SouthernWorldwide.com – Acting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Director Todd Lyons has revealed that federal investigators have uncovered a significant fraud scheme involving over 10,000 foreign students. This scheme is linked to “suspect employers” and specifically targets the federal STEM Optional Practical Training (OPT) extension program.
During a news conference held on Tuesday, Lyons characterized the cases identified so far as merely “the tip of the iceberg,” suggesting the full extent of the fraud is likely much larger.
The OPT program is a U.S. immigration initiative that permits international students holding F-1 visas to work temporarily in the country. The jobs must be directly related to their academic field of study. Lyons noted that when the program was initially established under the Bush administration and later expanded by the Obama administration, the Department of Homeland Security anticipated only a limited number of foreign students would utilize the training approval before returning to their home countries.
“Instead,” Lyons stated, the OPT program has “ballooned into an uncontrolled guest worker pipeline with hundreds of thousands of foreign students working in the United States.”
He further elaborated that “as the program size exploded, so has the fraud.”
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“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 emphasized.
“We’ve dramatically expanded our oversight of OPT and can report that we found fraud nationwide.”
According to Lyons, officers from Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) have conducted site visits to “problematic OPT worksite employers” across several states, including Virginia, Texas, Georgia, Illinois, New York, New Jersey, North Carolina, and Florida. He pointed out that a significant number of these suspicious employers are non-governmental organizations.
Lyons detailed that investigators have “discovered empty buildings and locked doors at addresses where hundreds of foreign students are allegedly employed.” Additionally, hundreds of foreign students were found to be listed as working from residential addresses.
“In many places,” he continued, “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 added.
The ICE director also revealed that investigators uncovered what he described as “phantom employees.” These are foreign students who secured work authorization through OPT but never actually reported for work at the locations they claimed to be employed at.
“This is not accidental,” Lyons concluded. “This is deliberate, coordinated and criminal.”
He stressed that “this fraud is not victimless,” referring to it as a “blatant attack on the goodwill of the American people.”
Vice President JD Vance, who President Donald Trump appointed as “fraud czar,” commended the discovery on an X post, hailing it as “another great win for our fraud task force.”
Vance asserted that the administration “will not tolerate foreign nationals abusing our visa system at the expense of the American people.”
