students who receive science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) degrees may apply for a 24-month extension of their post-completion optional practical training (OPT),” U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) states on its website of the program, which was created during the George W. Bush administration and expanded by President Barack Obama.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) initially expected that “only a few thousand foreign students would receive training approval before returning home,” but OPT has instead “ballooned into an uncontrolled guest worker pipeline with hundreds of thousands of foreign students working in the United States,” Lyons said.
The acting director added, “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,” Lyons told reporters.
“We’ve dramatically expanded our oversight of OPT and can report that we found fraud nationwide,” he said.
The top immigration enforcement official explained that officers with Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) have conducted visits with “problematic OPT worksite employers” in Florida, Georgia, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Texas, and Virginia, and that many of the suspect employers include nongovernmental organizations or NGOs.
Lyons revealed that visiting investigators “discovered empty buildings and locked doors at addresses where hundreds of foreign students are allegedly employed,” along with hundreds of international students who are listed working from residential addresses.
“In many places,” he said, “multiple OPT employers claim to operate from the same address, but none actually lease the facility.”
“When someone does open the door, their statements are inconsistent, or they claim no knowledge of the business,” Lyons said, also stating that investigators found “phantom employees,” foreigners who received authorization to work through OPT but never showed up at the sites where they said they were working.
“This is not accidental,” he pointed out. “This is deliberate, coordinated, and criminal.”
“OPT has become a magnet for fraud,” Lyons also said.
The announcement drew high praise from Vice President JD Vance.
Another great win for our fraud task force. We will not tolerate foreign nationals abusing our visa system at the expense of the American people. https://t.co/smFBgxha3w
— JD Vance (@JDVance) May 12, 2026
“Another great win for our fraud task force. We will not tolerate foreign nationals abusing our visa system at the expense of the American people,” the “fraud czar” said in a post to X, sharing video of the news conference.
“Our nation will not tolerate security threats originating from the foreign student program,” Lyons vowed.
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