[FOX] Acting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Director Todd Lyons announced that federal investigators have uncovered more than 10,000 foreign students connected to "suspect employers" as part of another potentially massive fraud scheme, this time involving the federal STEM Optional Practical Training (OPT) extension program.
At a news conference Tuesday, Lyons said the cases uncovered thus far are "just the tip of the iceberg."
OPT is a U.S. immigration program that lets international students on F-1 visas work temporarily in the country in jobs related to their field of study. Lyons said that when the program was first created under the Bush administration and expanded under the Obama administration, the Department of Homeland Security expected "only a few thousand foreign students would receive training approval before returning home."
"Instead," Lyons said, that OPT "ballooned into an uncontrolled guest worker pipeline with hundreds of thousands of foreign students working in the United States."
"Today, we are announcing 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," he said.
"We’ve dramatically expanded our oversight of OPT and can report that we found fraud nationwide."
According to Lyons, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) officers have visited "problematic OPT worksite employers" in Virginia, Texas, Georgia, Illinois, New York, New Jersey, North Carolina and Florida. He said that many of the suspicious employers include nongovernmental organizations.
According to Lyons, investigators have "discovered empty buildings and locked doors at addresses where hundreds of foreign students are allegedly employed." Investigators have also found hundreds of foreign students listed as working out of residential addresses.
"In many places," he continued, "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," said Lyons.
The ICE director also said investigators uncovered what he referred to as "phantom employees," who he said are foreign students who obtained work authorization through OPT but never actually showed up for work at the sites they claimed to work out of.
"This is not accidental," Lyons concluded. "This is deliberate, coordinated and criminal."
He added that "this fraud is not victimless," calling it a "blatant attack on the goodwill of the American people."
Vice President JD Vance, who President Donald Trump appointed "fraud czar," celebrated the discovery in an X post as "another great win for our fraud task force."
Vance wrote that the administration "will not tolerate foreign nationals abusing our visa system at the expense of the American people."
[Townhall] Vice President JD Vance revealed on Wednesday that the new White House Fraud Task Force will be sending letters to all 50 states demanding proof that state governments are taking Medicaid fraud seriously. He warned that any state failing to meet the Trump administration’s standards could face cuts to its Medicaid funding.
"Today, we are sending across 50 Medicaid programs, we are sending letters that will require them to show that they are effectively and aggressively prosecuting Medicaid fraud in their states," the vice presdient said. "And if they do not, if they do not aggressively prosecute Medicaid fraud, we are going to turn off the money that goes to these anti-fraud units."
"And I want to say a couple things about this."
You may think, obviously, this is a Republican administration, we're all proud Republicans up here. You may think that this is purely a red state or blue state issue. That's actually not true. We see Medicaid fraud issues in Ohio, the state that I used to represent in the United States Senate. We also see Medicaid issues, fraud issues in a state like Maryland, which is obviously a very blue state.
But both Ohio and Maryland have worked with us to take this issue seriously. They've worked with the guys behind me, they've worked with our entire team to make sure that they take fraud seriously. Again, this does not have to be a red state or a blue state issue.
This is just basic good government. However, states like California, states like Hawaii, states like New York have completely not taken the fraud issue seriously in the Medicaid program. And so for those states that refuse to get serious about fraud, we are going to turn off that anti-fraud money. And if we continue to find problems, we can turn off other resources within their state Medicaid programs as well.
UNBELIEVABLE. Vice President Vance just did a double take after hearing this wild stat dropped by Dr. Oz:
"You're saying that we kicked off 800 fraudulent healthcare providers off of the Medicare system and not a single one of them called the government and said, 'hey, you made… pic.twitter.com/EaJTz1lNoA
[IsraelTimes] Georgian national Michail Chkhikvishvili, a leader of Maniac Murder Cult, to be imprisoned after pleading guilty to soliciting hate crimes and sending instructions to make bombs
A federal court in New York City on Wednesday sentenced a neo-Nazi ...adherents of a philosophy that was seen even at the time as pure evil, which makes them either consciously purely evil, or attention-seeking ratbags. Pick one, or both.... from the country of Georgia to 15 years in prison for crimes, including a plot to poison Jewish children.
Michail Chkhikvishvili, 22, is a leader of the Maniac Murder Cult, or MKY, an international white supremacist group that follows neo-Nazi ideology, prosecutors said.
Chkhikvishvili, who uses the moniker "Commander Butcher," recruited followers to commit mass casualty attacks in New York City.
He had distributed a manifesto called the "Hater’s Handbook" that called on others to commit school shootings and other violent mostly peaceful attacks "for the white race."
One of the people he encouraged to commit the attacks was an undercover FBI agent.
