“Worst of the Worst” Was the Plan for Visa Overstays. An Audit Shows How It Went.

On September 29, the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general released an audit of how ICE handled visa overstays from fiscal years 2021 through 2024. For most of that period, ICE worked under a September 2021 policy memo that told it to pursue only the overstays who posed the highest threat to national security or public safety. The idea was to spend limited resources on the worst cases.

Most of those cases were never investigated. ICE received 3,145,375 leads on suspected overstays in those four years and rated 96.7 percent “Non-Priority.” Of the 1,769 viable leads in the top-priority category, 84 were investigated and two ended in an arrest. Across every category, the investigations ICE opened from leads produced eight arrests.

The highest-risk cases

The inspector general concluded that foreign nationals “who potentially posed threats to the United States remained at large despite their illegal status.”

ICE often couldn’t find the people it was looking for. Officials told the auditors that the address on file for many visitors is a temporary one, such as a hotel or resort. At the end of fiscal 2024, the agency had 205 people identified as top-priority threats and could not refer 194 of them to a field office, in part because it lacked a good address.

More people were overstaying during those years. CBP’s count of suspected in-country overstays went from 171,269 in fiscal 2021 to 795,167 the next year and stayed near half a million in each of the two years after that. Those figures cover only people who arrived by air or sea. NumbersUSA Co-President Jeremy Beck told Newsweek the result was “a country more vulnerable to the ‘worst of the worst,’ who could more easily disappear into a growing illegal population.”

Who the policy left out

Nearly everyone else was set aside. About 2.8 million of the leads rated “Non-Priority” were passed to ICE’s removal officers, who investigated five.

Overstaying a visa doesn’t authorize anyone to work, and a person who stays for years has to earn a living. Some employers prefer workers who are in no position to complain about pay or conditions. An audit of arrests doesn’t measure what that costs. American workers at the lower end of the labor market bear it in wages and bargaining power, and so do their families.

“Immigration enforcement protects Americans’ economic security as well as their physical security,” Beck said, “and administrations that recognize this enforce the law across the board, regardless of additional crimes committed.”

What broader enforcement found

Against those eight arrests from leads, ICE’s regular operations arrested 16,458 people who were later identified as overstays. The example the inspector general gives is a worksite enforcement operation, which “typically arrests workers who are unable to produce valid employment authorization documentation.”

The report doesn’t break out how many of the 16,458 were arrested at a job site. Even so, ordinary enforcement reached far more overstays than the list of high-risk names did.

The next step

President Trump canceled the 2021 memo on January 20, 2025, and a law passed that July set aside almost $30 billion for ICE operations, overstay enforcement included. Both were needed.

The audit’s one recommendation keeps the narrow focus. It asks ICE for a plan to increase investigations and enforcement against top-priority overstays. ICE agreed and gave an estimated completion date of September 30, 2027. That plan is worth having, but the four years in the audit show it can’t be the whole strategy.

Mandatory E-Verify would reach overstays whether or not they’re on a priority list. Hiring someone who lacks work authorization has been illegal since 1986, yet most employers aren’t required to use E-Verify, the free federal system that checks a new hire’s information against Social Security and Homeland Security records. They only have to look over the documents a new hire presents, and a convincing forgery will usually get through.

Beck’s answer is that “any serious overstay strategy must include mandatory E-Verify, so people who overstay their visas can’t support themselves by working illegally.”

Two bills in Congress would do that. The Legal Workforce Act (H.R. 251) would phase in E-Verify for new hires by employer size. The Mandatory E-Verify Act (S. 4620) would require it of every employer. Either would apply to every overstay looking for work, whatever priority ICE had assigned.