ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations unit announced the findings on May 12, saying investigators discovered empty buildings and locked doors at addresses connected to the probe. Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons called the investigations “only the beginning.”
The scale of the suspected fraud is staggering, and the details ICE has released read like a blueprint for organized immigration fraud on American soil.
📺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
The announcement follows a formal warning that the Student and Exchange Visitor Program sent to school officials in March. A publicly posted copy of that broadcast message laid out what SEVP and HSI investigators found during site visits to employers participating in the STEM OPT extension program.
The findings were damning.
The SEVP broadcast message detailed what investigators encountered:
SEVP and HSI site visits found unoccupied and unused business locations, personal residences listed as on-site employment locations with no employees present, offshore human resources and payroll personnel, employer officials with little knowledge about the companies they claimed to represent, contradictory statements from employer representatives, students claiming STEM OPT employment who never showed up for work, and inoperative telephone numbers.
The broadcast warned designated school officials that employers and foreign students engaged in suspected fraud risk referral for administrative or criminal investigations by HSI and the Department of Justice. SEVP also told school officials to watch for vague employer websites, job duties that do not match what was reported to the school, worksites that do not match Form I-983 addresses, unfamiliar employers hiring large groups of students, and work conducted remotely or through apps such as WeChat. SEVP flagged IT recruitment, consulting, and staffing firms as common areas of concern.
Read that list again. Empty offices. Locked doors. Home addresses pretending to be corporate worksites. Offshore payroll. Company officials unable to explain the companies they supposedly ran. Students who were authorized to work but never actually showed up. Phone numbers that did not even ring.
The findings point far beyond a few bad apples slipping through a bureaucratic crack. They suggest organized exploitation of a federal program, and ICE is signaling it intends to keep pulling the thread.
To understand how this fraud works, you need to understand OPT itself.
The Congressional Research Service provides essential context:
OPT is temporary employment authorization for foreign students and recent graduates in F-1 or M-1 nonimmigrant status and must be directly related to the student’s major area of study. In calendar year 2024, there were 1.58 million F-1 and M-1 students and recent graduates in the United States, and 26 percent of them, or 418,781, were authorized to work via OPT.
There is no numerical limitation on OPT participation. General OPT can last up to 12 months, but STEM OPT extensions can bring the total authorized work period to 36 months. Employers participating in STEM OPT must use E-Verify and submit a formal training plan. CRS describes an ongoing policy debate, including arguments that OPT has become a large-scale temporary worker program without sufficient safeguards for U.S. workers and students, along with concerns about access to sensitive technology and intellectual property.
Nearly 419,000 foreign nationals authorized to work through a single program with no numerical cap and, as ICE is now demonstrating, enforcement that has historically been minimal at best. The STEM extension alone can keep a foreign worker in the United States for three years, and CRS notes the program often serves as a bridge to H-1B visas or permanent residency.
That bridge only works if the underlying employment is real. What ICE is describing suggests that for a significant number of participants, it was not.
🚨 MASSIVE ICE FRAUD BUST: 10,000 foreign students caught in a nationwide OPT scam.
Empty buildings. Hundreds of “employees” sharing the same fake address. Locked doors. Phantom employers sending money overseas.
This is organized, coordinated fraud spanning multiple states and… pic.twitter.com/3j6rxcjCwb
— Gunther Eagleman™ (@GuntherEagleman) May 12, 2026
It is important to be precise about what ICE has said and what it has not. The agency has identified over 10,000 students tied to highly suspicious employers. It has not announced 10,000 arrests or convictions. These are active fraud probes, and the legal process will determine individual outcomes. But the sheer volume of red flags, and the consistency of those red flags across multiple site visits, show a program that was left wide open for abuse.
The OPT program was designed to give foreign students a limited window of practical work experience connected to their field of study. Somewhere along the way it became something much bigger, a sprawling, uncapped work authorization channel with nearly half a million participants and an enforcement apparatus that, until now, could not keep up with the fraud.
ICE says these probes are only the beginning. If the first wave has already turned up 10,000 suspicious cases, empty buildings, phantom employers, and offshore payroll networks, then the OPT program is overdue for the kind of hard scrutiny that should have come years ago.