In November 2023, Chkhikvishvili plotted a mass casualty attack set to take place on New Year’s Eve in New York City. He planned to have the assailant dress as Santa Claus and distribute poisonous candy to racial minorities.
In January 2024, he altered the plan and directed the FBI agent to target Jewish schools and Jewish children in Brooklyn with poison.
Chkhikvishvili sent detailed instructions to the agent about creating lethal poisons and gases, such as ricin.
Chkhikvishvili was extradited to the US from Moldova last year and pled guilty in November to soliciting hate crimes and sending instructions to make bombs and ricin, a lethal poison.
His incitement to violence was linked to at least two deadly attacks. One was a January school shooting in Tennessee. The 17-year-old shooter killed one person and then himself, livestreaming part of the attack. Before the shooting, he claimed he was acting on behalf of MKY and another group.
In August 2024, a man livestreamed himself stabbing around five people outside a mosque in The Sick Man of Europe Turkey ...the decaying remnant of the Ottoman Empire... while wearing Nazi symbols. A manifesto by the attacker referred to Chkhikvishvili, and before the stabbings, the assailant distributed a list to the Hater’s Handbook.
#1
Given In New York, attempted murder, even if the victim does not die. This crime is treated serious, and a guilty party can be sentenced for up to 25 years in prison.
So why 15 yrs and likely parole/ probation in 10 year
NOTE:
His violence was directly linked to at least 2 already committed deadly attacks.
One of which was a school shooting in Tennessee. Where there were 2 deaths (including the perpetrator) and 2 injured.
So he could face co-conspirator arrests for those MURDERS and assaults also.
[Breitbart] Hundreds of refugees fled their homes in Haiti’s capital of Port-au-Prince on Monday amid a fresh wave of gang violence.
The situation became so dangerous that hospitals shut down, Doctors Without Borders suspended humanitarian operations, and Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aime suspended plans for the first presidential election in a decade.
Haiti has been overrun by violent gangs ever since the assassination of President Jovenal Moise in July 2021. The government controls only a small portion of Port-au-Prince, and gangsters have rampaged across the countryside to loot, murder, and rape rural citizens.
The International Organization for Migration (IOM) found in October 2025 that over 1.4 million people have been displaced by the reign of gangland terror since Moise’s assassination. About two-thirds of the displacements in late 2025 were people driven from their homes in rural areas, rather than the capital city.
The Miami Herald reported on Monday that the latest surge of gang violence was sparked by a turf war between armed groups fighting for control of the Cite Soleil and Croix des Bouquets neighborhoods in Port-au-Prince. The fighting began in earnest on Sunday morning, and terrified civilians fled the area under cover of darkness on Sunday night.
Doctors Without Borders (known by its French acronym MSF) said its staffers were forced to evacuate from their Cite Soleil hospital after being overwhelmed by gunshot victims and people seeking refuge.
“In just 12 hours, our teams treated more than 40 people with gunshot wounds. One of our security guards was also struck by a stray bullet right inside our hospital compound,” said MSF’s head of mission for Haiti, Davina Hayles.
“Several hundred inhabitants of Cite Soleil, as well as our colleagues and their families, have sought refuge in our hospital, having no other option to shelter from the gunfire,” she added.
Other hospitals in the area said they would suspend operations and evacuate patients due to the fighting. According to MSF, not a single hospital in Cite Soleil was functioning as of Monday.
The other neighborhood that saw heavy fighting, Croix-des-Bouquets, is located in an area known as the Cul-de-Sac Plain. Residents said the savage gang war was presaged by fires that were deliberately set to destroy the cane fields owned by the venerable Rhum Barbancourt distillery.
The distillery and several other local businesses sent an urgent letter to the prime minister requesting police protection and calling for repairs to local roads, but there was no response, even after they warned that instability might completely shut down Toussaint Louverture International Airport.
“You cannot secure an airport if you allow the roads around it to degrade,” the letter pointed out.
Observers told the Miami Herald that gang violence intensified after smaller gangs began banding together to challenge the bigger outfits for valuable territory. The delay of promised reinforcements for the U.N.’s Gang Suppression Force seems to have created an opportunity for gangs to grab what they could.
Another motivation for the surge of bloodshed might have been prolonging the state of anarchy by frightening the government out of holding elections. That gambit appeared successful on Monday, as Prime Minister Fils-Aime said elections would be postponed by at least half a year.
“It is clear that the security conditions are not met at the level for us to have elections in August,” he said.
“I would like for elections to happen by the end of the year. On February 7, we would have an elected president,” he said.
Haiti’s last presidential election was held in 2016. The winner, Jovenel Moise, postponed legislative elections in 2019, postponed the presidential election that was supposed to occur in February 2021, and was ruling by decree at the time of his death.
