Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced in May that it had identified more than 10,000 foreign students claiming to work for highly suspect employers under Optional Practical Training. Acting Director Todd Lyons called the figure the tip of the iceberg, limited to the top 25 such employers. Agents had visited sites in Virginia, Texas, Georgia, Illinois, New York, New Jersey, North Carolina, and Florida. They found empty buildings with locked doors, addresses that were nothing but post-office boxes, residential houses listed as the workplace for hundreds of students, and shell companies run by the same operators. In North Texas they hit 18 sites in one week. Some “employers” claimed only a handful of OPT workers while records showed hundreds. Others were managed by personnel based in India, in violation of the rule that the training occur under U.S. direction. The October proposal for a 70,000-dollar initial fee and a 30,000-dollar fee for any subsequent period is the regulatory answer to what the site visits documented.
🚨 HOLY SMOKES. ICE has just announced a jaw-dropping fraud bust, saying 10,000 FOREIGN students are involved in the federal government’s Optional Practical Training
There are EMPTY BUILDINGS where HUNDREDS of students should be “working” as part of their ability to be in America — run by foreign-linked groups that send money out of the country!
Locked doors, hundreds of students sharing the SAME ADDRESS, and “employers” sharing the same unleased addresses
There is a widespread “phantom employee” fraud going on. This is insane.
Many of the so-called “employers” have major red flags, such as facing lawsuits, no employment records, offshore payroll claims, and suspicious INTERNATIONAL MONEY flows
“HSI agents have visited problematic OPT employer work sites in Virginia, Texas, Georgia, Illinois, New York, New Jersey, North Carolina, and Florida.”
“Foreign students themselves are entering false addresses and employer names into the student and exchange visitor information system.”
“But we are uncovering evidence of organized fraud that spans national and international borders. This is not accidental. It is deliberate, coordinated, and criminal.”
“To give you an example, one employer we visited claimed to employ only three foreign students through OPT, while our records show over 500 foreign students claiming to work there.”
“The company’s representatives were unable to answer basic questions about the business and deferred HR managers in India.”
“OPT employers are required to directly train foreign students, but we’ve seen multiple examples of alleged employers claiming that all management is overseas in India.”
“We’ve also discovered multiple state networks which are large networks of alleged employers claiming to train thousands of foreign students in OPT, then farming them out to unreported third party employers, making oversight nearly impossible and raising serious national security issues.”
— Midnight Leaks (@MidnightLeaksHQ) October 17, 2026
What the program is
Optional Practical Training lets an F-1 student work in the United States for up to 12 months after completing a degree, provided the work is related to the field of study. Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics graduates can add another 24 months. The authorization is recommended by a school official and granted by the immigration service. Unlike the H-1B, it requires no labor-market test and no prevailing-wage attestation. The employer does not have to show that no American is available. Roughly a third of the more than one million international students in the country have used it in a recent year. It has become the largest single pipeline from the student visa into the American workforce, and from there into the H-1B lottery. The regulations assume a real job, a real worksite, and training that advances the degree. The site visits showed how often those assumptions failed.
What the visits found
The patterns were consistent. Agents arrived at addresses listed in the student database for hundreds of OPT participants and found vacant space. One alleged information-technology company’s address in Georgia was a post-office box; a related company across the street, also claiming dozens of students, was empty, and one of its websites had been flagged as potential malware. Multiple unrelated “employers” shared the same address with no lease on record. Small houses were listed as the location for hundreds of workers. Shell entities existed on paper to give students a sponsorship façade while the actual placement, if any, was with third-party clients. Some operators ran coordinated networks in which students appeared on nearly identical company websites with the same job postings. Students paid for a place on a roster—the “pay-to-stay” arrangement the later rulemaking described. Work was assigned or supervised from overseas. The employment had little or no relationship to the student’s program of study. The Student and Exchange Visitor Program had already been spending significant resources investigating improper authorizations used to facilitate visa fraud. The 10,000 names were the ones attached to the most suspect of the top employers. Lyons said the fraud was nationwide.
What it costs the country
Every name on a fraudulent OPT roster is a work authorization that did not have to clear the tests applied to other temporary workers. In fields where recent American graduates already compete for entry-level technical jobs, the extra supply holds down starting wages and reduces the number of openings that go to citizens. The shell companies and the overseas management convert a training program into a residency permit that can be bought. The empty buildings mean the “training” is not occurring under American supervision, which is both a regulatory violation and a security gap: the government has authorized foreign nationals to remain and work without knowing who is actually directing them. Universities collect tuition from the students who need the OPT promise to justify the cost of the degree; designated school officials recommend the authorizations; the employers, real or fictitious, fill the slots. The fee proposal shifts part of the cost onto the schools in the hope that they will stop recommending students for employers they have not verified. Whether the fees survive comment and litigation, the site-visit record already shows the scale. Ten thousand students at employers that do not exist, or that exist only to sell the visa, is not a training program. It is an unauthorized work channel that the visits have now measured. The measurement is what the empty buildings and the locked doors supplied.
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