National Review, May 14, 2026
Recent months have seen a series of blockbuster fraud stories: childcare fraud in Minneapolis, Medicaid fraud in Ohio, hospice fraud in California. Vice President JD Vance held a press conference this week targeting fraud at the state level. The latest revelation comes from the Department of Homeland Security: massive abuse of a work program for former foreign students.
The Optional Practical Training program, or OPT, was turned into a guest worker scheme by the George W. Bush administration and expanded under the Obama administration. It allows foreign students who’ve completed their studies in STEM fields to stay on their student visas, even though they’re no longer students, and work for up to three years.
In a press conference this week, acting ICE Director Todd Lyons said investigators found locked and empty buildings where hundreds of OPT “students” were supposed to be working, small private homes listed as worksites for hundreds of OPT workers, multiple OPT employers with the same address, and more. Lyons said, “This is only the tip of the iceberg,” since ICE had only started looking at the top 25 employers of OPT workers.
ICE should be commended for turning over rocks and exposing this corruption. All the criminals involved should go to prison, including the foreign “students,” who after serving their sentences should be deported and banned for life from returning the U.S. But what’s the longer-term outcome of this investigation? Everyone following this issue already knew there was massive wrongdoing; Lyons himself said the OPT program is “a magnet for fraud.”
There are two possibilities: this is either the first step in making the case for the abolition of this harmful and illegal program, or it’s a diversion designed to placate the increasingly vocal critics of the program without angering powerful donors who profit from it. I hope it’s the first, but I fear it might be the second.
OPT for STEM workers was dreamed up in 2007 by Microsoft’s chief D.C. lobbyist as a way of getting around the numerical limits Congress placed on the H-1B visa program, which is mainly used by tech firms. It has grown to become one of the largest guest worker programs in the country, with hundreds of thousands of participants, even though it was not created by Congress.
It’s not only that OPT is a creation of bureaucrats rather than lawmakers; it’s actually illegal on its face. The F-1 visa for foreign students is only valid so long as the foreigner is engaged in “a full course of study”. If the foreign student graduates or drops out, he is, by definition, no longer pursuing a “full course of study” and should leave.
The only significant court challenge to the legality of OPT failed at the D.C. Circuit and was not taken up by the Supreme Court. The majority in that ruling effectively said that the word “student” could mean anything DHS wanted it to mean, a position the dissent referred to as “verbicide.”
To make things worse, because these guest workers are masquerading (with the government’s complicity) as students, their employers don’t have to pay Social Security, Medicare, or unemployment tax. That can amount to an 8 percent taxpayer-funded subsidy for the employer to hire foreign graduates over American graduates.
And that assumes that the rules, such as they are, are being followed. But, as Lyons suggested, the program is catnip for fraudsters. ICE investigators started by visiting the supposed workplaces of the OPT “students” and found that many didn’t exist. So where are they working? An activist I trust has been doing field research and says he has found many OPTs working at hotels and gas stations. How much “practical training” do you need to sell someone a pack of cigarettes or some beef jerky?
These fraud revelations are an important part of making the case for abolishing OPT, which the Trump administration can do at any time by regulation. Building the case is important because, although there’s not really any public support for the program, the deep-pocketed corporations that benefit from the cheap, controllable labor of non-fraudulent OPTs who are working in tech (as opposed to the gas station) have a lot of influence in Washington. Getting the word out about pervasive OPT fraud contributes to the broader indictment of the program.
A cynic might suspect that the anti-fraud effort is intended by administration officials above ICE’s pay grade to divert attention and energy from the effort to abolish even the non-fraudulent use of OPT. Throwing a bone to critics — including an increasing number of lawmakers — may distract or mollify enough of them to save OPT.
At his Senate confirmation hearing last year, Joseph Edlow, now the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services — the DHS bureau that deals with work permits, green cards, and the like — was asked about OPT and responded that he wanted to be able “to remove the ability for employment authorizations for F-1 students beyond the time that they are in school.” Let’s hope the latest revelations result not only in prosecutions and deportations but also in this kind of substantive policy change.
OPT: End it, don’t mend it.