As for the U.N. security mission, the last of the small contingent of Kenyan police deployed to Haiti departed on April 27, and it was not clear where their replacements might come from, or when they could arrive.
Kenya originally pledged to send a thousand police officers to Haiti, but wound up sending less than 800. Only $400 million of the $600 million budgeted for the mission materialized, most of it supplied by the United States. The U.N. fielded complaints of sexual exploitation and other abuse by the Kenyan police, but their commanders denied all wrongdoing. The gangs remained firmly in control of much of Haiti during the deployment.
The U.N. mission to Haiti supposedly entered a new phase with the departure of the Kenyans, with some 5,500 officers expected to be on the ground by October of this year – but so far, only 400 personnel from Chad have arrived. Chad has committed to send another 1,100 officers, but there is no indication when they will arrive, and no word on where the other 4,000 will come from.
#1
A fire will not destroy a sugar cane crop- a cane field is burnt every year before harvest, to remove the huge amount of dead leaves and trash. Though an out of burning season fire could be a problem.
#5
Burn the entire island down with the shit that lives there. Problem solved.
Not the entire island. The eastern half is the Dominican Republic, a relatively normal country by Caribbean standards (Haiti is #9 on the List of Messed-Up Places while the Dominican Republic comes in at #108)
[American Intelligence] While Americans are told to fear displacement by artificial intelligence in the future, many are already being displaced in the present by hiring practices of the very firms building it.
While many warn that artificial intelligence itself will displace American workers, far less attention is paid to the fact that the very companies building AI are already replacing American employees with cheaper foreign labor. In many cases, though, the immediate threat to American workers is not the technology itself, but the hiring practices of the firms developing it.
In 2025, 406,348 H-1B visas were given to foreign workers in the United States, according to the latest U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services data. For hundreds of thousands of Americans, that figure is a nightmare.
The H-1B visa program, created in the 1990s as a temporary work visa supposedly for highly-skilled migrants, has flooded America with millions of cheap foreign workers.
For the last few months, I have been investigating the issue of the H-1B program and its impact on Americans for a new documentary for GB News. During that process, I received a flood of messages from workers across the country describing how they were forced to train their foreign replacements, saw their jobs were sent overseas, or witnessed ethnic tribalism in hiring that shut Americans out of jobs altogether.
The largest users of the H-1B program are Big Tech companies, many of which lobby Congress aggressively against reforms that could disrupt their pipeline of foreign labor.
Tech workers in Silicon Valley, one of America’s great civilizational achievements, are now overwhelmingly foreign born. According to the 2025 Silicon Valley Inde, roughly two-thirds of Silicon Valley tech workers were born outside the United States. There are more Indian-born tech workers there than those born in California. Highly-educated tech workers from India and China outnumber those from the United States, making up 41 per cent of the workforce compared with 30 per cent.
Lawmakers should evaluate the national security implications of a strategically vital American industry becoming taken over by, and increasingly dependent on, foreigners.
But the most visceral impact of this change has been on American tech workers.
According to an analysis by Harvard economist George Borjas, H-1B workers are on average 16% cheaper to employ than their American counterparts. For each H-1B worker employers save an average of $100,000 over the six-year term of the visa. Employers then have the ability to sponsor H-1B workers for green cards, ensuring they replace American workers in perpetuity.
One Silicon Valley based employee told me she lost her job after her Indian manager forced her to hire an Indian assistant, who she was later told to train so that he could replace her. Since then, she has been struggling to find work for two years, and was forced to sell her home.
In another case, a whistleblower, who until recently worked at FedEx, said her entire team’s jobs were off-shored to India. A former Google contractor said he was told to train his replacements in the Philippines. These stories are not atypical, especially for older workers who are competing for jobs with young, cheaper foreigners.
Many have also seen ethnic tribalism in hiring. At Google one former employee said he saw Indians give other Indians confidential interview questions to help them secure jobs. Others told me similar stories, where ethnic nepotism has led to workplaces becoming hives for foreign workers who all spawned from one particular city or even village in India. One high-profile example of this can be seen in the case of Cognizant Technology Solutions, an IT consulting company founded in India. Several successful lawsuits against the company in recent years have found discrimination against non-Indian employees in hiring and promotions.
To deal with these challenges, the Trump administration has attempted to crack down on the H-1B visa. Last year a new $100,000 fee was announced which would apply to employers hiring foreign talent. While official figures on the impact on H-1B applications are not yet available, experts estimate that applications may have fallen by between 30 and 50 per cent.
A solid start.
