Lehigh University
On June 25, the local NBC affiliate in Philadelphia published an article headlined “Former Lehigh University Freshman faked his father's death for full scholarship, officials say”. There’s something comical in such duplicity, and in fact, 19-year-old Indian national Aryan Anand did apparently fake a death certificate for his father to receive a scholarship at the prestigious university, but that was neither the beginning nor the end of his fraud scheme. This case highlights key vulnerabilities in a student visa system that came under heavy scrutiny even before it was exploited by one (or more, depending how you look at it) of the hijackers in the September 11th attacks — vulnerabilities that still remain and that could be easily exploited by those who seek to harm our country and its institutions.
The Student Visa Process, in Brief. Nonimmigrant foreign students in the United States generally enter under one of two visa categories, known as “F-1” and “M-1”, for their respective authorizing subparagraphs in section 101(a)(15) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).
An F-1 visa allows a nonimmigrant alien "to enter the United States as a full-time student at an accredited college, university, seminary, conservatory, academic high school, elementary school, or other academic institution or in a language training program”. To be an F-1 nonimmigrant, an alien “must be enrolled in a program or course of study that culminates in a degree, diploma, or certificate”.
An M-1 visa, on the other hand, is issued to an alien student in a “vocational or other nonacademic program, other than language training”.
F-1 and M-1 visas are only available to prospective alien students who are planning on attending a school “certified by the Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP)”. SEVP is administered by DHS, more specifically the National Security Division (NSD) at ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI).
If HSI sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the ICE directorate that’s rebranding itself — with the assent of the Biden administration — to distance its mission from anything immigration-related.
But I digress. SEVP, in turn, “administers the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS)”, a database created to ensure “government agencies have essential data related to nonimmigrant students and exchange visitors to preserve national security”.
Keeping track of nonimmigrant students has been a big deal for Congress for decades, as a March 2003 DOJ Inspector General’s report explains. That interest stems from the realization that Eyad Ismoil, a Jordanian national and one of the participants in the first World Trade Center bombing (in February 1993), was here on an expired student visa.
The student visa process doesn’t start with NSD, HSI, or any other alphabet-soup agency. It starts when the would-be student applies to an SEVP-certified school.
After the student is accepted, one of the school’s administrative employees — known as a “Designated School Official (DSO)” — creates an initial SEVIS record for the alien using biographical and financial information the applicant provides and issues a Form I-20, “Certificate of Eligibility for Nonimmigrant Student Status”, to the alien.
As I’ll explain below, Anand’s securing of an I-20 played a key role in his fraud scheme.
With the I-20 and the school acceptance secured, a would-be foreign student must next pay a SEVIS fee and apply with the Department of State (DoS) for the visa and schedule an appointment with a DoS consular officer for an interview.
At that interview, the student visa applicant must present both proof of acceptance and the I-20. If that visa is approved, the alien next takes his or her passport with the visa attached, along with the I-20 and supporting documentation, to a U.S. port of entry, where the alien will be inspected by a CBP officer.
That port inspection is generally perfunctory, because by that point (assuming the visa and I-20 aren’t bogus), the alien has been screened by the school, the DSO, and the DoS consular officer, and all of the alien’s information has been downloaded into NSD’s SEVIS database.
The alien has 30 days from the date of admission to appear at the school, at which point the DSO enters the alien’s arrival into SEVIS and thereafter updates the system to show the alien student continues to be in good standing. Alternatively, the DSO must also tell SEVIS if the alien isn’t in good standing (subject to exceptions) or fails to appear.
The Strange Case of Aryan Anand. Which brings me to the curious case of Aryan Anand. As the indispensable Stephen Dinan explains in his July 5 article on the case, the student visa system described above broke down in any number of ways.
Apparently back home in India, Anand was what Dinan describes as an “unmotivated student”, spending his time watching horror movies instead of attending to his studies. That posed a problem for the would-be scholar, because he realized it was unlikely any good school back home would want him.
So instead, he turned his focus on U.S. colleges that offered lavish aid programs. It’s doubtful he needed the aid: Dinan indicates Anand’s father could have paid, but that would have meant the intrepid pupil would have had to do whatever his father told him to do — a prospect he wanted to avoid.
Which is why he faked his father’s death certificate and claimed that with dad gone, his mother couldn’t handle the cost.
Lehigh is a highly selective school, as U.S. News and World Report’s assessment of the school reveals. It “has an acceptance rate of 37%”, and “half the applicants admitted to Lehigh University who submitted test scores have an SAT score between 1340 and 1490 or an ACT score of 30 and 33” — not an easy bar to clear.
So you may be wondering how a middling-to-poor student from India with a penchant for horror movies managed to find himself wandering the school’s leafy and scenic Bethlehem, Pa., campus with a nearly full ride. Simple — he recreated his secondary-school achievements by “fak[ing] his school records and email address” and “used ChatGPT to write his college essays”.
That apparently got him past the admissions office, and the school dutifully issued his I-20, which he then took to the U.S. consulate. As per Dinan, Anand:
said he was nervous about the student visa process, but he had no reason to be.
