ICE flags 10,000 foreign students over suspected OPT visa fraud

The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) has said it identified around 10,000 foreign students, including several from India, who are suspected of misusing the Optional Practical Training (OPT) scheme linked to student visas.

Speaking at a press conference on Tuesday, acting ICE Director Todd Lyons described the OPT programme as a growing source of fraud and said it had become the focus of numerous investigations by the Department of Homeland Security.

OPT allows international students studying in the United States on academic visas to work in the country for up to 12 months after graduation, with some science and technology graduates eligible for extensions of up to 24 months. The programme is also widely used as a pathway to obtaining employer-sponsored H-1B visas.

Lyons said federal authorities had uncovered several cases involving serious alleged offences linked to abuse of the programme. These included claims of espionage, intellectual property theft, employment fraud and scams targeting elderly Americans.

“We've encountered cases involving espionage, biological threats, intellectual property theft, visa and employment fraud, and even scams targeting elderly Americans,” Lyons said, adding that such activities had been carried out by individuals “abusing their status as students”.

He warned that the US would not tolerate threats emerging from the foreign student system and said investigators had carried out multiple site visits as part of ongoing probes.

According to ICE officials, some OPT beneficiaries were found to be supervised remotely by employees based in India, which authorities said breached programme rules requiring training and oversight within the United States.

Lyons said the OPT scheme, introduced during the administration of former President George W. Bush, was initially intended to support a relatively small number of foreign students seeking short-term work experience before returning to their home countries.

“Instead, OPT ballooned into an uncontrolled guest worker pipeline with hundreds of thousands of foreign students working in the United States,” he said. “As the programme’s size has exploded, so has the fraud.”

He also described the alleged abuse of the programme as an attack on the trust of the American public, arguing that the system was being exploited by individuals taking advantage of access to the US education sector.

With IANS inputs