However, veteran anti-immigration campaigner and lawyer Rosemary Jenks said the new fee has had little overall impact as it doesn’t apply to domestic H-1B applications. Those who convert their visas to H-1Bs, such as students, or those renewing their H-1Bs are exempt from the $100,000 charge. Jenks’ view was confirmed to me by an immigration lawyer in Silicon Valley, who said she had seen a significant increase in domestic H-1B applications.
And when it comes to foreign competition for jobs, the H-1B program isn’t the only challenge for American workers.
This week Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced it has found more than 10,000 cases of potential fraud in the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program. This scheme allows foreign students to work in the United States for up to two years after graduating (who can then convert their student visas into H-1Bs, and eventually green cards). ICE officials said they had found "empty buildings and locked doors at addresses where hundreds of foreign students are allegedly employed".
See more about fraud in the OPT program here. ICE investigators have found more than 10,000 foreign students connected to suspect employers, many NGOs, thus far.
Unlike the H-1B program, which requires employers to pay the "prevailing wage" for roles, those employed under OPT can be paid any wage. The result is that American graduates are competing for entry level jobs with foreigners who are willing, and able, to work for far less. As of last year, 294,253 students are in the US on the OPT program.
Some Republicans, including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, have called for the H-1B visa to be abolished entirely. But until Congress is willing to confront the political influence of the Big Tech lobby, America’s dependence on cheap foreign labor is unlikely to end. The irony is that while Americans are told to fear displacement by artificial intelligence in the future, many are already being displaced in the present by hiring practices of the very firms building it.
#1
Loyalty to the American worker is, for all intents and purposes non-existent. 'AI' is simply the current 'cover story' for the replacement of the American worker. Notice how seldom the term "job retraining" is used? With few exceptions, big tech is not at all interested in "picking their own cotton."
Foreign workers are simply "following the money" that our government betrayers have facilitated through programs such as H-1B.
When cheap foreign import (Global Economy products) fall out of favor or become logistically untenable, cheap foreign labor here at home restores the profit margins. It's a convenient work-around.
[Daily Mail, where America gets its news] Hundreds of General Motors workers were summoned to an ominous 15-minute virtual meeting - and told their jobs were gone.
Employees at the Detroit car giant said they received an oddly timed email inviting them to a short online meeting with human resources on Monday.
At the online meeting, they were read a scripted message telling them they had been laid off. Then the meeting ended.
'No appreciation or empathy. No questions. Nothing,' one data analyst who had worked at GM for more than a decade told CNBC.
If you want a friend in the work world, get a dog. No matter how much management wants to be loving and supporting, in the end it comes down to the cold equations. I was once fired for doing my job too well, and making the older employees nervous. Yes, it was a sign of poor management, the company closed its doors a year later, and I was definitely better off earning my bread elsewhere, but these things do happen.
The layoffs hit about 500 to 600 employees, largely in IT roles in Austin, Texas, and Warren, Michigan, according to a person familiar with the cuts.
GM has 156,000 employees at 396 facilities on six continents, producing about $185 billion in revenue. Six hundred is less than 0.4% of the staff.
At the same time, GM is hiring for AI-focused roles as automakers ramp up their push to use artificial intelligence to boost worker productivity and streamline operations. As of now, 80 IT positions are listed including jobs working in AI, motorsports and autonomous vehicles.
GM told the Daily Mail AI was a factor, but not the sole cause and the cuts were also tied to workforce reevaluation.
Workforce reevaluation should be ongoing: cut the bottom-rated 10% or quartile, hire new to fill the empty slots as needed, rinse and repeat
The veteran programmer and data scientist who lost their job said staff had been pushed to use AI more in their daily work before the cuts landed.
'I've seen it firsthand. It can make you much more productive, as a programmer. It can really help you get more work done, but AI isn't going to do you any good if you don't know the business.'
As part of their severance packages, employees were offered sliding-scale compensation based on tenure, along with lump-sum payments to help cover healthcare costs and mental health services through Lyra Health.
Think of it as an opportunity to take the time to find work that will be a better fit. Surely you wouldn’t want to continue to work for a company like that.
GM said in a statement to the Daily Mail: 'GM is transforming its Information Technology organization to better position the company for the future. As part of that work, we have made the difficult decision to eliminate certain roles globally.
'We are grateful for the contributions of the employees affected and are committed to supporting them through this transition.'
The brutal cuts make GM the latest major American company to slash white-collar jobs as bosses race to reshape their workforces for the AI age.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[IsraelTimes] Georgian national Michail Chkhikvishvili, a leader of Maniac Murder Cult, to be imprisoned after pleading guilty to soliciting hate crimes and sending instructions to make bombs
...the decaying remnant of the Ottoman Empire...
