Markwayne Mullin’s Department of Homeland Security is exposing fraud throughout the huge Optional Practical Training (OPT) program that feeds many white-collar migrants into the careers sought by U.S. graduates.
“We have identified over 10,000 foreign students who claim to be working for highly suspect employers, and that’s just among the top 25 OPT employers,” said Todd Lyons, the acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, which oversees the OPT program.
“This is only the tip of the iceberg,” he added, without taking questions at a press conference on Tuesday morning.
In 2024, the program issued more than 400,000 work permits to foreign students and graduates at U.S colleges — even though Congress never approved or even debated the corporate giveaway created by President George W. Bush.
The DHS inspections of the fraud-ridden, never-authorized, corporate giveaway OPT program are a good sign, said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies. But the political purpose of the sudden agency action is unclear, he told Breitbart News:
Is it a substitute for eliminating the illegal OPT program, or a preparation to eliminate it by showing how pervasive the fraud is? I hope for the latter, but fear it is the former.
The huge visa programs are attracting much controversy among younger Americans, especially because few Americans are getting white-collar jobs amid migrant hiring and AI downsizing.
The OPT program is largely ignored by white-collar reporters in establishment media, even though it is used as a back door for white-collar migrants to sneak into the job opportunities and middle-class careers needed by skilled American professionals.
The OPT program, and its pre-graduation twin, the Curricular Practical Training Program, allow a wide swath of graduates with technology-related degrees to work for up to five years — usually without paying Social Security taxes, and often in software sweatshops. That long work period gives many white-collar migrants time to train, build resumes, and file to enter the annual H-1B program, which provides them with an on-ramp to green cards and citizenship.
The resulting workforce of more than one million subservient and low-wage CPT, OPT, and H-1B workers is used by foreign-managed companies to win low-cost subcontracts from a wide variety of U.S. companies. That imported cheap competition has crippled many U.S. companies, and shoved millions of American graduates out ot of jobs, careers, and middle-class prosperity.
“OPT is where the foreign students actually start replacing American workers at jobs,” said Rosemary Jenks, co-founder of the Immigration Accountability Project.
OPT also helps investors in Fortune 500 companies to reduce their payroll costs, raise their profitability, and spike their stock values on Wall Street.
Many tech workers have told Breitbart News that the OPT program is also used by foreign managers to discriminate against Americans and to instead hire kickback-paying workers from within their ethnic diaspora. The result is that a rising share of Fortune 500 management jobs are now held by people from ethnic groups that have a huge economic incentive to exclude Americans from starter jobs and management-track careers.
The program is also used by entrepreneurial migrants for profitable visa fraud, especially by Indians who get into the United States via student visas. For example, foreign-owned companies will sell fraudulent white-collar payroll records to dropout college migrants who actually work cash-only jobs at foreign-owned retail stores, restaurants, and trucking companies. This fraud is very common, but has been mostly enabled by top embassy officials in India.
Lyons sketched out the fraud uncovered by recent ICE visits to companies that hire OPT migrants:
Over the past year, we’ve dramatically expanded our oversight of OPT and can report that we found fraud nationwide. [ICE] agents have visited, have visited problematic employee websites in Virginia, Texas, Georgia, Illinois, New York, New Jersey, North Carolina and Florida…
We’ve discovered empty buildings and locked doors and addresses where hundreds of foreign students are allegedly employed. In many cases, multiple OPT employers claim to operate from the same address, but none actually leased the facility. We found small residential addresses listed as work sites for hundreds more students, yet no employees were present …
We’re also seeing financial red flags. Many alleged employers display clear fraud indicators, including tax liens, civil lawsuits … and breaches of contract. We are seeing suspicious financial attractions moving cash across multiple countries. We’ve discovered that numerous businesses fail to maintain basic employment records for the foreign students– raising serious tax reporting concerns. Some employers claim to have offshore human resources and payroll personnel …
We’re finding what we call phantom employees. We’ve identified foreign students who obtained work authorization documents through OPT but never showed up for work at the sites they claimed.
This fraud has been ignored by white-collar reporters and editors at establishment media sites. Instead, they focus their empathy and concern on illegal migrants who violate U.S. laws to get jobs and housing in blue-collar districts.
DHS officers also visited 18 OPT employment sites in North Texas, said John Condon, the Acting Executive Associate Director for the Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) wing of ICE. He continued:
Our findings were alarming. We discovered coordinated employer clusters where numerous employers in the same building complex are running nearly identical websites, sharing job postings and management personnel, but claiming no business relationships with each other.
We found shell company schemes where multiple OPT employers are established by the same owner-operator, indicating a deliberate scheme to structure income and evade taxes.
We’ve also discovered … large networks of alleged employers claiming to train thousands of foreign students, then farming them out to unreported third-party employers, making oversight nearly impossible and raising serious national security issues … …
In Houston, we found an alleged OPT employer accused of pay-to-stay visa fraud, who was charging students under the table to help them fraudulently maintain visa status. The phony employer had never operated from the listed address, and over 100 foreign students allegedly employed there were nowhere to be found …
In a New York condo allegedly housing dozens of foreign students, a supposed employer became visibly upset and denied any knowledge of the company, despite DHS records and student reports confirming otherwise.
Unsurprisingly, corporate lobbyists have minimized media and government reviews of the software sweatshops and visa arbitrage. This elite pressure has blocked media exposés of the secretive process that has pushed millions of U.S. college graduates out of good jobs.
DHS officials shrank the program and shut down some fraudulent OPT employers in President Donald Trump’s first term. But under Joe Biden’s administration, oversight was minimized as the program was expanded by Biden’s pro-migration border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas.
There is pressure for change in the second Trump administration, where Joe Edlow now runs the US Citizenship and Immigration Services agency under Mullin and Trump. “I think it is depressing wages, and it’s something that we need to be concerned about,” Edlow told Congress in August 2025.
“When OPT was created under the Bush administration and expanded under the Obama administration, DHS anticipated that only a few thousand foreign students would receive training approval before returning home,” Lyons said today, adding:
Instead, OPT ballooned into an uncontrolled guest worker pipeline with hundreds of thousands of foreign students working in the United States …The program size has exploded — so has the fraud.
“Congratulations to Secretary Mullin for letting this information get out and for allowing the investigation to continue,” said Jenks.
She added: “[OPT] was created under the Bush administration by executive fiat, and expanded under [Barack] Obama by executive fiat, and it can be ended by executive action.”
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