ICE on May 12, 2026, announced a coordinated nationwide crackdown on fraud in the Optional Practical Training program for F-1 students, saying Homeland Security Investigations had identified more than 10,000 foreign students claiming employment with highly suspect employers. The agency said the figure came only from the top 25 OPT employers and represented just a fraction of the problem.
The announcement landed with a direct warning for companies that hire international students through OPT and the STEM OPT extension. ICE said additional enforcement actions were forthcoming, and the message was aimed as much at employers as at the students whose records are now under scrutiny.
ICE said HSI site visits were carried out in Virginia, Texas, Georgia, Illinois, New York, New Jersey, North Carolina and Florida, with concentrated activity in North Texas, where eighteen OPT work sites were visited in a single week. Investigators described empty buildings, locked doors and residential addresses listed as work sites for hundreds of students, along with coordinated employer clusters in shared office complexes that used nearly identical websites and shared management personnel.
The agency also described shell-company schemes in which a single owner had established multiple OPT employer entities, plus international financial patterns spanning several countries and bank accounts, missing employment records and offshore human-resources or payroll arrangements. ICE used the term “phantom employees” for students who had obtained Employment Authorization Documents and were listed as working for a particular employer but had never reported to work.
One North Texas employer, ICE said, claimed to employ three F-1 students through OPT while agency records reflected more than 500 students claiming to work there. In another case, ICE cited an alleged Houston pay-to-stay scheme in which students paid an employer under the table to maintain status. The agency also pointed to a Georgia information-technology entity operating from a post-office box and a New Jersey employer that reported employing more than 150 F-1 students but could not answer basic questions about who those students were or what they were hired to do.
OPT and the STEM OPT extension are employment pathways for F-1 students, which makes the crackdown an immediate concern for employers that rely on the programs to staff jobs with international students. ICE said the more than 10,000 figure was only the tip of the iceberg, and the scale of the cases it laid out suggests the review is now widening beyond a few isolated bad actors. For employers, the next phase may be less about the headline number than about whether their records, work sites and payroll arrangements can survive a closer look.
