Just when you thought the aftershocks of the Biden administration’s open borders couldn’t get any worse, more fraud has just been uncovered. This time, it involves foreign students using a fraudulent workaround under their F-1 visas to stay in the country illegally.

F-1 is an academic visa that allows foreign students to come to the U.S. to attend university. It is vastly different from an M-1 visa, which is for those coming to the States for vocational or non-educational reasons.

Students here for educational purposes have been subverting the limitations of the F-1 visa by using federal STEM Optional Practical Training (OPT). This extension program allows them to work in their field and, perhaps, eventually acquire an H-1B visa. While OPT allows a temporary stay for the visa holder, the process as a whole is an illegal backdoor for students to remain in the U.S. indefinitely.

OPT, like all government programs, started small under the Bush administration, but it ballooned under Barack Obama into a massive, fiddly-to-regulate program. In short, thousands of students were applying for OPT, getting fake jobs, and staying in the country. Much like the Minnesota Somali fraud and California hospice fraud, the top OPT employers are highly suspect. According to Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons:

[We have] discovered empty buildings and locked doors at addresses where hundreds of foreign students are allegedly employed. In many places, multiple OPT employers claim to operate from the same address, but none actually lease the facility. When someone does open the door, their statements are inconsistent, or they claim no knowledge of the business. … This is deliberate, coordinated, and criminal.

Students would be “hired” by these fake shell businesses to stay in the U.S. Moreover, the scale of the fraud is unknown. Lyons added:

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. This is only the tip of the iceberg. … We’ve dramatically expanded our oversight of OPT and can report that we found fraud nationwide.

Defrauding the American people and taking advantage of their goodwill is shameful behavior, and the foreign students who are participating in this fraud should immediately have their visas revoked and be sent back to their home countries. Furthermore, the owners of the shell businesses providing cover should be jailed and/or denaturalized and deported.

If the government is so careless with our taxpayer dollars and our resources, perhaps it should have less of it to manage and give away.

As if this fraud weren’t disheartening enough, this week, the architect of Joe Biden’s migrant invasion, former DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, decided to put a positive spin on his failure to protect the American people.

In an interview with Politico, he said, “Our tougher border stance in June of ‘24 was coupled with an increased focus on providing lawful pathways for people to arrive at the United States outside the hands of smugglers — more secure and more humanitarian.” He added, “Those two combined — our numbers dropped 70, 75%.”

Mayorkas says that he disagreed with Biden admin immigration policy — and suggests that border security should’ve been tightened sooner:

“There were areas of disagreement within immigration policy…but I voiced my views.”

“I was very pleased that in June of 2024, we took… pic.twitter.com/Txb22hw5FT

— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) May 13, 2026

In June 2024, they toughened up on the border? Please. If there was any reduction in the flow, it was too little, too late — a last-ditch attempt to turn the electoral tide in the Democrats’ favor. Biden needed all the political help he could muster in that year’s presidential race. By the end of the month, his disastrous debate performance marked the beginning of the end for our 46th president.

Perhaps Mayorkas’s most telling lie in his Politico interview was when he said, "There were areas of disagreement within immigration policy … but I voiced my views.” This implies that Mayorkas didn’t like Biden’s open-border policy, which contradicts what he himself perennially and adamantly insisted — that the border was secure.

Robert Spencer of the David Horowitz Freedom Center put it perfectly when he described the Biden administration and the Democrat Party’s view on the border:

For Mayorkas and the rest of the people who were running Old Joe’s White House, an open border was a secure border. It just depended on what your definition of “secure” was. The objective was not to make Americans secure from illegal migrant criminals and terrorists; the objective was to make future elections secure for the Democrats. From that standpoint, sure, the border was secure.

Democrats do not believe in an America that is for the people and by the people. They prefer a country that is for the Democrats and by the Democrats, and it doesn’t matter how many Americans are defrauded of money or victimized by illegal alien violence in their quest for power.

We still have a few years until the next presidential election. In the meantime, let’s continue sending the criminal foreigners back home and keeping the gate locked behind them.