Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has announced a massive crackdown on the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program for foreign students with an F-1 visa.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has announced a massive crackdown on an immigration program that allows international students to work temporarily in the country. ICE Director Todd M. Lyons called the OPT program a “fraud magnet” and said the agency uncovered violations involving nearly 10,000 foreign students participating in the federal government’s optional practical training program.
When the Occupied Palestinian Territories were created under the Bush administration and expanded under the Obama administration, the Department of Homeland Security expected that only a few thousand foreign students would be approved for training before returning to their home country, Lyons said, providing background on the program.But instead of what was expected, the occupied Palestinian territories swelled into an unsupervised pipeline of guest workers with hundreds of thousands of foreign students working in the United States, the director said at a news conference Tuesday.
“As the program grew in size, so did fraud. During the first Trump administration, we caught thousands of foreign students claiming to work at job sites that did not exist, and blatantly fabricated information provided to DHS.
Under the Biden administration, fraud has escalated even more.”
Lyons announced that ICE has identified 10,000 students working for highly suspicious employers and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
He said that these companies are only among the top 25 employers in the occupied Palestinian territories.Investigators found empty buildings and closed doors at addresses where hundreds of foreign students allegedly worked. In many cases, multiple employers in the OPT claimed to be operating from the same address, but none of them actually leased the facility. These companies are involved in financial violations, including breach of contracts, and the suspicious movement of funds across countries.HSI said last week it had visited 18 work sites in the occupied Palestinian territories in Texas and the results were alarming. They found coordinated employer groups where many OPT workers were on nearly identical websites, sharing job advertisements. One employer claimed, during the field visit, that they only had three OPT students, but according to records, they had 500 foreign students working. Company officials were unable to answer basic questions asked by investigators and referred to human resources personnel from India.What are the occupied Palestinian territories?OPT (Optional Practical Training) is a US immigration program that allows international students with F-1 visas to temporarily work in jobs related to their field of study. They are administered by US Citizenship and Immigration Services and schools licensed under the F-1 student visa system.