“They first asked why this university and all. I said something unique about the uni and then said they also gave me a full ride, which means full scholarship. As soon as she saw that on my I20 [sic] (it’s a doc for the visa), she said, ‘Oh, that’s good,’ smiled and said congrats, and said, ‘You must be very smart’ … and instantly typed something on the computer and said your visa is approved,” he recounted.
It would probably be piling on at this point to note that he didn’t exactly shine in his computer science studies at the school (“he was still unmotivated and cheated on his exams”), but he was interested in making some cash, though he was hindered by the fact that his F-1 didn’t allow him to work.
Not to worry, though, because: “He applied for an internship, fabricated his resume and college records, and got a part-time remote job earning $1,500 monthly”.
“I Have Built My Career on LIES and FRAUD”. I described Dinan above as “indispensable”, and I mean it — he’s been covering immigration for over a decade, and is one of the few “immigration reporters” who actually understands the subject. He’s also intrepid, but in this case, he didn’t need to be: Anand basically confessed all of the above “[i]n a lengthy write-up on Reddit”, including in a post captioned “I have built my career on LIES and FRAUD”.
That was an “own goal” as they say in soccer because it unraveled this otherwise flawless scheme. “Another user saw it and forwarded it to investigators”, which led to a guilty plea to forgery, an ICE arrest, and a deportation order.
If I were still an immigration judge in Pennsylvania, I likely would have gotten his case, and would have told him what I told numerous other bunco artists: “If you used your skills in pursuit of any legal scheme, you’d be a success.” Cold comfort, to be sure.
When Everybody’s Responsible, Nobody Is. Another of my favorite aphorisms is “when everybody’s responsible, nobody is”, and as the foregoing shows, that was almost definitely true in this case.
Lehigh likely should have done a better job of checking on Anand’s claimed academic success back home, but the school likely assumed a DoS employee who was actually in India would have handled that. And the consular officer likely assumed that the school wasn’t being huckstered by a teenage slacker, so the I-20 and the acceptance (to say nothing of the “full ride”) were good enough for DoS.
Meanwhile, the SEVP folks at HSI NSD likely assumed some combination of the DSO, DoS, and CBP had already vetted the guy, and so long as his illicit employment didn’t show up in SEVIS they were none the wiser.
It’s difficult to discuss this tale without some mixture of humor and grudging admiration (Dinan reports that Anand has “become a social media sensation”), but this story evidences something much, much darker.
If a single, unpromising teenager from India could game our student visa system — which again Congress has fretted over for the past 30 years — imagine what a terrorist organization like ISIS-K could do if they wanted to embed a malevolent actor into this country and enable him to remain here with little scrutiny.
Ismoil wasn’t the last foreign student turned terrorist in this country’s history. Hani Hanjour, the Saudi Arabian national who piloted the plane flown into the Pentagon on September 11th, was present after he had entered on a student visa in December 2000 to attend the ELS Language Center in Oakland, Calif. — but he never showed up.
Mohammed Atta and Marwan Al Shehhi — the pilots of the planes crashed into the north and south towers of the World Trade Center on September 11th, respectively — initially entered as tourists before seeking M-1 status for flight-training (the then-INS’s approvals of those requests, six months to the day after 9/11, triggered Congress’s creation of DHS, as I’ve explained elsewhere).
In addition, Khaled Abu al Dahab and Wadih el Hage, both of whom were convicted for their roles in the August 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, had each entered the United States as students before they naturalized following marriages to citizens.
And, of course 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (also known as “KSM”) had studied engineering in the United States before graduating in December 1986 from North Carolina A&T. He later successfully applied for a tourist visa using a fake name in July 2001, but never apparently used it.
Or, imagine you were a functionary from the Chinese government and wanted to send a would-be spy into an academic research institution with defense contracts. So what if the U.S. government had suspicions about the individual in question — just create a new identity for him or her. Reddit will show them how it’s done.
By the way, a May 2013 “fact check” attempted to tamp down congressional concerns about terrorism and student visas, and speaking of cold comfort, it begins:
Lawmakers on both sides of the immigration debate have falsely claimed that “some” or “all” of the 9/11 hijackers were in the U.S. on student visas. Only one of the 19 hijackers came to the U.S. on a student visa.
You’d figure that one hijacking terrorist mass-murderer would be enough, but anyway the final report of the 9/11 Commission notes that five different known would-be co-conspirators in the plot “were deemed not to be bona fide tourists or students as they claimed”, but were denied admission by INS inspectors (precursors to CBP officers at the ports).
Those inspectors were the last line of defense — not the first. They’re good at what they do, generally, but it’s much better to nip national-security risks in the bud, not at the bottom of the stem.
None of this is meant to be overly critical of Lehigh University, any DSO, the consular officer who adjudicated Anand’s visa application, or ICE — the issuance system for foreign student visas, even after decades of scrutiny, still lacks real accountability, making it glaringly vulnerable to fraud.
If a 19-year-old horror-movie fan from India who’s afraid of his father can game the student visa system, imagine what terrorists and hostile foreign governments can do. That’s no laughing matter.